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Agency and Gender in Gaza: Masculinity, Femininity, and Family during the Second Intifada by Aitemad Muhanna (review)

As Nicola Pratt notes in the foreword to this book, “Paradoxically, the increased international attention to the impacts of conflict onwomenhas been accompaniedby an increased silencing of voices of ordinary women living in conflict zones, except where they conform with liberal notions of agency or are victims of violence and patriarchy” (vii). Aitemad Muhanna’s exploration of how Palestinian women in poor and vulnerable families in Gaza adapt to “the masculinizing of their enactment and the feminizing of their selfhood” (163) is a major contribution to making such voices heard and to challenging many of the liberal West’s assumptions about them. Muhanna’s study covering the period from the start of the Second Intifada in 2000 until 2009 is based on interviews, life stories, and focus groupmaterial collectedmainly in 2007 and 2008 in the neighborhood of El-Shujaeʾya and in Beach Refugee Camp. As she lays out, these years saw a huge shift in gender relations and roles inGaza caused primarily by the economic impacts of Israeli closures and a 75 percent drop in average family income. Majority unemployment among men is set against increasing roles for women as breadwinners for their families either through paid work or as aid recipients. This in turn has influenced the decisions and choices men and women and their families make around marriage, education, places of residence, and work. As Muhanna’s interlocutors make clear, however, the liberal assumptions of international donor agencies about women’s work andmobility constituting empowerment do not apply in this setting. Indeed, it seems that for many women the priorities imposed by such donors, by emphasizing female poverty and helplessness as criteria for receiving aid, create systems in which women are forced to humiliate themselves in return for aid, actually “create another layer of violence that operates in tandem with the violence of