Negotiating Space on the Right: Everyday Politics of Israeli Zionist Settler Women in the Southern West Bank, Palestine

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• Dr. Akanksha Mehta (Sussex)
• Thursday 26 October 2017, 17:15-19:00
• Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu.

Right-wing movements that have mobilize women have had very uneasy encounters with feminism and feminist politics. Focusing mainly on themes of motherhood and the familial, feminist scholars often view the increasing participation of women in the right-wing as a ‘problem’ that needs to be ‘countered,’ thereby silencing the multiplicity of narratives, roles, and politics that encapsulate the everyday experiences of right-wing women. Moreover, dominant theorizations of right-wing women either depict them as ‘subjects/victims/pawns’ of right-wing men that live in ‘false consciousness’ or as beings with a ‘quasi/partial/limited’ agency; ignoring sites of complexities, contradictions, subversions, and resistance among right-wing women. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research conducted with right-wing women in the Zionist Settler movement in Palestine-Israel in 2014, I present narratives that examine the intersections of settler women’s everyday politics and space. I argue that through a politics of the everyday, Zionist settler women construct, transform, and negotiate with space and spatialities. These negotiations on the right not only further their political violence and settler colonialism but also become means to bargain with patriarchal communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and male-dominated right-wing projects and spaces. These spatial negotiations replicate and affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, personal/political, and victim/agent.

This talk is part of the Desiring the Middle East Seminars at Pembroke series.

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• Desiring the Middle East Seminars at Pembroke
• Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College

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