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“No Free Homeland Without Free Women:” Tal’at's Indigenous Feminist Movement
Abstract
On September 3, 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old woman was murdered by her family. Soon after, on September 26, 2019, thousands of protestors took to the streets throughout 12 cities including Jerusalem, Ramallah, Rafah, and Haifa. The protests were organized by the Indigenous Palestinian feminist movement, Tal’at. Tal’at is translated literally from Arabic as “stepping out” and is semantically translated as “rising up.” It's slogan “No Free Homeland without Free Women” encapsulates the movement's assertion that national liberation and feminist liberation must be fought together. The femicide of Israa Ghrayeb mobilized Palestinian feminists to call for an end to gender-based violence, for legal accountability, and collective liberation. Palestinian women are faced with the intersecting oppression of both Palestinian patriarchal norms as well the Zionist military occupation and apartheid system. This paper examines the emergence and influence of Tal’at and its concurrent resistance to patriarchy and Zionist settler colonialism. It is ultimately a call to action for feminist social workers to act in solidarity with Tal’at's struggle for feminist, queer, and national justice and liberation.
Purpose
Internationalisation in higher education (HE) has always been romanticised and idealised but there has been limited focus on the internationalisation of gender equality and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) certification and the role of international partnerships. Certification and Award Schemes (CAS), such as the Athena Swan Charter, can promote gender equality, best practices exchanges and foster institutional changes. Nevertheless, simply transferring strategies or frameworks without careful consideration of the nuances of the destination context can inadvertently lead to the perpetuation or exacerbation of gender inequalities and reproduce hierarchical relations between the Global South and North. Brazil's cultural and political context highlights the need for adapting the CAS framework to align with the unique conditions of the country, as well as institutional transformations in order to accommodate such a framework. This study aims to critically explore how gender equality and EDI certification can be internationalised in the Global South and how international partnerships can play a role in this process.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on a collaborative UK–Brazil funded project on advancing gender equality in Brazilian academia, we critically reflect on the assumptions of the funding call for operationalising international collaborations, and how we built solidarity – informed by our positionalities – against underlying colonial patterns. As part of our partnership, we were consulted to provide feedback on the introduction of an Athena SWAN framework in Brazil. We reflect on how the Athena Swan framework was “internationalised” in Brazil, especially in relation to its focus, the challenges of implementing gender equality and EDI efforts and the conditions required for such efforts to be meaningful in the Brazilian context. Thus, we assess and critically reflect on the current situation in Brazil, the role that certification can play for EDI and which conditions are required to enact change. In addition, we reflect on our positionalities and working practices as part of this collaboration as feminist researchers from different disciplinary and geographical backgrounds.
Findings
We trace colonial logics in the operationalisation of the funding scheme on setting international collaborations valorising the UK system and reinforcing geopolitical production of knowledge hierarchies between the Global North and Global South. Furthermore, reflecting on the Brazilian political, cultural context with a focus on HE we find similar challenges – to the UK – in implementing gender and EDI efforts. However, there are particular nuances in the Brazilian context that exacerbate these obstacles and make the implementation of an EDI certification framework in Brazil particularly challenging. Overcoming these barriers requires a collective effort from government, funding bodies, scientific associations and HE institutions, for the implementation of impactful and sustainable initiatives beyond mere rhetoric. Finally, while we had a positive collaboration, we felt ambivalent towards certain dimensions of the way the partnerships and the EDI internationalisation were operationalised.
Practical implications
We provide insights and practical recommendations that enhance the understanding of the issues surrounding the implementation of EDI efforts internationally such as CAS in the Brazilian context.
Social implications
Reflecting on the internationalisation of EDI can lead to more tailored context-sensitive frameworks and activities that have the potential to influence societal attitudes and expectations towards gender roles and inclusivity, contributing to a more equitable and just society at large. It also touches upon the dynamics of international partnerships and collaborations across different contexts that can have implications for how such partnerships should be developed and funded beyond a mainstream colonial approach of “mentoring less advanced institutions”.
Originality/value
We reflect and critically discuss the internationalisation of EDI certification in HE and the role of international collaborations towards this process, a topic that has not been often examined within the literature on the internationalisation of HE as a romanticised and positive discourse. From our experience, we explore how such efforts can bring up ambivalence in the way they are operationalised and have the potential to both reinforce and disrupt colonial hierarchies.
Despite international social work commitments to social justice, human dignity, and individual worth, feminist social work remains silent on Palestine. Israeli settler colonial violence pushes us to revisit our responsibilities to stand against colonized militarism. We insist that collective liberation is a feminist ethical constant, a political bosom for decolonization, a compass for critical feminist social work. In this article, we extend previously made claims that Palestine is a feminist issue by highlighting four moral imperatives: 1) persistent sumud, (2) gendered impacts of Zionism's settler colonial violence, 3) commitments to justice and liberation, and 4) feminist praxis of narrating violence.
The effects of colonization on Kanaka 'Ōiwi, the Indigenous people of Hawai'i, have led to the systematic distancing of Kanaka 'Ōiwi from their cultural ways of knowing, replacing it, instead with eurocentric standards of education that adversely impact Kanaka 'Ōiwi wellbeing. In this article, I provide an overview of the history of colonization of Kanaka 'Ōiwi through a critical race lens. Critical Race Theory and TribalCrit are reviewed in relation to their theoretical relevance to Kanaka 'Ōiwi epistemologies. A synthesis model of an adapted CRT and TribalCrit framework called, Kanaka'ŌiwiCrit is presented and discussed within the context of education as a space for resistance.
This review was published in International Feminist Journal of Politics [© 2015 Taylor & Francis] and the definite version is available at: https://www.google.com/search?q=10.1080%2F14616742.2015.1088226&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b The article website is at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616742.2015.1088226?needAccess=true
Though they are almost completely absent from the historical record, Palestinian women were extensively involved in the unfolding national struggle in their country during the British mandate period. Led primarily by urban, educated women from the middle and upper classes of Arab society, Palestinian women struggled against British colonialism and against Jewish settlement by holding a national congress, meeting with government officials, smuggling arms, demonstrating, and participating in regional and international conferences. This book is a comprehensive historical study of the emergence and development of the Palestinian women's movement in this important historical period. Drawing from little-studied source material including oral histories, newspapers, memoirs, and government documents, the author not only shows what these women accomplished within the political arena, but also explores the social, cultural, and economic contexts within which they operated. Charting the emergence of an indigenous feminism in Palestine, this work joins efforts to broaden European and American definitions of feminism by incorporating non-Western perspectives.
Settler colonial violence targets Indigenous women in specific ways. While urban planning has attended to issues of women’s safety, the physical dimensions of safety tend to be emphasized over the social and political causes of women’s vulnerability to violence. In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women. Drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to planning and point toward approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.
Before the Nakba a significant process of urbanisation had occurred in Palestine, leading to substantial changes in gender relations and women’s status. However, following the 1948 war, the existence of a vibrant urban social and gendered reality in Palestine was dismissed and erased, by both Palestinian and Zionist narratives; it was replaced by exclusively rural memory. This article analyses how Palestinian society in Israel accepted the Zionist version of history, according to which the modernisation of Arab society in Israel, especially gendered modernity, resulted from Jewish proximity and steps adopted by the state.
The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state and that settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women's studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women's studies is regularly understood and taught. Too often, the consideration of Indigenous peoples remains rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time away from which our society has progressed. Centering settler colonialism within gender and women's studies instead exposes the still-existing structure of settler colonialism and its powerful effects on Indigenous peoples and settlers. Taking as its audience practitioners of both "whitestream" and other feminisms and writing in conversation with a long history of Native feminist theorizing, the article offers critical suggestions for the meaningful engagement of Native feminisms. Overall, it aims to persuade readers that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative for all peoples living within settler colonial contexts.
On March 8, 2003, which is recognized as International Women’s Day, several Palestinian women’s organizations released a public statement, in which they declared: "Looking towards the eighth of March, we, Palestinian women, stand defiantly over the graves of our innocent martyrs and children, challenging the violations of human rights practiced against our people daily." Later the statement goes on to say: "[W]e raise our voices loudly, as one people, demanding from international society to provide international protection for our people, living, dying and existing under occupation. We demand a halt to all forms of war crimes and violations of our human rights which we face daily. We call upon our civil society partners to build a feminist agenda as an integral part of their programs for the sake of a just society in which all are equal without discrimination or abuse." This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
Women's voices, roles, and contributions are die most misunderstood issues in the analysis of war zones and conflict areas. This paper brings the feminist lens into the analysis of Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It examines the effect and legacy of policies inflicted by the doctrines of “no safe haven” and of “security reasoning” in relation to women, explores the way it shapes women's interactions with their family members, and discusses the ways in which continued and unpredictable political oppression creates an art of resistance with therapeutic qualities. By using a collection of narratives, personal witnessing, and analyses of studies gathered since the onset of the second Intifada, the researcher reveals how women have managed to develop women-oriented strategies that protected the domestic space and produced innovative transcripts that created counter-spaces of safety to rebuild (actually or metaphorically) the family home. The paper concludes by showing how the processes of displacement and the attacks on the domestic sphere, nevertheless, engender agency and creative resistance and calls for front-line feminist activism.
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I develop the conceptual frame of homonationalism for understanding the complexities of how acceptance and tolerance for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated. I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation's status as gay-friendly has become desirable in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it.
This article argues that the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal) in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. The spacio-cide is a deliberate ideology with unified rational, albeit dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context and the actions of the Palestinian resistance. By describing and questioning different aspects of the military-judicial-civil apparatuses, this article examines how the realization of the spacio-cidal project becomes possible through a regime that deploys three principles, namely: the principle of colonization, the principle of separation, and the state of exception that mediates between these two seemingly contradictory principles.
In interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, intersectionality has been a primary framework for thinking about multiple identities and the interconnectedness of various systems of oppression in women’s lives. This article suggests that to understand this multiplicity more effectively, feminist social work scholars need to develop and use a continuum of different theorizations of intersectionality, with various epistemological bases, that can be strategically applied, depending on the goals of a particular project or practice context. To articulate the experience of diverse groups of women throughout the world, these paradigms must go beyond the usual triumvirate of U.S.-based race, class, and gender to include migration, colonization, sexuality, ability, and other processes of oppression and identity. Drawing on postcolonial, queer, and transnational feminist perspectives, the article offers queer diasporic scholarship as an example of an interdisciplinary approach for conceptualizing the multiplicity of queer South Asian women’s experiences.
This article explores the murder of women and girls, which we name it Femicide, among the Palestinian community living in Israel. Specifically, it analyzes how the dialectic interrelationship between informal and formal legal-social systems constructs the murders of Palestinian women. The data revealed that femicide is a crime empowered by the wider context of colonization and the increasing spatial segregation of Palestinian communities. The study confirms the need to move beyond simplistic "cultural" explanations of femicide, and pay closer attention to the ways in which the structure, politics and economy of death function in colonized spaces and contexts.
We are very pleased to play a part in critical interventions happening in the study of Native women’s lives and historical experiences. As Native feminists who met through various forums—at conferences where we shared our interest and passion in issues of Indigenous nations, gender, and colonialism; at work sessions organized by our colleagues; and in conversations over the phone and by e-mail—we came to see a commonality of commitment amongst ourselves, and one of the outcomes, although certainly not the only one, is this fine collection of essays devoted to illuminating the workings of colonialism within our respective Native nations and communities and to reclaiming traditional values as the foundation for our lives and communities. In order to decolonize, we must critically assess our present state and name the reasons that Native peoples continue to live at the margins of the American nation’s imagination and we must account for the state of our homelands, for wherever we live and travel—as Mishuana Goeman (Seneca) points out, the entire Americas are our homelands, urban and rural spaces and Native nations—we experience, still, the consequences of colonialism. The structures of our lives as Native women and men are shaped by racism, sexism, and discrimination. We strive to recover our former selves and push toward creating better future selves by reclaiming Native values, which have seen us through multiple traumas, including land dispossession and the loss of our freedoms.
Native feminism is a much-debated term. The term, and the histories and fields of thought it implies, are fraught with all the complexities that result from colonial histories. Feminism is long held to be in purview of white rule, according to much literature on Native women and feminism. It is long believed to be a European invention or, much worse, a colonial imposition that sought to destroy tribal ways of life. However, J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Andrea Smith have interceded in these discourses, claiming that a monolithic approach to a Native feminism is not possible and that the false dichotomy of feminist and nonfeminist is oversimplified and undermines Native women’s approaches to decolonization. They state that “the very simplified manner in which Native women’s activism is theorized has made it difficult to articulate political and scholarly projects that simultaneously address sexism and promote indigenous sovereignty.”1 In order to be useful, we must acknowledge some strains of liberal-feminist thought that continue to contain racial hierarchies and imperial intent. While acknowledging these strains of feminism that work at odds with Indigenous sovereignties and understanding the debates among Native women about the usefulness of the term and its application to our intellectual labors and applications to our Native nations and communities, we affirm the usefulness of a Native feminism’s analysis and, indeed, declare that Native feminist analysis is crucial if we are determined to decolonize as Native peoples. As these essays demonstrate, for Native women there is no one definition of Native feminism; rather, there are multiple definitions and layers of what it means to do Native feminist analysis. However, as Native feminists, our dreams and goals overlap; we desire to open up spaces where generations of colonialism have silenced Native peoples about the status of their women and about the intersections of power and domination that have also shaped Native nations and gender relations. We rely on still developing frameworks for Native feminisms to examine and reflect upon the reverberations in our Native homelands. Many of the authors in this book at one time or another have been set with “dis-ease” with liberal-feminist forms of thought. Fomenting Native feminisms that intercede in these discourses is necessary; however, as gender conceptions continue to underpin and affirm the U.S. nation-state and its global imperial power, as Lisa Kahaleole Hall points to in her essay as she complicates the notion that feminism is white. In this edition, and in much of the work of those who are striving to claim Native feminisms, this is a history that must not be ignored or erased but confronted head on, as it is instrumental in the process of decolonization.
The contributors focus on the intersections of...
Presents an overview of feminist philosophy and examines the values and perspectives shared by feminism and social work. The assumption underlying both feminist and social work values is that people best realize their humanity through effective social functioning. It is suggested that feminist theory should be more extensively incorporated into social work practice at all levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The article explores the relationship between genocide and the settler colonialism. The author asserts that though the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal-they should be distinguished. The article further analyzes the negative and positive dimensions of settler colonialism. While on the one hand it attempts to dissolve native societies, it also establishes a new colonial society on the seized land base.
A queer cry for freedom
- L B David
Basic law: Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. The Knesset: Laws State of Israel
- S H Rolef
What is praxis? Discussed in relation to Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre
- N Cowley
Childbirth at checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory
- H Shoaibi