 coming to voice of Mizrahi feminist intellectuals is a process threatened by the negation of their difference, the denial of this collective identity and its distinctive material and symbolic claims. The double exclusion of the Mizrahi woman’s voice from cultural representation denies her the privileged identity of an “Israeli” subject position, though theoretically she is part of the national collective. This state of affairs was altered only in the late 1990s. Thus hegemonic academic representations reproduced the essentialist, predetermined definitions of Mizrahi women, rather than challenging them. Hegemonic “scientific” statistical data on the ethnic gap do not provide a theoretical or analytic explanation, as they fail to attend to the politics of knowledge, the ideological bias of scholarly construction. Feminist data fail to intersect gender with ethnic and class differences. Motzafi-Haller suggests that hegemonic feminism posited the privileged Ashkenazi male as the norm, while distancing itself from the allegedly uneducated and less-deserving women whose existence they erased on their path to equality with the norm. A future research agenda must posit the Mizrahi woman as the starting point of research. The research must follow a trajectory of identification from a minority perspective that is relational, considers other collective identities, and is always aware of the context of power. The goal is not to create more knowledge about Mizrahi women, but to displace current scholarly practices by focusing on the daily experiences of Mizrahi women so as to subvert the transparency of the male Ashkenazi subject.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s “Reexamining Femicide: Breaking the Silence and Crossing ‘Scientific’ Borders” focuses on a major concern for Palestinian feminism: honor killing. The essay redefines this cultural tradition as femicide, and demands that it be treated as both a crime and a human rights violation. The broadening of the concept allows border crossings between disciplines whose distinctiveness forestalls a full appreciation of the socioeconomic, political, and cultural interlocking systems of oppression that simultaneously threaten the victims’ lives. The essay contextualizes this particular form of femicide within a global context of legitimized male violence against women. Shalhoub-Kevorkian links the growing pervasiveness of femicide to the rise of nationalism in the Middle East, on the one hand, and to the gendered embrace of equality, subject to traditional propriety, on the other. On the one hand, Palestinian nationalism promotes women’s public resistance against political oppression, on the other hand it insists on adherence to Islamic definitions of female sexuality, which often enhance women’s subordination to patriarchal authority within the extended family and clan community. The essay argues that Palestinian women in the West Bank during the occupation were subject to both Israeli and Palestinian violence, and that gender and nation are interlinked differently within this particular local context. The linkage of femicide to codes of masculine honor locally and globally often leads to the exoneration of the male perpetrators of this hate crime. This exoneration is made possible by constructing knowledge regimes that legitimize male control of female sexuality. This control is rationalized as a form of male power because the very definition of one’s honor depends on the behavior of another. This behavior includes a long list of daily practices and may implicate women in a web of unwarranted accusations even when asserting their will in matters of marriage or betrothal. In an attempt to overturn the language of domination and control, the essay crosses “scientific” boundaries by focusing on firsthand reports of victims of the threat of femicide. Victims of rape and incest usually opt for silence, and when they reveal their traumatizing experiences they tend to use cultural metaphors that objectify them and prevent them from articulating their point of view and personal pain. Shalhoub-Kevor