‘Both an Arab and a Woman’: Gendered, Racialized Experiences of Female Palestinian Citizens of Israel
Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper applies ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. Based on 108 in-depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the author claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures, which generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal ‘unhomely’ space, women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi-dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women’s experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorizing markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialized regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.