Postgraduate Module Descriptor

ARAM230: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Palestine/Israel

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

This module aims to provide you with the skills of critical gender analysis, which will allow you to explore how settler colonialism and political violence are sustained and subverted in Palestine/Israel. You will learn to analyse how gender roles, relations, codes and norms become central to the production of violence, as well as how women and men experience, understand and resist this violence on individual and collective levels. You are expected to take an active role in creating and leading our learning community. The module encourages politically active learning through discussion of topical events and project-based assessment.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here - you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills1. Discern the various ways in which gender roles, codes, norms and relations shape – and are shaped by – political violence in Palestine/Israel.
2. Develop an in-depth understanding of the relationship between gender, sexuality and settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel.
3. Evaluate how gender and sexuality intersect with diverse modes of resistance in Palestine/Israel.
Discipline-Specific Skills4. Analyse and assess academic texts and prevailing discursive frames (i.e., ‘conflict’ or ‘occupation’) critically.
5. Distinguish between a range of methodological approaches as well as variety of genres, i.e. anthropological and sociological texts, (auto)biographical writings and fiction.
6. Demonstrate awareness of, and be sensitised to, the various processes by which gender (i.e., femaleness and maleness) is socially constructed and impacts politics.
Personal and Key Skills7. Engage in independent study and group work, including the presentation of material for group discussion
8. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment.
9. Critically examine and review existing literature.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Abdo, N., Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System, 2014.

Abdo, N. and Yuval-Davis, N., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, 1995.

Abdo, N. and Masalha, N. (eds.), An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, 2018.

Arvin, M., Tuck, E. and Morrill, A., ‘Decolonising Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy’, Feminist Formations, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 8-34, 2013.

Fanon, F., ‘Concerning Violence’ in The Wretched of the Earth, 1968.

Icaza, R. and de Jong, S. (eds.) Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, 2019.

Lentin, R., Thinking Palestine, 2008.

Morgensen, S., ‘Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 2-22, 2012.

Natanel, K., Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel/Palestine, 2016.

Puar, J., Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, 2007.

Said, E., ‘Permission to Narrate’, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 27-48, 1984.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N., Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case Study, 2009.

Sharoni, S., Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance, 1995.

Wolfe, P., ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 387-409, 2006.