{"id":2933,"date":"2024-12-13T19:44:19","date_gmt":"2024-12-13T18:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/?p=2933"},"modified":"2024-12-13T19:44:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T18:44:19","slug":"women-in-the-field-of-struggle-which-women-in-which-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/?p=2933","title":{"rendered":"Women in the Field of Struggle”: Which Women in Which Field?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Pegah Pezeshki<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The following text is based on nine films by Arab women filmmakers under the title <\/span>“The Place of the Arab Woman in Struggle,”<\/span><\/i> written by Pegah Pezeshki. This collection, curated by Giovanni Vimercati, was presented at Cryptofiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we think of struggle and resistance, who comes to mind as the fighter? Especially when this struggle is tied to the Middle East\u2014a region often depicted, under relentless media pressure, through a masculinized lens of combat. When someone fights or resists in the Middle East, who are they? Even a simple Google image search on such keywords reveals how long it takes to find an image of a woman depicted as an active participant in the fight\u2014not as a supporter, a background figure, or a bystander. And when we finally reach such an image, another question emerges: when a woman fights, <\/span>who<\/span><\/i> is she? What does this image of the militant woman leave out\u2014what women, what forms of feminine action does it exclude?<\/span><\/p>\n

Jocelyne Saab\u2019s <\/span>Palestinian Women<\/span><\/i> begins with the face of a child, accompanied by the sounds of children playing in the background, before the frame pulls back to reveal a scene resembling an ordinary daycare center. Children are playing, and women are taking care of them. But the narration quickly sets the record straight: \u201cNo, this is not an ordinary daycare center.\u201d The children in this image are Palestinian refugee children, and the women taking care of them are described as \u201cmilitants.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The image of a woman caring for a child, feeding them, or playing with them is one of the most invisible in our surroundings. On the one hand, its presence\u2014whether in reality or representation\u2014is so normalized that it rarely draws attention or prompts reflection. Contrast this with our reaction to an image of a man caring for a child: the mental shift reveals the extent of this invisibility. Even for those who reject traditional gender roles, such a sight often elicits more attention, even praise, as something extraordinary. But a woman caring for a child? Unless the woman or the narrative insists, demanding, \u201cLook!\u201d the image remains unseen.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Pegah Pezeshki<\/p><\/div>\n

This invisibility depoliticizes the act. The image of women caring for children\u2014whether in a daycare or at home\u2014draws so little attention that it conceals all the mechanisms behind it. It appears as though this \u201cnatural\u201d act has never been political and never could be. In defiance of this indifferent gaze, Saab\u2019s film opens with a resounding \u201cNo!\u201d and quickly brings the political dimension of this specific image to the forefront: militant women caring for Palestinian refugee children. The film swiftly transitions from this scene to one of women engaged in military drills, continuing the tension established at the start by disrupting the binary of \u201cordinary woman\u201d versus \u201cpolitical woman.\u201d It\u2019s not just these particular women whose childcare is political; this tension permeates the entire narrative, reclaiming the political dimension of the \u201cordinary woman\u201d image. By highlighting how even caregiving\u2014a role often devalued and dismissed by patriarchal systems\u2014is inherently political, the film compels us to pause and recognize this politicization. Which women care for which children, and why and how?<\/span><\/p>\n

Nicola Pratt, in her book <\/span>Embodied Geopolitics,<\/span><\/i> explores how women\u2019s activism fundamentally disrupts the binary of \u201cresistance\u201d versus \u201ccompliance\u201d with systems. Unlike this externally imposed binary, women\u2019s experiences often challenge such dichotomies by exposing the ever-present political nature of what is deemed invisible or natural. Pratt writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>For example, women\u2019s use of motherhood and maternal politics to protest human rights abuses (among others, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) and militarism (among others, the Greenham Common base women) constitute the performance of their gender identity in accord with dominant notions of femininity. Yet, simultaneously, these women subvert this gender identity by transposing it from the private sphere to an overtly political space that challenges the legitimacy of the state\u2019s monopoly on violence<\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, in politicizing the image of women caring for children and juxtaposing it with women holding guns in military drills, the imposed binary collapses. In this sense, the two initial questions\u2014\u201cWho fights?\u201d and \u201cWhat kind of woman do we imagine as a fighter?\u201d\u2014are deeply intertwined.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Tell Your Story, Little Bird<\/span><\/i> by Arab Lotfi, a documentary based on interviews with seven Arab militant women, this binary is once again challenged. The women sit on sofas and chairs in a \u201chome\u201d setting. Their clothes, appearances, speech, and surroundings align with the image of an \u201cordinary woman.\u201d Yet, in this same home, they recount stories of activism, armed resistance, escape, torture, and more. Watching them \u201ctell their stories\u201d mirrors the same \u201cNo!\u201d that opens <\/span>Palestinian Women,<\/span><\/i> inviting viewers to pause and scrutinize an image too ordinary to seem political.<\/span><\/p>\n

This disruption reaches its peak in a specific narrative: Leila Khaled recounts how her four-year-old child returned from school saying, \u201cThe teacher said today, \u2018Your mother hijacked a plane!\u2019\u201d Now, as a mother greeting her child after school, she must explain this statement and even answer the child\u2019s follow-up question: \u201cWhere\u2019s the plane now? I want to play with it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What collapses here is not just the image of \u201cmotherhood\u201d as repetitive, ordinary, and system-aligned. It\u2019s also the image of \u201cmilitant femininity\u201d as something extraordinary, un-womanly, and disconnected from the everyday. If we leave the question \u201cWhen a woman fights, who is she?\u201d to Google\u2019s images or the perpetuated narratives of \u201cfighting women,\u201d we end up with distant, unrelatable, and unattainable heroines. Yet the figure of the \u201chero\u201d is the least feminine construct, emerging from the denial of resistance in the lives of those who are not called heroes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Films that allow women to narrate their struggles dismantle this isolation. Now, a mother takes her child\u2019s hand and tells them where \u201cthat plane\u201d is.<\/span><\/p>\n

But can this challenge to the binary image of women also address the first question: <\/span>Who fights?<\/span><\/i> The exclusion of women\u2019s struggles from the broader narrative of social resistance is neither new nor unfamiliar. This exclusion reproduces itself across multiple layers. The battlefield for women becomes unsafe, entangled with domination and suppression. The memory of their tenacious presence in these same spaces is often left out of the broader narrative of \u201ccollective\/national\/regional resistance.\u201d And where neither of these layers erases them\u2014where women remain in the field and preserve the memory of their struggle\u2014this presence is often relegated to a narrowly defined, gendered space: a fight for \u201cwomen\u2019s issues,\u201d running parallel to or, at best, as a subset of the \u201cmain struggl e.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Fatma, a film about years of women\u2019s struggle in Tunisia, grapples with this very question: does this line of separation truly exist in the memory and experience of collective resistance? The film explores how women who were left out of the constructed image of the fighter\u2014militant, activist\u2014have always been a vital part of that very picture. This inflated gender binary becomes even more pronounced when it comes to the Middle East. It\u2019s as if, in the Middle East of blood and fire, it\u2019s still \u201cnot the time\u201d to challenge and redefine our image of the fighter, to liberate it from entrenched gender stereotypes. The image of the \u201chero\u201d still stands center stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Pegah Pezeshki The following text is based on nine films by Arab women filmmakers under the title “The Place of the Arab Woman in Struggle,” written by Pegah Pezeshki. This collection, curated by Giovanni Vimercati, was presented at Cryptofiction. When we think of struggle and resistance, who comes to mind as the fighter? Especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2934,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2933\/revisions\/2934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redcutcollective.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}