Suppression of the Female Name in Contemporary Palestine

Abstract

Palestinian female identity has been constructed and reconstructed as an amalgamation of patriarchal-oriented roles (daughter, wife, mother, sister, grandmother or even aunt), demonstrating women’s exclusion from the realm of men who have proper names to locate them within a family group. This article examines the suppression of the female name and the use of reference and terms of address as euphemisms for women in contemporary, non-urban Palestine. While the exclusion of the female name from the public sphere fuels feminists’ criticism of this patriarchal dehumanization, objectification and commodification of the female, we contend that the possibility of undermining Palestinian patronymic culture is shattered because women publicly advertise themselves as the sister, mother, daughter and wife of someone and, hence, their participation in the conventionally male-dominated sphere of politics upholds their subordination.

Key Words:

• Culture
• Identity
• Name
• Palestinian Women
• Patronymic Culture
• Terms of Address

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous peer reviewers who assisted us in nuancing the discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Simone De Beauvoir (1974) The Second Sex, p. xvi (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books).

2 Khalida Saʿid (1991) “Al-Marʾa al-ʿarabiyya: kaʾin bi-ghayrihi am bi-dhatihi [English translation]?” in idem, Al-Marʾa, al-taharrur, al-ibdaʿ [English trans.] p. 70 (Casablanca: Nashr al-fanak).

3 Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra (2020) The Misogynist Representation of Women in Palestinian Oral Tradition: A Socio-Political Study, Journal of Gender Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2019.1604328, pp. 1–13.

4 Erni  Gustafsson, Nabil Alawi and Per NormannAndersen (2019) Attitudes towards Women in Palestine: A Quantitative Survey, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20(2), pp. 208–224.

5 Robin Lakoff (1973) Language and Woman’s Place, Language in Society, 2(1), p. 45.

6 Authors’ Private Communication, female student, An-Najah National University, 23 September 2019.

7 Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place, p. 19.

8 Friederike Braun (1988) Terms of Address: Problems and Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures, p. 7 (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter).

9 Mohammad Hossein Keshavarz (2001) The Role of social contexts, intimacy, and distace in the choice of forms of address, International Journal Social Language, 148, p. 6.

10 Zouheir Maalej (2010) Addressing Non-Acquaintances in Tunisian Arabic: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Account, Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), p. 148.

11 Michal  Rom and Orly  Benjamin (2011) Feminism, Family and Identity in Israel: Women’s Marital Names, p. 1 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

12 Orit Kamir (2007) Human Dignity for Adam and Eve: Israeli legal and Welfare Oriented Feminism, p. 19 (Jerusalem: Carmel Publication).

13 Judith Butler (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, p. 2 (New York: Routledge).

14 Ibid., p. 2.

15 Ibid., p. 33.

16 Louis Althusser (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster (trans), p. 117 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

17 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 5.

18 Palestinian Ministry of Women’s Affairs (2011) National Strategy to Combat Violence against Women-2011–2019, GEWE, pp. 1–76.

19 Judith Butler (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p. 50 (New York: Routledge).

20 Ibid., p. 50.

21 Judith Butler (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, p. 153 (New York: Routledge).

22 Luce Irigaray (1985) This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, p. 177 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

23 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 5.

24 Ibid., p. 2.

25 See, for example, Saifur Rahman Al-Mubarakpuri (1979) Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum [The Sealed Nectar]. Biography of the Noble Prophet (S.A.W), pp. 267–269 (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Dar-as-Salam).

26 The system we used in transliterating Arabic to English is the system that was devised ca. 1968 by the Middle East Studies Association [MESA] in collaboration with Cambridge University Press and the Library of Congress.

27 Rom & Benjamin, Feminism, p. 5.

28 Ibid., p. 10.

29 Hassan R. S. Abd-el-Jawad (1989) Language and Women’s Place with Special Reference to Arabic, Language Sciences, 11(3), p. 318.

30 Mohammed Nahar Al-Ali (2006) Religious Affiliations and Masculine Power in Jordanian Wedding Invitation Genre, Discourse & Society, 17(6), p. 710.

31 Abd-el-Jawad, Language and Women’s Place, p. 318.

32 Ibid., p. 307.

33 Ibid., p. 318.

34 Sarah Graham-Brown (1988) Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of theMiddle East, 1860–1950, p. 71 (New York: Columbia University Press).

35 Abd-el-Jawad, Language and Women’s Place, p. 314.

36 Homa Hoodfar (1994) The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women, Resources for Feminist Research, 22(3), p. 8.

37 Hamamra, The misogynist representation of women, pp. 4–5.

38 Ibid., p. 6.

39 Friederike Braun (1988) Terms of Address: Problems and Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures , p. 9 (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter).

40 Zouheir Maalej (2010) Addressing Non-Acquaintances in Tunisian Arabic: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Account, Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), p. 148.

41 Abd-el-Jawad, Language and Women’s Place, p. 315.

42 Khalid Abu Toameh (2016) “The Invisible (Female) Palestinians,” Available online at: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8861/palestinian-women, accessed November 8, 2018.

43 Ibid.

44 Rom and Benjamin, Feminism, p. 13.

45 Hamamra, ‘The misogynist representation of women’, p. 9.