(Re-) Occupying Marginal Space: Contemporary Perceptions and Practices of ‘Citizenship’ among Palestinian Women Activists in Israel

The aim of this research is investigate the manner in which Palestinian women activists in Israel use their position at the margins and the latitude created by the openings between different layers of oppression and facilitation through a conscious occupation of ‘marginal space’ and thereby a radical practice of ‘citizenship’ that ultimately pushes the boundaries of both the ‘spaces’ they inhabit and their ‘citizenship’ in Israel. I thereby strive to build on existing calls for analytical notions of political participation to be broadened as to not only encompass a wider spectrum of citizenry but also to demonstrate that marginalised individuals and communities use effective strategies to accomplish their personal and political interests. It is here in this gap where an interdisciplinary and intersectional methodological approach comes into scientific value and, I believe, constitutes an imperative. This approach combines the analytical sharpness of critical and black feminist political theory with an ethnographic attempt to capture local individual and group experiences and practices. One objective is to highlight the struggles of Palestinian women citizens to claim, create, produce, and regulate space and to see what happens when they occupy ‘privileged’ spaces that have not been reserved for them thereby disrupting the ‘somatic norm’. In my exploration of Palestinian women’s ‘citizenship’ practices I consider ‘space’ as representing social relationships inherent to power asymmetries that include the forces of production and property in both metaphorical and material forms. In an attempt to move beyond modernist and postmodernist traditionally binary conceptualisations of space, this research resorts to a feminist notion of ‘space’ which abandons dichotomous thinking and draws upon a juxtaposition of critical feminist spatial approaches within postmodern geography and spatial scholarship within cultural politics of black feminism.