Equality with a Difference: Gender and Citizenship in Transitional Palestine

Citation:

Hammami, Rema, and Penny Johnson. 1999. “Equality with a Difference: Gender and Citizenship in Transitional Palestine.” Social Politics 6 (3): 314-43.

Authors: Rema Hammami, Penny Johnson

Abstract:

This investigation of gender and citizenship in the Palestinian territories comes at the closing of the five-year transitional period ushered in by the Oslo agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. This article views the "interim self government arrangements" of this period as possibly indicative of global and local constraints on national communities seeking sovereignty, rather than as an exception to normative states and state building, and considers the effect of these constraints on the structure of rule, the conceptualization and practice of citizenship and the engendering of citizenship. The equality strategy of the Palestinian women's movement is considered in this complex context of exclusions and difference, as the movement's "active citizenship" opened up a space for public debate and propelled the movement into direct conflict with the Islamist movement, bringing into sharp relief both competing paradigms of women's citizenship and rights and political and social fault lines in Palestinian society.

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Citizenship, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Political Participation Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories

Year: 1999