Webs of oppression: An intersectional analysis of inequalities facing women activists in Palestine

Abstract

How can we understand the multiple, intersecting webs of oppression that Palestinian women activists face in their everyday organizing? With a long tradition of counter-hegemonic organizing, the Palestinian context presents opportunities and challenges for women pursuing activist causes in the public domain. Adopting an intersectionality framework, we uncover how gender, class and settler-colonized domination interact, engendering dynamics of oppression differentiated by activists’ social positions. Activists’ stories captured at interview reveal they were not victims across all categories of difference, experiencing forms of relative privilege, characterized as safeguarded, secured and sheltered. We connect relative privilege to the patchwork nature of Palestinian institutions, whereby women’s agency intermingles with a patchwork of historically constituted structures and conditions. Our fine-grained study contributes to literature on feminist and activist organizing and to theorizations of intersectionality by identifying forms of relative oppression and privilege as women actively resist hegemonic gendered structures in Palestine.