Plenarveranstaltung III / Plenary session III: (Un)intended gender politics of humanitarianism
"Gender as a category of humanitarian analysis: lessons from the Palestinian experience"
Sprecherin / Speaker:
Ilana Feldman (George Washington University, USA)
Based on research on the long Palestinian refugee experience with humanitarian assistance, this talk explores gender as a category that both structures humanitarian decisions and distinctions and shapes how people live within and against this apparatus. That is, I explore both the gendered “politics of life” and the gendered “politic of living” in humanitarianism. In global discourses of humanitarian compassion, women are more easily legible as victims deserving succor. But in regulatory systems of humanitarian assistance, gender decisions produce multiple, sometimes contradictory effects. I explore these effects through consideration of the definition of an “eligible” Palestine refugee. Gender is also crucial to how refugees seek to both survive and thrive in humanitarian conditions—what I call the politics of living. I give particular attention to what a gendered analysis illuminates about contestations within Palestinian refugee communities about the “right” way to live as a refugee.
Datum: Montag, 30. September 2019