Between Patriarchy and Occupation: Joyful Encounters, Intimate Politics and Endurance in Hebron

By exploring intimate topologies in rural Palestine, this thesis examines Palestinian women’s spaces less through the lens of occupation which emphasizes geopolitical violence and more through everyday geographies of perseverance and affect that enable women to cherish spaces of contact. It traces women’s agential capacities in relation to endurance and joy as opposed to politics of occupation and patriarchy. In so doing, the thesis asks how Palestinian women from villages maintain and make sense of the spaces they inhabit. Specifically, this research meditates on the question of how women bargain and get by the double bind of patriarchy and occupation.
My research questions urge me to look at (and produce the knowledge of) spaces maintained by women, enabling them to grow powerful together under the stifling infrastructures of the prolonged colonial occupation. Rather than just dwelling on the pervasiveness of occupation and patriarchy, this thesis explores, celebrates and connects with other ways of establishing durable bonds among women. Through my voluntary work with a women’s handicraft cooperative, I seek to examine the operations of spatial intimacy and of women’s spacings that endure under the settler-colonial occupation.
In my inquiry into feminist localities and care, I explore three sites – the home, the cooperative and the village – which enable me to trace multiple dynamic relations operating over space-making, thereby helping me examine the different modes of attachment/dis- attachment, bounding and distancing, and perhaps of dwelling in rural Palestine. Shifting the focus of lenses as such on the possibilities of tracing the solidarities and sharing of communal and political responsibilities among women contributes to the literature on geographies of intimacy, affect and gender in MENA. What makes, for instance, a women’s embroidery cooperative interesting, I argued, is that it overflows the gendered burden of resistance.