W hile feminists in the West have identified in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cause for serious attention, this has not been the case among Arab feminists. This may be due to a lack of familiarity with their work or a lack of access to their works in translation, but I believe it has more to do with a perceived lack of resonance between Deleuze's thought and Arab feminist concerns. 1 The first part of this essay examines the state of Arab feminisms today, while the second explores just how viable and productive a "disjunctive synthesis" of Deleuze and Arab feminism might be at this juncture. 2 In the third and final section, I briefly outline what effects such a project can have, by analyzing the particular situation of women in the Gulf state of Kuwait. Arab feminisms today A conference held in October 2009 organized by the scholars of the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers (Bahithat) at the American University of Beirut marked the plurality of Arab feminism in its title: "Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective." The proposed goals of this conference, as described in a letter sent to invited participants, were manifold, but one key aim was to gauge "the place and role of feminism in the many and often contradictory realities of Arab societies and their interactions with other forms of feminism both within and outside the dominant Eurocentric model, as well as the strategies they have developed for change in the intellectual, social and cultural structures." 3 This objective was achieved by including participants from all over the Arab world, other parts of the global South, and both 1 A rather elusive concept in Deleuze's philosophy, resonance can be understood as a force between series that can trigger a transformation of or movement beyond the series involved (Deleuze 1990b, 226-29, 239). As will become evident, my argument is that the resonance between Deleuze and Arab feminism can initiate a movement beyond some of the limits currently structuring the latter. 2 The Deleuzian notion of the "disjunctive synthesis" will be discussed in detail in the second section of this essay. For now, it is sufficient to think of it as a relationship between series through which additional series of differences resonate or are produced (Deleuze 1990b, 229).
This paper explores the effects of the Iraqi invasion on the Palestinian community in Kuwait. Specifically, it considers Gilles Deleuze's notion of the ‘missing people’ in relation both to the Palestinians deported after the 1991 Gulf War and to the majority of Kuwaitis who have not acknowledged the effects of this disappearance on either the Palestinians or themselves. The first section revisits the circumstances surrounding the deportation of approximately 380,000 Palestinians from Kuwait, while the second considers what was lost as a result. The final section proposes an ‘ethics of the missing’ as a possible means to engage and transform some of the ensuing problems.
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