ess 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-Kevorkian coins the term “voxicide” in considering the multiple regimes of silencing—colonial, sexist, national, and religious—which deprive the victim of consciousness and voice. This language must not be used by Western colonialists to condemn the totality of a cultural collective identity, but should rather inspire the enabling of cultural change and boundary crossings. Shalhoub-Kevorkian proposes to expand the definition of femicide in such a way as to criminalize the social collaboration with and legitimization of the process of intimidation, terrorization, and dehumanization leading up to the murder itself. She recommends a strategy defined as “dialoguing with the muted” and continuous discussion of femicide as part of a broader goal toward political and social liberation from tyranny, colonization, and national oppression.
Erella Shadmi’s “The Construction of Lesbianism as Nonissue in Israel” argues that the invisibility of lesbians in Israeli representations of women derives from the heterosexual definition of Zionism as a nexus between God, masculinity, family, and land. Within this national and religious context female sexuality is constructed as a depoliticized, auxiliary, and functional fact, while lesbianism is erased as a nonissue. This state of affairs drove lesbian feminists into silence and invisibility. In the early seventies, lesbians joined the feminist movement in the hope of finding a non-heterosexist space for political self-definition. While lesbian feminist activism was accepted, lesbian identity remained closeted until the 1990s. It was feared that the lesbian issue would detract from the feminist agenda through sensationalist misrepresentation. When the lesbian issue was articulated as a public issue, it was done within the discourse of civil and individual rights in the 1970s. Within this theoretically genderless yet still homocentric context of queer theory and praxis, the lesbian community had to forfeit its original feminist transformative and revolutionary vision. In the 1980s the femin