Missing Men: Unpacking Humanitarianism's Gendered Rhetorics on Gaza

This talk focuses on gender within the rhetorics of normative Humanitarianism’s advocacy on behalf of Gaza’s suffering population – tracing its continuities from the previous era of Israeli siege / sanctions and its permutations in the present unending genocidal war. 

Under 15 years of devastating siege and sanctions, Gaza women as a category became marked out as the particular moral object necessary for the operation of Humanitarian care: the “exemplary victims” of Gaza’s “Humanitarian Crisis”. In Israel’s current genocidal war, Gaza women have been conjoined into the well-known war category, womenchildren, granting them along with children the master status of “innocent civilian”.

Where previously, Gazan civilian men and masculinities appeared only as patriarchal obstacles to Gazan women’s liberal freedom or the source of harms against them, in Humanitarian representations of the current genocidal war, Gaza men are missing subjects altogether. Ultimately, through shifting our focus onto Gazan’s embodied experience of Israel’s genocidal violence can we move beyond these selective (sympathetic-complicit) humanitarian frames and begin to unravel how gender is both central in the dynamics of this war and in what ways it has been made irrelevant to it.

Dr Rema Hammami is an Associate Arofessor of anthropology at Birzeit University where she has been a faculty member in the Institute of Women's Studies since 1995. She received her BA in political science from the University of Cincinnati and her MA and PhD in cultural anthropology from Temple University.

Chaired by Dr Lotte Buch Segal, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.