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, the author examines 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. 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.