The subjected non-subject: security, subjectification and resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine how Palestinian women living under Israeli occupation experience and resist subjectification through security practices. Such an examination is inspired by Foucault, who claims that power functions upon corporeal bodies to create subjects. Interesting to the case of Palestinian women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is the way in which they are de facto subjects in that their bodies are subject to Israeli power, without being subjects of Israel. This article is based on recent field research in the West Bank. It thus relies upon narratives from individual Palestinian women of how they experience being subject to Israeli power and how, in turn, they enact resistance to that power.