Many Ways of Becoming a Woman: The Case of Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian "Girls"

Abstract

Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women are normatively expected to virgins and social juniors, yet in practice their handling of their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, produces a range of social personas. While some indeed submissive and suppressed, others undergo sexual maturation. Detailed ethnographic attention to their lifestyles, and particularly to their sexuality, disproves any stereotypic impressions held of this group of Arab women. As liminal persons, unmarried women serve not only as delineators of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Contextualizing the phenomenon historically, the analysis considers how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. (Sexuality, virginity, gender, liminality) Linguistically referred to as girls (banat), unmarried Palestinian women in Israel have a strong likelihood of being barred from adult femininity, as well as being generally marginalized. Local explanations of the use of girls as a form of reference to unmarried women emphasize their assumed virginal state. The term banat also means daughters, which highlights the second aspect of their classification. As those who remain daughters (byithallin banat), their primary role remains the one they have in their family of orientation, which has no adult position for them. They therefore allegedly fixed in an ongoing child-like status. The linguistic gesture of infantilizing and desexualizing unmarried women represents a normative expectation that the passage to womanhood should occur in a specific, institutionalized form. Against this narrow expectation, this ethnography of unmarried women (1) discloses a wide diversity of personal types, ranging from extremely submissive or girlish to outgoing and charismatic individuals who can hardly be described as girls. This essay focuses on the sexuality of these women, and uses their liminality as a prism to understand notions of womanhood in Israeli-Palestinian culture generally. Formal and practical forms of local knowledge are not consistent with the local conviction that unless females marry, they cannot mature in a socially accepted way. Despite the stigma associated with the term banat, many unmarried females overcome the pitfalls set by the norm of marriage and do attain womanhood. These persons successfully resist their restriction to become sexually mature, social adults. In so doing, many of them manage not to lose moral standing. Against heavy odds, some even manage to increase their respectability. At the same time, they liminal personas, habituating an interstitial space between normative age and gender categories. The ways in which unmarried females handle their sexuality, and by extension their femininity, range from extreme suppression to self-rejoicing sexual awakening. As liminal personas, unmarried women serve not only as delineations of normative female sexuality, but also as agents of change who expand the norm and make it more inclusive. Considering that structure-antistructure energies are historically informed, the analysis here looks at how this adjustment of gender responds to larger concerns with modernity and marginality. UNMARRIED WOMEN (2) Brief ethnographic descriptions of three unmarried women living in the same urban community exemplify the diversity of lifestyles, life opportunities, and personality types representative of unmarried Israeli-Palestinian women. They vary in their religious affiliations, social class, housing conditions, education, employment, and family relationships. Rose, a 32-year-old Christian woman, is the oldest of six siblings and a high-school graduate. She has worked eight years as the secretary of a local contractor, a job she likes and takes pride in, for a minimum-wage salary. For the past few years, her family has had hard economic times: This year has been the hardest in all my life. …