Gender Subjectivity under the Situation of Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip: Contradictory but Self-Respected

Dr. Aitemad Muhanna, Research Fellow, Middle East Centre, London School of Economics.

The prolonged closure imposed over Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation during the period 2007-2010 generated profound gender changes, which considerably dislocating the structural basis of the ideology of male domination and patriarchy in the Palestinian society. By the prolonged closure of Gaza, the majority of households became reliant on humanitarian aid provided by the international community. This context created gendered crisis where men became jobless and women became the primary family provider by collecting coupons for family survival. In this paper, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among women and men in poor households in diverse locations in Gaza, I focus on how poor men and women responded to the crisis of gendered selfhood. They resisted the dislocation of gender order by preserving the historical moral and ideological patriarchal imaginary of their gendered subject: masculinity and femininity. This ethnography provides evidence that women’s struggle to shape their gendered self is not only determined by the material aspects of power. It is also based on the moral order to keep a meaning for social existence.

Biography

Aitemad Muhanna is a research fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre pursuing post-doctoral research on gender, religion and sustainable human development in the Gaza Strip. Originally from the Gaza Strip, she has extensive experience as a gender and development specialist and activist in Palestine. For the last twenty years, she has worked on policy-oriented research programmes and publications for Oxfam-UK, Sida, UNIFEM, UNDP and the World Bank, to name just a few. For several years, she conducted research and contributed to the Palestinian Human Development Report as part of the Arab Human Development Report. She was a member of the Arab Research Hub and the research consortium of Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. She received her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Swansea in 2011. Her publications include the book Women and Work in Gaza (1991); a book chapter entitled “The Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal: an assessment of reality and a future vision” (2005); and a research paper entitled “Palestinian children in the labour market under the Israeli occupation” (2006). She is now revising her PhD thesis to be published in a book by Ashgate Publisher early 2013.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk