Abstract
The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel’s convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork close to one of the largest checkpoint terminals in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the article develops knowledge about checkpoints in three important ways: i) as gendered spaces that regulate women’s mobility differently from that of men; ii) as spaces that produce particular embodied experiences for women; and iii) as security mechanisms that disrupt and regulate relations of care. This knowledge builds towards the main argument of the article: Palestinian women’s lives are profoundly affected by Israel’s imposition of permit systems and checkpoints in terms of highly gendered impositions of (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The research presented here thus makes two wider contributions to research on security to do with how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care under military occupation.
For more, see ‘Women and checkpoints in Palestine‘.