The sexual politics of palestinian women in Israel

Over the last three decades, Palestinian society in Israel has undergone intense changes on a number of fronts, including attitudes to sexuality. These changes are welcomed by many members of society, and are critiqued and rejected by others. The subject of sexuality is considered sensitive and threatening and is thus frequently silenced. It is also muted in academia where it is a highly neglected area of research. This study is one of the first to attempt to examine the processes by which Palestinian women in Israel formulate their sexual outlooks, including the personal and sociopolitical components of those processes. My research is grounded in the meaning that the women participants in this study give to sexuality, oppression, and liberation, and how they define and experience them. Palestinian women in Israel give the word "sexuality" a wide array of significance, including genitalia, gender, a woman's body, the sex act, one's relationship to sex, "the oppression I suffer as a woman," love, romance, sexual orientation, femininity, fear, embarrassment, and taboo. Utilizing in-depth interviews and focus groups with Palestinian women, I present some of the participants' outlooks on sexuality, and the meanings and life experiences they ascribe to it. In particular, I analyze the power dynamics of silencing and the ways in which women cope and resist. While Palestinian society can certainly be characterized as patriarchal, it is not a homogeneous, closed, or absolute social order. Hisham Sharabi's concept of neopatriarchy (1988) conveys some of the heterogeneity and changing structures of Palestinian society in Israel, yet attention must be given to the power of individuals in strategizing to gain power and autonomy. My analysis takes into account traditions and norms as well as constant change, social structure and agency, and overarching conditions together with disparity and complexity. Thus, this study shows that the binary division of sexual freedom versus suppression is too simplistic and one-dimensional. It looks at a number of levels in which social power operates, including Palestinian women's relation to each other, to Palestinian men, and to Jews in the Israeli state. The experiences and practices of the women in the study were highly varied. Some led independent lives, lived alone, were educated, and yet did not dare speak about the subject of sexuality or their own sexual experiences. Other women found a way to cope with the rules of society through stretching the limits and maneuvering through them. Rather than focus on sexual intercourse exclusively, the women refer to a range of other behaviors that sexually satisfy them and enable them to connect to their intimate selves. At the same time, the majority of the interviewees spoke about a "red line" that cannot be ignored. This limit, though varied from one family to the next, can still be considered uniform in that it links conformity to sexual norms with social value. Although some of the interviewees spoke about crossing this boundary, most of them maintained the clear norms concerning these "red lines."