Sociology

Gender violence in India, particularly in Gujarat, has been a major issue that has been rooted from the religious clash between the Hindus and Muslims.

It begins, she says, in the divisive caste system that has allowed the principle of inequality to become embedded in the Hindu culture. It continues in the belief that women are not only inferior, but also womens sexuality has to be patrolled so that it is legitimately accessible to some men and inaccessible to other. (Baldwin, p.186)

The extreme brutality in the violent acts such as rape, torture and murder toward Muslim women is a result of how the concept of the inferior Other is being defined.

If a womans body belongs not to herself, but to her community, then the violation of that body signifies an attack upon the honor (izzat) of the whole community.

Whose 1960s Gender, Resistance and Liberation in Palestine by Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi
Womens active participation in anti-colonial movements may be interpreted most importantly from the best vantage point, and in the case of Palestinian Occupation, from the Palestinians who experienced the Israeli colonization vis--vis the narratives of the Westerners who try to authorize the stories of activist women.

Politics of location and situated knowledge are essential to understanding womens (and mens) activism and the diversity in experiences and lives.  p. 22

Women who participate in ant colonial movements are not duped, as colonial feminists claim. For women, the decision to participate in resisting colonialism is rational, conscious and pro-active.  p.23
Conceiving the Masculine Gender and Palestinian Nationalism by Joseph Massad

The masculinity perspective of Palestinian nationalist thought was based on the imagery that invasion of Palestine also meant the intrusion of a virgin land, which is automatically being associated with a womans reproductive capabilities.

Zionisms gendered discourse echoes Orientalist discourse  Orientalists described the Orient as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem and the despotic  but curiously attractive  ruler. p. 471

Metaphorically speaking, Palestinian identity is being restricted to the traits of men and that women only play a secondary role in the society as it only serves to preserve its survival.

While men actively create glory, respect, and dignity, women are merely soil on which these attributes, along with manhood, grow, p.474

Although initiatives are being forwarded in changing this perspective of the Palestinian nationalist thought, the superiority of men over women will continuously remain to be fact.

Palestinian women may have more say in Palestinian politics in the near future, but given their discursive construction in nationalist thought, they will be able to do so not as Palestinian women struggling for Palestinian womens rights, but as Palestinian women struggling for discursively constituted. p.483

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe
Mbembe describes the relationship of sovereignty and war to the power of life and death, which he termed as necropower, as an absolute power that legitimizes violence by maximum destruction of people.

The combination of biopower (as formulated by Foucault) which is the power aiming for the generation and regeneration of life itself, necropower and colonial occupation explains why the Palestinian conflict is a never-ending loop.

As the Palestinian case illustrates, late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. The combination of the three allocates to the colonial power an absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. p.29-30