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Marriage talk

Palestinian women, intimacy, and the liberal nation-state

The Hebrew University, Israel

In feminist anthropological studies of Palestinian women gender change is often interpreted as contributing to the national struggle. Based on research of Palestinian Israeli university women’s marriage talk, I look at how gender change articulated through liberal discourses can reproduce state national hegemony. Palestinian educated women are forbearers of gender change in that they re-create women’s role in courtship and marriage from one of object to subject. Yet the subject position they take up is of the modern bourgeois individual-the required subject of the nation-state. Their marriage talk reproduces the hegemony of the nation-state by advocating and attaching the women to one of its central mechanisms of sovereignty-intimacy. Further, they espouse this intimacy within the genealogical limits that serve as the basis for definitions of the state’s national character. Thus, even while calling for gender change, they ‘talk’ themselves into oppressive nationally defined power relations of the liberal state.

Key Words: Palestinians • Israel • marriage • liberalism • intimacy • postcolonialism • genealogy • nation-state • university

Ethnography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 493-523 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138106073143


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