Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements

Abstract

The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement (Women in Black) and a mixed-gender one (The 21st Year), which protested against the Israeli Occupation in the early 1990s. The comparison reveals reversed patterns of body/knowledge relations, each connoting a different meaning and outcome of the social protest. In the mixed movement, the body served as an instrument in carrying out the political knowledge and thus was left unmarked. In Women in Black, on the other hand, the body was the message, as it produced and articulated political ideology, simultaneously challenging the national security legacy and the gender order in Israel.

The Bounded Female Voice in Memorial Ceremonies

“…By the term "female voice" I refer to three distinct "feminine" modes of expressivity: voicing the personal, painful and emotional side of the war experience, a task which is culturally ascribed to women (Enloe 1988); performing symbolic practices culturally linked to femininity, such as dance (Csikszentmihalyi 2001;Hanna 1988); and conveying a critical voice and carrying out symbolic practices that subvert the basic assumption of the male order and the militaristic regime (Hever 1999;Nave 2001;Sasson-Levy and Rapoport 2003;Yuval-Davis 1997).…”

National and gender identity perceptions among female football players in Israel

“…Just as the accepted social perception of the female soldier is of being 'less worthy' in the military system, even if she serves in combat positions, she is similarly undervalued as a female football player in comparison with the male football player. 46 Public discourse is directed by the perception that football is not the 'natural' or 'normal' place of a woman, resulting in disdain for female football league in Israel. That is, a woman's status in Israel hinders her legitimate acceptance in fields rooted perceptively in military contexts.…”

Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina

“…In the context of sexist political cultures, women's activist practices may foster different perceptions of what constitutes an activist body and a member of the body politic. Such actions can also help create alternative notions of embodied womanhood (Laware 2004;Parkins 2000;Sasson-Levy and Rapoport 2003).…”

“…It is interesting that many women's struggles centered on bodily issues: the bodies tortured and "disappeared" by the dictatorship, food security and adequate health care, reproductive and sexual freedom, and the right to lead lives without physical violence, to name a few examples. Yet it is not only the substance of women's demands (e.g., access to abortion and contraception) but also activist practices themselves that can disrupt normative notions of feminine embodiment (Sasson-Levy and Rapoport 2003).…”