Below is the abstract for my paper titled "Negotiating the Intimate in Masafer Yatta: Palestinian Women's Practices of Sacredness, Embodiment, and Countering."
"In Masafer Yatta, the occupied West Bank, the Israeli occupation instrumentalizes the isolated geography of rural villages to steal land and impose unlivable conditions onto Palestinians. From drones to raids to sexualized violence to demolitions, the invasion of the intimate space of the home functions as one of the most critical, ubiquitous, and insidious forms of state violence. Palestinian women in Masafer Yatta navigate, experience, and conceptualize the intimate as a site of both colonial domination and Indigenous resistance. This article examines military occupation and settler colonialism through its most subtle, granular, and debilitating functions, from the perspective of quotidian routines and embodied knowledge. Based on ten interviews and six weeks of field notes, this article demonstrates how Palestinian women in Masafer Yatta attend to the occupation’s desecration of and omnipresence in their intimate spaces. Their epistemological and ontological relationships with the land, navigations of invasion both as an act and an eventuality, and routines of (re)building counter-spaces expose the ambitions and failures of Israeli dominance. Palestinian women disrupt Israeli impunity by making visible violence that is too often invisibilized, naturalized, and legitimized. More broadly, this research complicates understandings of settler colonialism and gendered violence, in Palestine and under military occupation generally."
For similar scholarship, I recommend Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Manal Shqair, Rema Hammami, Sara Ihmoud, Helga Tawil-Souri, and Nayrouz Abu-Hatoum. For more information on Masafer Yatta, I recommend following the social medias of Palestinian activists Mohammed Huraini from the village of Tuwani, Tariq al-Hathaleen from the village of Umm al-Khair and this group of young activists from the village of Susiya.