Traces of Racial Exception by Ronit Lentin

Author:Ronit Lentin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Importantly, however, although Palestinian women are particularly jeopardized by evictions and house demolitions, subject to Israeli sovereignty that disregards Palestinian housing needs and uses legalistic excuses to demolish their homes, they are also agents of resistance, as argued later. Positioning Palestinian women’s bodies at the intersection of state and gender, Rhoda A. Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair argue that the state’s civilizing mission not only views Palestinians as racially inferior but also affects gender relations and reinforces gender hierarchies.87 One wonders, however, about Israel’s civilizing intentions in view of blatant anti-Arab racism, exemplified inter alia by rabbis and Jewish anti-miscegenation groups obsessively warning Jewish women against relationship with Arab men as mentioned earlier.

If we are to use the term femina sacra, albeit “under erasure,” we must regard it as the embodied feminized subject par excellence. Women and other feminized subjects such as trans and gay people in precarious situations are often reduced to their body. This is illustrated by women becoming racialized instruments of genocidal acts via mass rapes and mass impregnations, or by motherhood becoming charged by political regimes with the production of “racially appropriate” future generations. Thus, by administering Depo Provera contraceptive injections to Jewish Ethiopian women, as discussed in Chapter 4, the state uses women’s bodies to control the birthing practices of those Jewish mothers considered racially inferior.

Israel has the highest number of fertility clinics and the highest per capita rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in the world.88 Its pro-natalist policies are motivated by demographic anxiety, as discussed in Chapter 4, by the biblical edict to “be fruitful and multiply” (which explains the high birth rates of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews), by the legacy of the Holocaust, and by the centrality of militarism that equates military service for men with childbirth for women.89 In Reproducing Jews, Susan Kahn argues that the availability of state subsidized fertility treatments is not the result of high infertility but rather, reflects the centrality of reproduction in Jewish culture.90 While Israel employs state-of-the-art reproduction technologies as a strategy of ensuring a Jewish majority, Palestinians in Israel, as Kanaaneh argues,91 use reproduction as a strategy of affirming indigeneity and tradition,

in a context where the field of reproduction has become one of the privileged ways to “measure” the modern or traditional character of ... ethnicities and populations, Palestinians have responded by, on the one hand, internalizing and reproducing the modernist outlook and, on the other hand (and in opposition to the dominant Zionist construction), by representing the Arab large family as the symbol of their “authentic” culture and a gendered powerful tool for national resistance.92

Abdo’s critique of Orientalist, Eurocentric, and essentialist Western feminist approaches to researching women in the Middle East sharpens my awareness of Western feminism’s problematic position in relation to majority world feminisms,93 which, as Chandra T. Mohanty argues, it “discursively colonizes.”94 I therefore attempt to keep Palestinian gendered subjects at the heart of the analysis. Taking a “critical border thinking”95 approach, I am mindful of my own subject position as an

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