Secret Penetrabilities: Embodied Coloniality, Gendered Violence, and the Racialized Policing of Affects

Abstract

ABSTRACT Secrecy as a mode of governance offers a new site to analyze and understand the state’s violence against those living under settler colonial oppression. In this article, we investigate the Israeli state’s policies and use of “secret information” to violate, infiltrate, and penetrate Palestinian women’s lives, bodies, psyches, and minds in Occupied East Jerusalem. By sharing Palestinian women’s narratives, we offer a glimpse into the operation of colonial power via what we define as gendered securitized secrecy. The narratives expose the gendered aspects of the psychopolitical work of secrecy in penetrating, engineering, and/or destabilizing the constructions of national and social bonds, personhood, and sexuality among colonized women. We argue that secrecy, as state-militarized and psychologized gendered violence, increases social and private disciplining of bodies and affects. Secrecy is challenged by an embodied and affective counterpolitics that refuses and defies the power of secrecy.