Structures of Abandonment: Gender, Statuslessness and Bare Life

This paper asks the question: What is status with regard to women without legal status in Israel? Ostensibly, status represents a sovereign state’s formal classification system. In practice, however, according to the accounts of statusless women, civil society activists, and welfare and health officials, as analyzed in this paper—status, or its lack thereof, is not a one-off, absolute condition, but an ephemeral and vulnerable position. The paper examines two concurrent processes: the blurring of boundaries between status and statuslessness; and the process of differentiating groups of racialized, undesired and unwelcomed women foreigners: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories; asylum-seeking women from Africa; and women from the Former Soviet Union, who have either been trafficked by the sex industry, or separated from their Israeli-citizen spouse before completing their naturalization. Drawing on feminist and critical race renditions of bare life, we explore the ways in which statusless women are positioned in relation to violent power. Moving away from a polarized and emancipatory discussion of legality, we argue that in the absence of full access to legal status, the body may serve as a more fitting alternative in the analysis of abandonment and violence.