When Feminism Redefines National Liberation: How Tal’at Movement brought Feminism to the Core of the Palestinian National Liberation Struggle

Abstract

On 8 August 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian living in Beit Sahour, was brutally beaten by members of her family. Since that moment, protests have erupted throughout historical Palestine and beyond, also reaching Palestinian women of the diaspora. Not only did this eventful protest mark the resurgence of a wave of women’s protests in Palestine, but it also brought about the start of a new feminist and anticolonial movement: Tal’at. Using frame analysis to examine the movement’s declarations, Facebook posts, and the archival material available at the Basso Foundation Archive, together with firsthand data collected through interviews conducted during my fieldwork in Historical Palestine, I will try to answer the following questions: How does this new feminist protest-movement differ from the previous ones? What are the elements of continuity with previous Palestinian women’s movements? How did this movement manage to frame an aggregating message in such a fragmented territory?

Intersectionality and feminist movements from a global perspective

“…Intersectionality has profoundly altered contemporary feminist movements, and this can be seen, for example, in the intertwining of gender and class and the role of indigenous peoples in mobilizations in Argentina (Cavallero & Gago, 2021; Gago, 2017, 2020); in the role of religion in Turkey (Mutluer, 2020), Iran (Asadi Zeidabadi, 2023), and Palestine (Stagni, 2023); and in the intersection of class, gender, and racialization in the critics posed by the feminist strike, which has been launched in many countries around the world on March 8 in recent years (Stanivukovic et al., 2023; Tormos‐Aponte et al., 2023).…”

Scrutinizing a Fieldwork Experience: Challenges in Doing Research With Social Movement Actors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

“…On the other hand, it is not up to researchers and White people to lead these feminist struggles. The Palestinian society is still highly gender-segregated, but there has been a Palestinian feminist movement that, starting from black feminist insights, is trying to fight sexism within their societies; we can follow their lead and express our solidarity (Stagni, 2023). Even though, as researchers, we might use Western feminist lenses to understand certain social phenomena, it is not our place to pass judgment.…”