Lecture: Severed Intimacies: Women, Gender and Policing the Family in Occupied East Jerusalem

Severed Intimacies: Women, Gender and Policing the Family in Occupied East Jerusalem

Dr. Sarah Ihmoud, Boston University

This talk examines the mundane gendered effects of Israel’s surveillance and policing of Palestinian family life in occupied East Jerusalem, focusing on the Israeli Permit system and the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.  Centering the voices of Palestinian women, I explore not only how these biopolitical forms of governance invade the Palestinian intimate, fragmenting familial and social life, but also how they work to reinforce and strengthen modes of patriarchal control within Palestinian communities themselves. These severed intimacies, I argue, constitute a form of intimate state violence that works to dismember, deterritorialize and evict the native body and family from Jerusalem. Finally, I turn to the ways in which Palestinian women resist racialized surveillance through embodied social practices and creative acts that, nested in the space of the everyday, contest state violence, evade power, and create space for life and belonging to the city.