Women have regularly resorted to hunger strikes as tools of active resistance. Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension of prison resistance. It focuses on hunger striking as a means to address harsh conditions in Israeli prisons, drawing on several other cases from Ireland to the United Sates to explore the gendered nature of resistance to political imprisonment. I argue that women hunger strikers are, active participants who weaponize their lives to resist the Israeli matrix of power and the patriarchal societal norms. There have been less women in number when compared to male prisoners, but women have been more effective in collectively conducting/coordinating their pioneering action and in learning new means of resistance. Through necroresistance (transforming their body to a site of resistance) and the strategy of sumud (Arabic for 'steadfastness'), women prisoners practice a duel and dual resistance of the colonial authorities and the patriarchal society -simultaneously reclaiming ownership of their bodies and lives from both systems, even if this means their death or exclusion from their society. This does not entail constituting their bodies as masculine (or de-feminizing themselves) so they are protected from sexual abuse. Rather, they insist on feminizing their experience and challenging gendered stereotypes of women as 'victims' with 'fragile bodies'. For them, gender is not a barrier but a motivational factor in which self-sacrifice to protest injustice is far superior to enduring the wrongs of political imprisonment. By turning their bodies into sites of resistance, they resist the necropolitical matrix of power (the use of social and political power to determine how prisoners might live or die) and assert individual feminine power against colonial and patriarchal injustices.
Although we only later came to realize its significance in our lives, and for Palestine advocacy generally, February 2017 turned out to be a watershed month for those of us on the frontlines of the Palestine advocacy movement in the UK. That month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were attacked in the media, smeared as antisemitic, and simultaneously supported and censored by our universities. The following month was marked by unprecedented censorship of Israel-critical events across the UK. As we have since learned, these events were linked to the UK government's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. While many communities and activists were affected by the event cancellations and the many other forms of censorship linked to the IHRA adoption, to our knowledge, we are the first UK-based academics who were directly targeted as a result of written statements relating to Israel. Malaka Shwaikh was then based at the University of Exeter, and completing her PhD on Palestinian hunger strikers at the time of the attack. Rebecca Ruth Gould had recently moved to the University of Bristol, where she was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. Three years after these events, we are, for the first time, telling our stories together. Although we did not know each other at the time we were attacked, we have since become allies, co-authors, and academic partners with a shared interest in and commitment to Palestine. 1 The better we came to know each other, the more struck we were by the elements that brought our stories together. We were attacked by the same organization in the days leading up to Israel Apartheid Week, in both cases for statements we had made about Israeli politics several years earlier. In both cases, too, the media systematically distorted what we had said, and our universities failed spectacularly to support us while we were under attack. The attacks left us
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