by Kristyna Brozova
Introduction
With the intensification of colonial apartheid in Palestine, the Women in Black movement has been reaffirming its importance as a site of peaceful protest and anti-colonial resistance, especially in the UK. The renewed traction necessitates a deeper analysis of the movement which has been active for decades and almost accidentally became a form of collective decolonial practice, connecting Israeli and Palestinian women and their distinct experiences of colonial/patriarchal domination. This piece will examine the discursive resistance performed by the anti-apartheid feminist movement and argue that, where cultural framings of dominant discourse have utilised gender and race as markers of difference, Women in Black (WiB) challenges these framings by proposing new cultural frameworks based on intersectionality, solidarity, and humanity.
Israel – Gender and Race
As Sasson-Levy notes, the Israeli system of discursive affordances is heavily militarised along different axes of oppression – mainly that of gender and ethnicity. The discursive construction of a woman in Israel has been tied with the Zionist narratives and nationalist discourse of the state modelled by the “establish[ment of] Jewish home” in which women are kept in a subservient position. These discourses produced a woman as a symbolic figure, connecting the physical and biological reproductive capacity of the female body with its discursive function. Indeed, in Israel, motherhood is regarded as women’s “national mission” to ensure the future of the Jewish state. Hence, women are cast into the sphere of domestic life, and expected to actively support the nation.
Moreover, this nationalist Zionist ideology has shaped a system of social differentiation based on racial hierarchies. As Herzog argues, in Israel, racism has been constitutive of the social discourse, acting as “a signifier of policy” which centred racial difference as a main organising principle. This reaffirmation of race has taken place through everyday processes, naturalising racism as a discursive frame and pushing it to the level of social unconsciousness. These interpretative patterns then facilitate discursive and normative violence as they subjectify individuals along gendered and racialised divisions, determining their epistemic possibility of being and normalising the violence against their gendered and racialised bodies. They have therefore underpinned the regime of colonial dispossession, apartheid, land occupation and dehumanisation of the otherised bodies.
Routine – Time and Space
Yet, these discursive frames are maintained only through their everyday collective re-enactment as the repeated compliance of the subjects to them reaffirms the power these frameworks convey – it legitimises, normalises and embeds the frames in the system of meaning. The failure to comply and actively exercise the discursive norms, however, endangers those very gendered and racialised social norms. Thus, disobedience to these processes of everyday routine opens up the space for resistance and establishment of alternative discursive patterns.
Women in Black – the women-led anti-apartheid movement which started in the wake of Intifada in 1987 – resisted by rupturing the social routine and establishing alternative routinised activity. Their performative protest of peasant resistance – the small defiance which ruptures the order of everyday life while not attacking this power upfront – “de-naturalize(d)” the rhythms of everyday life which reduced them to the gendered figures serving the advances of nationalism. The timing of their protest – at the brink of the Shabbat and the time of preparation for the religious day – defied the rules governing the Jewish tradition. By entering the public sphere at a time that is preconditioned to be dedicated to home, they refused their role as mothers, wives, and daughters. Instead of serving the institution of the Jewish home/nation, they renegotiated the meaning of the holy day by bridging the divide between the two religious’ days – one observed by Muslims and one by the Jews. Their time-based rupture of the public and private routine, therefore, presented a vigil as a form of bridge between the marginalised communities.
The women did not protest at the sites connected to the power but rather chose the places for their vigils based on the significance of this public exposure and its importance in Israel’s social life. Their approach was oriented towards the bottom-up change, trying to interrupt the space in which discursive patterns are being re-negotiated in the social body of the nation. The public location, therefore, enabled WiB to transform the location into “a practical means” of their discursive protest as they provide a facility to stage “temporary interruptions of the public routine” and the discourses this routine represents and produces. Instead, they offered a new form of public routine through the re-enactment of the performance and repetition of their vigils each week.
Performance and Alliance
WiB staged “the assembly of [their] bodies as a performative enactment” in order to redefine the “gendered spatiality”. By removing their bodies from the domestic to public spaces, they managed to break the traditional gendered divide between feminine private and masculine public. This resistance acted as a platform for women to escape the confines of their homes both physically and symbolically, enabling them to challenge the domination of masculine power which subjectifies them and keeps their possibility of being within the limits of the discursive category of women as mother, wives, caregivers, victims, sexual objects. They aimed to “transform the construction of women’s role” through their staged “interplay between the symbolic and the material”.
Moreover, their routinised performance of reclaiming a “delimited symbolic site” of the public space gestured towards sumud (or steadfastness) as a form of resistance practised by Palestinian women who refuse to succumb to pressures and abandon their land.
Therefore, by reclaiming the space from which they were abjected under the logic of the gendered discourse, WiB were able to connect with their Palestinian sisters in this symbolic act of resistance. Their feminine bodies, constructed under the dominant discourse just as invisible as the bodies of Palestinians, ruptured the racialised divides in the act of female solidarity. These acts of “absent presence” as the “bodily ethics and gestural poetics” exposed the absence of those who could not stand up for themselves – the colonised Palestinian women. The bodies of the protestors became sites of defiance against both racialised and gendered norms which defined Palestinian women’s epistemic and material place as that of lesser women. Their silence resonated with the silencing of Palestinians who have been prevented from the realm of power and discourse, bringing to attention the invisibility of Palestinian suffering and the inability to speak about this suffering within the bounds of the existing racialised framework. They turned silence into disobedience.
This public staging of the absent Palestinian voices in the act of defiance was not left unanswered. Women were targeted with slurs and smears from the by-passers who saw WiB as a threat to the common discursive construction of women, and therefore to Israel’s religious-neoliberal-national framework. Insult such as “Whores of Arafat” or “Whores of Arabs” demonstrated the racist underpinning of these discursive constructions where female sexual agency was used to dehumanise the Arab other. Yet, it also reiterated the importance of female bodily integrity for the discursive construction of national pride and strength, exemplifying the very masculine force Women in Black were seeking to challenge.
New Collective Identity
The violence and abuse women encountered did not change their determination and they continued to expose their femininity in defiance of dominant discourses, shifting the meanings of masculinity and femininity by their resistance. More importantly, the movement expanded across the world, with vigils taking place in Armenia, India, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. While the protest against Israeli occupation is the key connecting thread, Women in Black – who more and more often include persons of all genders – also tend to organise their resistance in response to the recent upsurge in violence in Ukraine, Armenia and Bihar, pointing to the common roots of the conflicts and suffering which disproportionately impact gendered and racialised bodies.
Most recently, the inhuman and illegal bombardment seeking a total elimination of Gaza and Palestinian people has prompted a new wave of vigils, especially in the United Kingdom. In contrast to many other mass protests organised in support of Palestine, the active performance of passive resistance offers an alternative mode of defiance. The diverse WiB groups still gather in traditionally black attire with signs calling for a ceasefire, peace and the end of occupation. But their silent passive resistance now more than ever resonates with the inability of Palestinians to speak due to network blackouts and power outages, which throw Gaza into total darkness. Their defiance therefore exposes Israeli occupation as part of the overarching patriarchal power which securitises itself through militarisation, occupation and colonial domination.
These vigils continue to be crucial acts of resistance which represent the overarching “struggle that seeks to open a future in which we might live in new social modes of existence” free of all forms of oppression. Through them, women create new discursive frames and redefine the meanings of their own identities and subjectivities. They create an eclectic collective identity which challenges the antagonistic discursive narratives of nationalism and Zionism and moves towards collectivity free of gendered and racialised hierarchies. Their vigils, therefore, provide the sites for the “construction of lived alternatives” which would “impact and modify the world beyond the performance”. They represent the future of the nation not dictated by nationalistic discourses but one offering new epistemic and normative ways of being, in their vision of a community free of hatred and war.
About the author:
Kristyna’s research is influenced by Post-Colonial and Gender Theories, with a focus on epistemic violence, alternative politics of human rights, discourse formation and possibilities of decolonial discursive resistance. She holds a first-class degree in MSc Gender Peace and Security and has secured several awards for outstanding academic performance during her studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Derby
You can contact her via: LinkedIn and k.brozova@alumni.lse.ac.uk
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