Webs of oppression’ in everyday organizing in Palestine: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis Middle East Centre

This talk delves into the multifaceted challenges Palestinian women activists face, revealing how intersecting oppressions within a settler-colonized society shape their organizing efforts and experiences, challenging singular analyses of patriarchy. How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? The talk is going to illuminates the context and complexity of the lived experiences of women activists in Palestine, aiming to contribute to feminist perspectives on organizing and how activists’ daily practices and interactions ‘inhabit’ institutions, creating, maintaining and transforming them. The analysis exposes a ‘simultaneity of oppressions’ which highlights the challenges faced by Palestinian women attempting to organize to challenge the social structure, within their quasi-state, settler-colonized context. The talk aims to uncover multiple intersecting inequalities produced by dominant institutional and societal structures, yet experienced differently by women activists, in an oppressed, colonized setting. This distinctive political context, aligned with the collaborative security setting with the occupier, elucidates how violations of the quasi-state, colonizer and other social structures like patriarchy and family manifest and intersect institutionally to violate and undermine women. Dr. Nazzal challenges the singular monolithic analysis of patriarchy, revealing how different patriarchal positions towards women expose different modes of oppression, while serving at times as a protective, supportive system.