Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility Towards a Feminist Methodology

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Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
1
Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Abstract
This paper examines the effect of the politics of militarization and how violent conflict
and war like situations can completely silence the voices of a certain segment of the
society and render their suffering “invisible” in both the local and global context. In
researching this invisibility the hitherto unheard voices of Palestinian women and girls
find articulation through a series of case studies. These voices cast light on the
unprecedented levels of hegemonic military power that is used to-occupy land,
demolish homes, and wage unequal wars between civilians and the state- in this case-
the Israeli state. It reflects on how Feminist methodologies can engage in studying the
effect of militarization and endless violence. It asks how such methodologies can be
developed when violent transgressions, both local and global, work in a spiral and
accumulative manner, and when localized contexts and global power politics change
rapidly and unpredictably, leaving victims/survivors in a constant state of confusion.
Author Profile
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-
Carmel Haifa, and a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University, Israel. Her main
theoretical and research interest has focused on the study of women in conflict zones,
mainly in Palestine. Her latest book entitled: “Militarization and Violence Against
Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian case-study” was published
by Cambridge University Press in May, 2009.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
2
Introduction
The problem is that first my house was demolished and we all
moved to live in the school. Then the school was demolished, and I
do not know where we should move to and when. Why can’t my
house be my house, my school be my school, and I live a normal
life with an undemolished house and undemolished school?
Hidaya, 15 years old 1
When they demolished my school, I felt that I lost my own home.
Maybe the world can’t understand, but for Palestinian girls like
me, the school is all we have. Girls in the world can go places,
visit each other, find the books they want to read, organize field
trips with their school and teachers, but Palestinian children have
nothing. We the Palestinian girls feel that our schools are the only
place we can meet friends, share books, meet, talk, play, sing,
write, love… and now they demolished my school.
Nora, 15 years old 2
When my house was demolished, the neighbors feared even
coming out to help us. They feared fighting back with us, because
they knew that they would be next, that they would end up losing
their homes. The demolition of my home, the loss of my belonging,
of my ability to gather my family under one roof and feel safe,
disappeared in seconds, and no one wanted to look at us. They
looked at the building. I mean the physical building, as if it is
about the walls, the windows and the doors. People maybe felt
sorry when they heard the noise during the demolition, but do
you think anybody is capable of hearing the demolition of our
hearts? Of our dreams? Of our future plans? I guess such voices
are never heard. Do you think they even noticed my fear, my
agony, my horror? No way. They (fear, agony, and horror) have
no voice, no noise, and military occupation has no eyes, no
morality, no consciousness, no God.
Salwa, 28 years old3
1 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “The Gendered Nature of Education Under Seige: A Palestinian
feminist Perspective,” International Journal of Lifelong Education (2008) : 189.
2 Ibid, 189-190.
3 Ibid.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
3
The voices cited above are just a small sample of the voices of Palestinian women
who are living with the effects of militarization and Israel’s demolition policies
on their home lives and education. As a result of these policies, Palestinian girls
and women have been turned into internally displaced persons (IDPs), made
homeless and, as Nora put it, “displaced at home.” Women like Nora have
experienced the trauma not only of losing their home, but also of losing their
sense of safety, security and belonging as a result of the ongoing political conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians, coupled with the denial of their suffering and
silencing of their voices.
This article addresses the “politics of invisibility,” and asks questions on how to
research and analyze unheard, silenced voices, understand the meaning of the
loss of one’s home and the loss of access to education and one’s right to
education, and what kind of methodology one should employ in order to
examine ongoing suffering. The voices of Hidaya, Nora and Salwa reveal that
the brute force of military power does not perceive or acknowledge their
suffering. However what about feminist activists and feminist researchers? Are
they capable of developing methodologies that can engage with their suffering,
respond to it and investigate its “invisibility”? If so, what kinds of methodologies
are called for?
The article discusses the need to develop counter-practices in research
methodologies that allow for engagement with indigenous womens’ knowledge,
experiences and ‘ways of knowing’ in conflict zones. It reflects on how to
visibilize the strength and resilience of women in the midst of daily ordeals and
in the context of the global workings of power, unending violence, and the
‘technologies’ associated with colonialism and militarization. Thus the primary
epistemological question raised in this article is whether, how, and when we can
engage with and know the “invisible” and invisibilized. In addressing this
question the paper draws from two of my studies in Palestine, one that studies
militarization, gender and education 4 and another that examines the loss of
home, and housing demolitions from a feminist perspective.5 Both studies
4Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Negotiating the present, historicizing the future:Palestinian
children speak about the Israeli separation wall,” American Behavioral Scientist
Journal,49(8) (2006): 1101-1134. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “The gendered nature of
education under siege: A Palestinian feminist perspective,” International Journal of
Lifelong Education (2008): 179-200. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and
Violence against Women in Conflict Zones: A Palestinian case-study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
5 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Counter-spaces as resistance in conflict zones:
Palestinian women recreating a home.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy: An

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
4
challenge perceptions of Palestinian women as victims, transgressors or
criminals, by placing their everyday actions in the context of military occupation
and oppression.
I examine several intertwined issues and dilemmas pertaining to researching
invisibility and developing an appropriate feminist methodology. To begin with,
how can we research invisibility, and where should we look for it? Most
importantly who are we accountable to when we conduct such research and
what is the price of disclosing the experiences of Palestinian women that would
otherwise have remained invisible? In other words are we sensitive to our
responsibilities towards the women we research, and how we engage with their
voices? A related question emerges. What is the price of not engaging with
women’s ordeals and daily lives in a zone of such violent conflict?
My own position, as a Palestinian feminist researcher living in the area of my
research, borrowing meanings from the absent voices and ordeals of the invisible
and the silenced, compels me to address the methodology that is needed to
capture such invisibility seriously. As a Palestinian feminist researcher, a mother
of three daughters, a wife, and a member of the Palestinian nation, researching
the invisible and invisibilized is a human/political, academic and moral
obligation. Researching the invisible, and focusing on invisibility as the main
category of analysis, requires that one remains attentive to each woman in the
context of her collective and objective experience of militarization and patriarchy,
which play out against the backdrop of colonialism, a violent political economy
and the inequities of globalization and racism. To do so, researchers must engage
with the past (mainly the history of injustice, including the ongoing effects of the
Nakba on Palestinians) and how this impacts the lives of women. They must look
carefully at the ways in which women locate themselves in the meanings they
attribute to their experiences, in the memory of the collective consciousness of
their families, community and nation. Building a feminist methodology to
research invisibility in conflict zones requires that one be attentive to and be able
to document women’s resistances and struggles against power relations, in their
daily acts, on their way to school, in their work, in their care-giving, and in their
strategies of survival.
The paper will conclude by engaging with a dilemma. Should Feminist
researchers research all instances of invisibility in conflict zones, especially as in
International Forum, 17(3/4) (2005): 109-141. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2008 and
2009), op. cit.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
5
some cases women’s invisibility and silence becomes a mode of survival and a
form of self-protection? By foregrounding women’s narratives and voices, the
paper reveals that information is one of the first casualties in conflict ridden
areas, and that the ‘other’ is further invisibilized as a result both of the inability
of the oppressed to come forward and explain their positions and their suffering,
and of the ability of those in power to maneuver and silence influential actors in
the media, the economy, the law, and even human rights defenders. We also
have to be alive to the possibility that information about women’s lives,
education, health and movement under conditions of vulnerability can well be
used as a tool of oppression. The challenge to feminist scholar-activists is
consequently to understand the politics of invisibility, particularly viewed
through the prism of the trauma of violence and constant loss. The paper
suggests that the epistemology of conflict and the politics of knowing in conflict
zones take us back to the very personal, as the political, while stressing that the
production of knowledge never takes place outside the realm of politics, history
and justice.
Spiral Transgressions, Militarization and the Disruption of Everyday Life
The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the military rule, and the
occupation of additional Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in
1967, resulted in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, challenged the
question of taking historic responsibility for this creation and opened up the
question of the right of return. It further questioned the legitimacy of the Zionist
claims that portrays Israel as an exclusive state of the Jewish people, and justifies
the constant attacks of the Jewish state on Palestinian’s bodies, lives, homes, and
homeland. The failure of the peace process, and the failure of the trial to bring an
end to the conflict, is rooted - in my belief - in the profound historical insecurity
that Israel has about its existence in the region. The issue of security, safety and
legitimacy of Israel is rooted in “historical” claims that justify Israel’s need to
totally control the Palestinians, in order to feel secure. The sufferings of the
Palestinian victims are augmented through the injustices inherent in the major
settler colonial project, through forceful attacks, displacement, land grabbing,
housing demolitions and destabilization of Palestinian lives. This is being done
to further the explicit aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
Our focus is on military attacks on homes and schools and the way in which the
Jewish settler colonial project not only destabilizes Palestinians' everydayness,
but further works on ‘invisibilizing’ their just cause. The attack on the
Palestinian home, and the Palestinian right to safe education, have not only made
many families homeless, but have also disrupted individuals’ rights to safety,

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
6
and violated their access to education, healthcare, social networks, etc.6 I have
termed these acts of violence “spiral” transgression, in order to reflect their wide-
ranging consequences in the lives of those they affect. Though they may appear
on paper as isolated physical events, the trauma cause by a house demolition or a
violation of basic rights permeates every aspect of life, irrevocably altering the
daily reality of those targeted by this violence. This trauma spirals out and
impacts the body, mind, social networks, economic status, etc. of all those
involved. For example, when a child’s house is demolished, she or he loses her or
his bed, books, toys, clothes, neighbours and friends. Children must accept and
adapt to living with relatives, moving to a new environment, place and space,
change schools, witness their family’s loss, and relive their trauma through their
daily everyday acts. When a woman’s house is demolished, her loss affects her
bodily safety, privacy, mobility, lifestyle, welfare, physical health, psychological
wellbeing and system of social support. Hence, the attacks on the body, the
home and homeland work in a spiral manner, intruding on all aspects of life, and
distorting the meaning of an individual life under military occupation.
The militarization of the Palestinian space is a widely-used tactic of the Israeli
military, and is reflected in the hundreds of military checkpoints, the attacks on
Palestinian educational institutions and house demolitions. For example, since
1999, the Israeli military has destroyed more than 5,200 Palestinian homes,
rendering 25,719 Palestinian women, men and children homeless.7 It has been a
powerful method of imposing Israeli spatial dominance and creating constant
chaos that feeds into the spiral manner in which militarized violence functions in
the every day life of Palestinians.
The disruption of everydayness and its spiral transgressive power is reflected in
11 year old Mariam’s voice and ordeal. Five years ago, while conducting research
in the field, engaging with and interviewing victims of housing demolitions, I
realized that one of the houses that had been demolished belonged to Ayman, a
former student of mine. A week after my interview with the family, Ayman came
to visit me with his wife and daughter Mariam. He wanted my help in finding a
way to alleviate the effect of the severe trauma from which his daughter had
been suffering following the loss of the family home and their displacement.
Talking to the family, and mainly the little girl, revealed to me the inseparability
of the historical denials (global and local) of Palestinians’ right to a home, and the
6 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2008), op. cit.
7 B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
“Statistics: Destruction of Property,” B/Tselem. http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/Index.asp
(accessed February 10, 2010).

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
7
ongoing personal trauma of Mariam, Ayman and the rest of their family. Mariam
shared with me her story of the demolition of her house with a great deal of
despair, pain, tears and anger. She told me how hundreds of police and military
officers had attacked her house in Silwan while she was sleeping. She described
the big dogs primed to attack her mother, who was resisting the demolition of
their home while carrying her younger brother, the loud noise of the bulldozers,
the extreme horror that struck her family, and her confusion, loss of the ability to
speak and anger towards the injustice. Then she said:
House demolitions have become normal. The bulldozers have
become something normal for the Jews. They have demolished so
many houses in Silwan…that the demolition of my home is
normal, which makes me so upset at the world. Sick, very sick… I
feel exhausted.
To hear such reflections and emotions from an 11 year old girl was shocking. But
the research in housing demolitions revealed that Mariam’s voice was one of the
many ordinarily unheard voices that contest the normalization of violence in
conflict zones. It calls on us to unpack the violence inflicted against her, and to
question the injustice that is reflected in the politics of the invisibility of her loss.
It draws our attention to the lack of acknowledgement of her victimization, its
‘normalization’ and its legalization. Mariam’s trauma, though not heard or
acknowledged, points to the fact that there is no production of knowledge
outside politics and the history of loss, displacement and injustice. Her rejection
of the normalization of her trauma, reflected in the politics of housing
demolition, highlights the fact that for feminist research the acknowledgment of
such hidden suffering is not only a scientific necessity, but also a political
obligation.
This obligation takes us away from the positivist approach, which typically poses
questions about the legitimacy of the study relating to the ‘size’ of the sample, its
representativeness etc. Instead it leads us to a different approach, one that
situates people like Mariam as the source of knowledge. It raises new sets of
questions that revolve around acquiring justice and alleviating the pain of those
living the ‘everydayness’ of militarization and violence. Mariam’s plight calls for
feminist to be attentive to researching invisibility and the invisibilized.
Mariam was persistent in discussing the impact that the noise, the terrorizing
bulldozers, and the violent military power had on her small body and young life.
She insisted on asking me whether I knew someone who would let her share

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
8
with the world her fear of the color yellow, which reminded her of the bulldozers
and her sense of loss.
However, her persistent request to share and speak ‘truth to power’ was
interrupted by her mother’s anxious interventions. Her mother explained that if
Mariam were to speak to a television station, the Jewish state would deprive her
of the medical treatment she needed. But Mariam remained adamant in asking
me and her father to find a way for her to tell her story. Her father began to make
suggestions, but her mother – who was close to tears – stated that she was unable
to deal with additional losses that might result from such story-telling. She
explained that Mariam’s health was what counted now (Mariam developed child
diabetes following the demolition of her house), not whether or not the world
knew about the effects of the home demolitions. She asked me, “Do you think the
world cares about us? Do you think that we are counted as human beings in the
world’s power formulas?” Despite her mother’s words, Mariam insisted, “I want
to tell the whole world what they did to us. I want to show them what they did
to me.”
Mariam’s voice, and her family’s long history of loss and injustice allow us to
reflect on the effect of the global, regional and local denial of the suffering of the
unseen and invisibilized. I refer here specifically to the Palestinian case. It
requires that we look closely at the way such denial and the workings of power
influence the bodies and shapes the lives of individuals and families living in
conflict and war zones. It sheds light on the unprecedented levels of hegemonic
military power implicated in the occupation of land, and asks whether and how
feminist methodologies can be developed when violent transgressions, both local
and global, work in a spiral and accumulative manner, affecting everyday acts
and movements of individuals. It requires that we understand how and whether
we can study “invisibility” through voices of individuals when localized contexts
and global power politics change rapidly and unpredictably, leaving
victims/survivors in a constant state of turmoil and confusion, and when our
research carries political ramifications.
The spiral nature of transgression, as apparent in the protracted suffering of
Mariam’s family, has affected every aspect of their lives. The family lost her
house in Haifa in 1948 ( during the Palestinian Nakba), lived thereafter in a state
of constant displacement, lost contact with members of their nuclear and
extended family, were deprived of social networks, proper access to education,
and were left unable to find gainful employment or safeguard the family's
wellbeing. The loss of Mariam’s family home and the inability of her family to
protect her from further trauma – against the backdrop of the world’s failure to

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
9
bring an end to the continuous violation of Palestinians rights – have worked in a
spiral manner to impact Mariam and her family economically, socially and
psychologically.
Mariam’s losses and their ramification are reflected in, for example, her health
situation, and in the heavy medication she is taking. It has a bearing on her
eating habits, her body image and her entire future as a woman. For Mariam,
being a woman in a patriarchal society such as the Palestinian one, suffering
from childhood diabetes affects not only her physical health, but also the degree
of her vulnerability as a young woman. It will (as her parents explained) further
influence her ability to acquire social and economic safety, access educational
institutions, impact her sexuality and affect her prospects for marriage.
Similar findings were apparent when revealing the effect of the loss of the home,
due to its demolition, on women’s bodily safety, sexuality politics, sense of
privacy, and personal future decision. Young women for example explained that
they needed to refrain from applying to universities, and accept an early
marriage proposal due to the heavy economic burden on their families.8 Other’s
explained that they needed to live with a large number of the extended family,
lose their bodily safety, privacy, and sense of protected familiality following the
demolition of their homes. Thus, the spiral manner in which violence functions
and affects the lives of individuals living under its shadow has added to the
already excessive levels of force, (that have been justified under what I call
Israel’s security theology) and legitimated disproportionate attacks against
Palestinians, disrupting their everyday life and future. The disruption of
Palestinian everyday lives be it through disrupting their ability to reach school,
to maintain the home as a safe space, to give birth in safety, or to bury their loved
ones with dignity, was justified on the alleged need to ensure “security for
Israel.” “Securing Israel” from the Palestinians, at any cost, and even if it violates
international codes of moralities and laws, has become a new religion, a new
theology that is above questioning and challenge. Israeli state security, as defined
by the Israeli military leadership and political elite, creates a spiral of insecurities
and attacks that impinge upon every moment of the lives of Palestinian civilians.
Some of these attacks, as Mariam’s ordeal exposes, are invisible, uncounted, and
denied recognition.
The accuracy, power, and efficiency of the spiral effects of militarized, violent
practices, resulted in escalating threats to Mariam’s family, including the threat
of continuous internal displacement, exile, the loss of home and family, loss of
8 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2005), op cit.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
10
economic sustenance and the deprivation of the rights to health and education.
And yet the mode, structure and epistemic power of this security theology,
which renders the human suffering of Mariam and her family invisible, itself
remains indistinct and hidden.
Studying the spiral effect of legalized violence (internal displacement, the
deprivation of safety and security, etc) and the use of women’s bodies and lives
to empower colonial bureaucracy and policies will help in the development of a
clear, politicized feminist methodology that situates the suffering of women at
and as the centre. My argument is that by foregrounding the voices of Palestinian
women and girls, as affected by the morphology of the Israeli security theology,
and reflected in the attack on the body, home, homeland and life, one could build
a critical analytical space from which to theorize a feminist methodology against
colonial violence. To further my argument, I draw from women’s voices facing
housing demolitions, follow by drawing from women’s voices facing the
violation of their right to education, and conclude with some reflections on
feminist methodologies and the dangers of both invisibility and visibility.
Feminist Methodologies and Homes of Invisibility in Conflict Zones
The daily activities of displaced Palestinian civilians are impacted by militaristic
policies, manifested among others in home demolitions and the Israeli
Separation Wall. As a result of these measures and as affirmed by the women I
interviewed, Palestinian women have lost their sense of security, autonomy and
economic independence. Women explained that they suffer the constant fear of
losing their homes, family members and their ability to provide for their
children. The economic strangulation that prevents Palestinians from reaching
schools, from finding decent work, and from moving freely within and between
their own areas, has had a profound impact on women’s bodily safety and lives.
Women express fear for their own bodily safety; many of them sleep fully
dressed, afraid of abuse and the arrival of bulldozers coming to demolish the
house. The voices of Manar, Hoda and others cited below reveal the way in
which Israel’s militaristic policies have permeated every area of Palestinian life.
Manar recounts:
For the past three years, after I wash up at night, I have gone to
bed with all of my clothes on… I fear even wearing pajamas to
sleep because one never knows what will happen... just ask what
happened to Hoda when they demolished their house and you will
understand why we sleep with all of our clothes on.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
11
Hoda describes the demolition of her house as follows:
When they demolished the house, I was still in my training suit...
I only realized that when I saw the pictures in the newspaper... I
was without my veil, and only in my training suit! I will never
forgive them for violating my privacy and my right to safety in
my own house. Because of that, even today, I refuse to take off my
veil and my dishdasheh [long dress] when I’m at home in my
rented place. Since the demolition last year, I do not know what
sleeping means. I feel that they even deprived me of the right to
sleep and to sleep safely.
Nawal and Salma tell similar stories of loss and fear. In Nawal’s words:
We lost everything – every sense of safety. We can’t get water
without a struggle, we can’t meet our parents without a struggle,
we can’t sleep, and we can’t scream or cry out. And even if we do,
no one listens. Even though both my husband and I are
Jersusalemites, our children are not, and they do not have I.D.
cards... They are all under constant threat. We have lost all sense
of safety and security. Sometimes, I feel that being a dog or a cat
is safer than being a Palestinian.
According to Salma:
Safety is our main problem. Our children are facing sexual
harassment on their way to school each and every day. Three
months ago, someone attempted to kidnap my six-year-old
daughter, and I had no one to ask for help. They refuse to
safeguard the streets and there is no public transportation. Thus,
we end up walking in insecure areas and our children end up
walking to school on insecure roads.
For Hoda, talking to me about her own hardships was an opportunity for
her to share her experiences and ventilate her feelings in her own language,
rather than “as a legal expert”. She repeatedly stated that her problem is
not the legality or illegality of her demolished home, but rather, “the
illegality of my existence… so, do you have a law that checks whether I
should exist, whether my family should live or not? Could you all write my
questions in your research?”

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
Towards a Feminist Methodology
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 3, No. 1: Spring 2010
Available from http://www.wiscomp.org/peaceprints.htm
12
Hoda, together with her neighbours, posed questions and requested that their
questions and worries should be brought before the world. Their constant use of
phrases such as, “No one sees us or hear us,” and “we are not considered human
beings” led me to a realization of the importance of developing a feminist
methodology that engages with invisibility as a major space for understanding
the unseen and unheard.
Hoda, like other Palestinian women I interviewed, underscored the fact that the
attack on the Palestinian home is a deliberate strategy of war. It changes gender
roles, causes physical dislocations and the destruction of social networks, and
ruptures the social fabric. It leads to changing gendered roles and
intergenerational confrontations, and shakes social values. 9 In such conditions,
cultural roots and religious and spiritual beliefs act as psychological buffers that
help women survivors to shape and re-shape their subjectivity in order to reduce
risk. The fact that the home (both physically and emotionally) is a site of
resistance, survival, and a source of women’s voices, reconstructs new meanings.
As Samar stated:
My home was the family home; it was the place where we
gathered the entire family on Fridays, the place that most of our
relatives came to ask for help when they were in trouble…it was a
place that we gathered in happy and sad moments…during
weddings, during birth, when we lost someone, when someone
was released from prison…it was the place I felt happy…in
control, loved, appreciated, respected…a place to talk, cry, share,
meet, relax, fight. I was so proud of my home, so strong and
energetic….Now…it looks like a grave yard…they buried all our
energies and solidarity…now…we are divided and very lost.
Samar, 58 years old.
Within the highly oppressive Israeli militaristic regime, the home is one of the
few places where Palestinian women can find solace. As the only place for
refuge, the home is a place for personal growth and community-building. As
such, the home is an oppositional site within a military-state patriarchy and a
place where Palestinian women can be safe from the “dual spheres of racism and
sexism.” 10
I argue that feminist methodologies in conflict zones must be attentive to the
meaning that certain spaces carry, such as the meaning of the home space. The
9 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2005), op.cit.
10 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2008), op.cit.

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voices of Palestinian women revealed that the home represents a nurturing place
that facilitates growth for them. The home was found to be the only place of
refuge. It is a place for identity formation and community-building. The home,
as we learn from Palestinian women, serves as a safe space they create from a
history and life of displacement. For them, the home has become not just a site of
personal cultivation, but a space of political resistance and agency. Losing their
home is tantamount to losing the space in which they can safely transform into
more independent and stronger individuals amidst the constant uncertainty and
violence. It implies losing the space that affirmed their power of love and care,
regardless of the strangulation of the Palestinian economy, the ongoing loss and
deprivations, and the global denial thereof. It means losing the only space in
which they can restore their dignity, denied by the structures of power and their
industrialized security theology. While home for some Palestinian women might
be what conventional feminist theories conceive of as a site of oppression and
subordination, it is also the only space that affirms their humanity in an
otherwise inhumane and brutal global and local contexts. As the site of
“personal/political resistance,” the private space of the home gains heightened
importance for individual women victims of military violence and constant
displacement.
Similarly, my study on the effects of the Israeli Separation Wall on Palestinian
school girls revealed how the ordeals of girls and their daily struggle to cross
military checkpoints and pass through the Wall have became a serious concern
and source of worry for them. Their fears of being sexually abused and harassed,
their concerns of being left waiting for hours in the cold or under the sun, the
denial of their right to access their schools, which caused them to miss
examinations and disrupt their attendance, were found to have militarized their
spaces and violated their right to education. Examining the daily struggles of
girls and the ramification of the violation of their right to education was however
lost in the legal, global and media discussions regarding the legality or illegality
of the construction of the Wall. The ordeals of girls and voices were invisibilized,
not only by the Israeli occupation and its supporters, but in some cases even by
human right activists who used the legal and human right discourse to stress the
illegality of the Wall’s construction, and unjust demolitions of house, while
turning a blind eye to the psychological trauma of its construction.11 But, in
studying and engaging with the daily experiences of women and girls, I learned
how violent conflicts affected their everydayness, the way they act, dress, plan
their future, take decisions, marry, etc. I learned that in some cases parents
11 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, & S. Khsheiboun, “Forbidden voices: Palestinian women facing
the Israeli policy of house demolition,” Women’s Studies International Forum (2009).

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
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decided to prevent girls from pursuing their education, fearing the effect of
military checkpoints on their safety and security. In other cases, young girls were
unable to cope with the daily humiliations and hardships, and decided to quit
schools; in yet others girls agreed to an early marriage to escape the daily
oppression.
Developing methodologies that are capable of reading, hearing and seeing the
unseen requires that one look at the invisibilized others – in our case Palestinian
women – as sources of invisible knowledge about the role and value of a safe
home under constant upheavals. The continued invisibility of women’s ordeals
contributes to the failure to understand the effects of militarization and thus
compounds the effect of instability and chaos during times of danger and trauma
in conflict zones where uncertainties and the interruption of life prevail.
Researching this invisibility allowed me to challenge the epistemic violence of
the hegemonic production of knowledge, which claimed that the Wall was
constructed to “safeguard” and “protect” lives. It brought to the fore an
ongoing ‘necropolitics,’ an economy of life and death that dictates whose life
should be safeguarded and protected, and who are the uncounted ‘others.’
Hearing young girls’ voices enabled me to untangle the implications of
colonialism, militarization, hegemonic ideologies and war on our methodologies.
It opened up new windows of empowerment, and of researching invisibility. It
brought to the research front, as to the conflict front, the importance of
investigating the lack of access to hospitals and schools as a deliberate way to
further the fragmentation of Palestinian society.
The Ever-Shifting Power of Spiral Transgressions
In my study on the gendered nature of education12 I showed how the
everydayness of militarism and violence affects the way in which young girls
access their schools. The study quotes Reem, a 13-year-old girl who shared the
following narrative:
I really want to continue going to school, but the soldiers and the
Mishmar Hagvul [border patrol] keep on harassing me and my
family. As you see, we live very close – one minute away – from
the racist separation wall and the soldiers do not bother me on my
way to school, but do not allow me to come back home after I am
done. I am now sneaking around and reaching home from school
12 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2008), op.cit.

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through the sewage pipes that are still open. Every time they
refuse to allow me to come back home, they know that I will reach
home either by walking more than five kilometres, or by sneaking
through the sewage pipes.
Reem’s voice reveals the way in which her time, space and route to school were
violated on a daily basis. It speaks of her daily upheavals, as well as her acts of
resistance and agency. However, Reem’s ordeal is rarely seen or known, and her
daily encounters, like those of many women and men living in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT), scarcely visible. The encounter between Israeli state
violence and Palestinian women civilians is colonial in nature, a making of
dominance through practices of violence that are directed at the colonized body,
home and homeland. Colonial encounters, including violent evictions, claims
that the land is empty, and the alleged need to save the colonized from their own
“backward” culture and lack of civility, affect the daily acts of the colonized. The
colonial power-holders have confined Palestinians to specific spaces and places
in the OPT, and created a new colonial administration. People’s movements and
lives are under the control of the settler colonialism regime. The management of
boundaries within the Palestinian spaces is also under their administration.
Ghettoized spaces are created for the Palestinian ‘other’ controlled by military
checkpoints, new zoning and planning laws, and the establishment of spaces and
roads for settlers, both conceptually and materially. Thus the Palestinian body,
home, school, time and space, and their everyday acts, are raced and gendered.
One instance of a counter-space, created in opposition to the demolished home,
was found in Iqbal’s narrative. She speaks of the night on which her home was
demolished with only thirty minutes’ warning:
They came, with their big bulldozers, cars, police forces… many
soldiers with their weapons directed at my children… and the
noise… their voices, their Hebrew language which no one
understood, made me feel like I was in a whirlpool [dawameh]. I
was running like crazy, between calming down the kids, fearing
they would be shot, collecting our papers, documents, birth
certificates… collecting the gold the children got as presents from
their grandparents… I was trying to gather everything in such a
hurry… and when they said that they are about to demolish the
house, Salim, my four-year-old son [at the time he was under the
age of two] was not around. I thought he was inside the house and
started screaming… screaming without being able to stop. But he
was right beside me, holding my deshdasheh [a long, wide

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housedress] … When they started demolishing the house, I
hugged him with his sisters… wrapped them all in my
deshdasheh and we all cried. To this day, the girls still remember
how the whole family stood, wrapped in my dirty home
deshdasheh, crying like we have never cried before, cried and cried
while our hearts were on fire. 13
Examining the invisibility in Iqbal’s act enables us to expand our understanding
of world politics to include the personal ordeal of the otherized, as constitutive of
previously invisible spheres, and to conceive of women’s acts of resistance and
agency as counter-hegemonic acts that function under a severe and spiral
transgression. Studying invisibility in the context of spiral transgression in
conflict-ridden areas raises crucial feminist/political and ethical issues that one
cannot turn a blind eye to. The development of a feminist methodology that
acknowledges and visibilizes the ordeals of women in conflict zones is both an
epistemological and political action, a means of turning methodology into a
political act of resistance to subjugation.
The study of the home and the educational space as sites of invisibility, but also
as a source of knowledge, reveals the spiral and intricate connection between
internal factors (personal, familial, community) and structural/politico-economic
factors. As the Palestinian case-studies indicated (and as could be seen in many
conflict zones), the localized institutionalization of the violence and of peace, has
facilitated our understanding of the effect of the workings of localized global
militarism on the everydayness of women’s lives. Engaging with women’s
voices revealed the way displacement, home demolitions, the deprivation of
education and loss is a clear and deliberate strategy of war. The silencing and
invisibilization of the displaced Palestinian since the 1948 Nakba (the Palestinian
catastrophe), and the spiral effect of physical and emotional dislocation,
including the destruction of whole communities, led to drastic changes in the
behavior of women and girls, the loss of certain values, and acquisition of new
ones. For example, visibilizing how women shape and re-shape their subjectivity
to reduce risk under extreme violence could be illuminating for researchers of
conflict zones. Revealing the silenced and invisibilizing global effect of
deprivation of education, of safety, and of certainty and predictability, and the
everydayness of violence, via critical feminist methodology, is a feminist and a
political act. A methodology of this kind allows us to comprehend how the
13 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2005), op.cit., 133.

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personal and familial hold life together and help women to preserve the
humanity of their loved ones.
In order to develop a feminist methodology of the politics of invisibility, I have
attempted to un-map the daily experiences of the Palestinian woman and the
effect that spiral transgression has on her (as on other Palestinians), and her
rights to housing and education, as well as to free access to family, school, health,
water, food, etc. This process of un-mapping helps us uncover the hierarchies of
the hidden and apparent violence. Un-mapping and making Palestinian
women’s ‘invisible’ spiral transgressions visible, requires that we look at the
roots of the historical injustice caused to Palestinians and juxtapose it with the
effect of continuous settler colonialist violence and militarism. It is a process that
compels us to question the relationship between her identity politics, as a
Palestinian refugee, the politics of “invisibilizing” her rights, cause, needs and
everydayness of suffering and the geopolitics of the colonial project as reflected
in the spatial politics of land grabbing, displacement and housing demolitions.
Analyzing the relationship between identity politics, geopolitics, and the politics
of invisibility requires that we analyze their effect on the day to day encounters
of Palestinian women living in a context of global denial of their basic rights to
life and livelihood. The analyses of everydayness require that one reads the
colonized woman’s “invisibility” through the organizations of politics in her
everyday life. It means that we look at what is being imposed and projected onto
specific bodies and lives.
Developing a feminist methodology that reveals the invisibility of women’s daily
acts of resistance requires that we first un-pack the technologies of domination,
such as control over bodily safety and security, over water, food, electricity,
movement. It requires unmaping the control over spaces, places, time, economies
and development; all employed by the settler colonialist regime. Such a
methodology asks that we read the counter-languages, counter-actions and
counter-spaces created by the colonized and the occupied in putting up
resistance to oppression. It also requires a reading of the spiral, continuous, and
ever-shifting power of the colonizer’s technologies of dominance.
Feminist Methodology and the Dangers of Invisibility and Visibility
The paper argued that the Feminist failure to develop methodologies that
visibilize the invisible is not merely an academic issue, but also a political one
that requires careful analyses of history and justice. I argue that there is a serious
danger in both invisibilizing and visibilizing women’s ordeals and the spiral
effect of the everydayness of violence against women in conflict zones. Such an

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Palestinian Women and the Politics of Invisibility:
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argument calls us to keep in our mind questions such as: What is the price of not
engaging with women’s ordeals and their call for historical justice? What is the
price of not acting upon the everydayness of their experiences, and for denying
women’s theorization a platform? What is the price of researching women in
conflict zones without allowing them to speak ‘truth to power’ through the
research? What is the price of failing to visibilize the invisible? What is the effect
of the trauma of silencing? All these are relevant questions that need further
unpacking.
Sociological analyses of visibility14 pointed to the importance of studying
asymmetries and distortions of visibility, when they are the norm, and suggested
that these should be incorporated in critical feminist methodology. Furthermore,
I posit that such asymmetries transform the visibility-invisibility issue into a site
of strategy and politics and hence require a counter politics, methodology and
language. A methodology that stipulates the tracking of the archeology of the
“invisible” women’s resistance in conflict zone helps us debunk the engineered
Western scholarship, be it that on traumatology, which tends to pathologize acts
of resistance15 , or human rights, which needs to use the legal regulatory
discourses and thus legalizes and de-politicizes inhumane acts 16 or criminology
or victimology, which are deeply influenced by those who control the production
of knowledge and its academic stronghold. Palestinian women’s
hidden/silenced voices teach us that developing a feminist methodology that
probes invisibility requires that we also question how, why and when visibility
intersects with perceptions of dangers and ‘security’. It requires us to look at,
and engage with the way in which the marginality of woman intersects with her
‘dangerousness’ as a Palestinian, and how the Israeli state constructs a security
theology that operates at all levels of everyday life to silence and invisibilize
women’s voices.
Connecting the dots between the politics of transforming the visible into
invisible, and comprehending the workings of power in normalizing or denying
such invisibility, as apparent in the voices of Palestinian women living in conflict
zones, takes us back to where we started. It takes us back to analyzing the effect
of the local and global politics of denial in understanding the politics of
researching “invisibility” and the invisibilized in conflict and war zones. It
invites us to closely research the politics of seeing and listening, while mapping
14 A. Brighenti, “Visibility: A Category for Social Science,” Current Sociology, 55(3) (2007): 323-
342.
15 I. Martín-Baró,Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Ed.Ignacio Martín-Baró Ed and trans.
A.Aron & S.Corne (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press: 1996).
16 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian & S. Khsheiboun, (2009), op. cit.

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the terrifying landscape in which order, regularity, predictability, routine, and
everydayness itself is organized in militarized zones. It assists us in developing
a critical feminist methodology that documents and engages in the every day
acts of resistance/survival of the “invisible” women living in conflict zones.
Moreover, the shaping and management of visibility and invisibility raises
questions such as who are the women in conflict zones who should or should not
be seen and why. It also requires one to unpack the regime of invisibility.
Visibility is an operation of power, controlled and operated by the politics and
knowledge production, when the invisible is not static or absolute, but rather an
owner of hidden power that should be feared.17 Researching the invisible trauma
of Palestinians, when they lose their homes and homeland and when they
survive constant danger and uncertainties, requires that one looks at the
interlocking connections between the spiral transgressions of trauma and
invisibility in the historical context of racism and invisibilizing, globalized power
politics. To understand the silenced voices of girls who are deprived of their
right to access education, or comprehend the meaning of the loss of the home to
Palestinian women, one should study the invisibility of their histories, of the
global denial of their rights, as well as the invisibility of their psychological
traumas as young girls and women facing continuous injustice.
The women’s voices shared in this paper also present a challenge to the role of
international politics in denying justice to Palestinians, by highlighting how the
daily, private lives of women are closely linked to global politics of seeing one
side, while rendering the other “invisible”. Hence, studying invisibility requires
both a macro and micro analyses of the global political economy, to link
women’s private lives with the global power game. Studying invisibility can
help us detect ‘security’ allegations that may further silence the unseen.
Studying women and their families at moments of militarization and
displacement, when the body, the future, the home and the family are threatened
might at times disturb the production of hegemonic knowledge. The question
remains whether such disturbance could be considered a form of feminist
political action. Reading and writing invisibility contributes in many cases to
preventing individual women from losing their achievements in the daily
struggle for survival. Whether such a methodology would empower or be
transformative for women in extreme situations of violence is a question that
remains unanswered.
17 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Education and the Israeli Industry of Fear,” in Education
in the Arab Region: Global Dynamics, Local Resonances, World Yearbook of Education,
Routledge, 2009.

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Two final questions remain unanswered: What is the price of disclosing the
invisible experiences for Palestinian women? Who would pay the price of such
visibility? And might visibility add insult to injury and inflict additional trauma
and loss? Based on my clinical activism and the research shared in this paper on
home demolitions and the militarization of education, I would like to argue that,
in some cases, women themselves exercise the right to remain silent and chose to
live in the darkness, in an effort to negotiate their survival strategies. Their
refusal to speak up should not only be taken into consideration, but also
respected and protected, for – as I have stated elsewhere in my research on
women facing sexual abuse in Palestine 18 – women are not vehicles for political
activism, research or change. Our first and most important ethical and political
commitment as feminists should be to be guided by women’s judgments,
silences, speeches and choices. To me, being a feminist means not only bringing
or not bringing the power and meanings inherent in silence and speech; it also
means being responsive and responsible for the ways of engaging, writing,
reading and not-writing or visibilizing the hidden voices of those who are
surviving in the dark and dealing with injustice on a daily basis.
Notions of academic ‘truths’ and our commitment to those we study in the
context of the politics of invisibility and responsibility bear complicated ethical
and political meanings and ideologies. The stories of women and girls, such as
that of Mariam, made me question the role of developing a methodology that is
able to make the invisible visible, and to write about the wrongs done to the
“invisibilized” in the midst of a volatile and violent conflict.
Women may need to remain invisible, and their decision to deny their
knowledge a voice, and prevent their narratives from seeing the light of day
should guide our constructions. But one must not forget that it is in the mere
intimate level of Mariam’s “invisible” life suffering, and with an attention to the
everydayness of the details, that one could develop a feminist methodology that
researches invisibility, and comprehends in depth the effect of the power of
spiral transgressions on women’s lives. For as Mbembe states: “power, in its own
violent quest for grandeur and prestige, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its
main mode of existence.” 19 Consequently, it is this intimacy of experience and
18 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Blocking her exclusion: A contextually sensitive model of
intervention for handling female abuse,” Social Service Review 74 (4), (2004): 620-634
and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Imposition of Virginity Testing: a Life-Saver or a
License to Kill. Social Science and Medicine,” V 60 (2004): 1187-1196. 2.453; 6, 4/28.
19 A. Mbembe, “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony, Public
Culture 4(2) (1992): 1-30.

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the obscenity of power – as Mbembe defines it - that one should attempt to
uncover in researching “invisibility”.20
I would like to thank Sarah Layton for her assistance with this paper.
20 Ibid