Gender Sovereignty and Journalism: Survival, Witness and Narrative making amidst Gaza Genocide

This paper examines how women journalists in Gaza, during the genocide from 2023 to the present, produce narrative forms that function as practices of political and epistemic agency. While existing scholarship on war reporting has focused predominantly on institutional media and state narratives, less attention has been paid to how gendered subjects operating under conditions of extreme precarity construct and circulate situated accounts of violence. This study addresses that gap by asking: how do women journalists in Gaza mobilize narrative-making as a practice of witnessing, and in what ways does this practice articulate claims to gendered sovereignty? Gaza’s women journalists appeared, especially through digitized mediums, witnessing harrowing experiences, recounting violent bombardments, and forming consistent strategic narratives. At great personal risk and threat of extermination, they document and capture timestamped events that seem to fill the gaps in the global information vacuum, as well as defy regulatory frameworks of digital media platforms. Through curated short videos, engagement with international media, and recounting of live dangerous escalations through curated narratives, Gaza’s journalists centered the experiences of ordinary subjects. This narrative-making was rooted in ethics of duty, truth-telling, and witnessing that also form the bedrock of cultures of resistance. Using a qualitative methodology, grounded theory, and political theory, this paper will document and analyze Gaza’s women journalists’ narrative-making and its ethics that inform gendered claims to the sovereignty of land through ancestral spiritual networks. These methods allow for engagement with self-identity and the internal logics of narrative-making beyond ideology; simultaneously, the application of political theory enables interpretation of local contexts and the political and international impacts of such narrative-making. Using in-depth interviews with ten such journalists, this paper will explore the relationship between cohesive self-identity, narrative-making, and gendered sovereignty as part of the contest for political autonomy. The paper demonstrates how narrative-making and the reporting of truth itself become agency, which in turn enables the reclamation of sovereignty through the ability to resist, survive genocide, and recount socially and politically accessible truths and the crafting of public narratives. This reclaimed sovereignty, under violent genocidal conditions, sustains the internal logics of narrative-making and gendered agency.