As a population of exile – transnational, stateless refugees struggling to return to their lands and rebuild their communities lost since 1948 – the Palestinian people built a grassroots trajectory of decolonization that peaked in the 1970s. Through oral histories and cultural text, this presentation analyzes gendered labor, value, and the intersections of national and popular struggles in the Palestinian liberation movement at the time. It juxtaposes the use of iconography with women’s narratives of participatory quotidian resistance to illuminate what is absent from masculinist histories and to interrogate the significance of pride for women and gendered labor in revolution. Lastly, this talk offers possibilities for alternative views of gendered labor, the consumption of femininity in revolution, and prospects for more sustainable and equitable revolutionary praxis.

Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East & North Africa at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to UC Santa Cruz, she was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis and, through the program, was selected as a 2023-24 Mellon Foundation/UC-HSI Humanities Initiative Faculty Fellow. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and her MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut. Her scholarship is cross-disciplinary – centering oral history, ethnography, archives, and cultural criticism – and broadly examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance. Her current book project frames and analyzes the coalitional relationship forged between Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary fronts during Civil War Lebanon.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.