Bodies That Walk, Bodies That Talk, Bodies That Love

Palestinian Women Refugees, Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary

Bibliographic Data

ID5807828
AuthorsR Salih (0000-0001-8934-9580, SOAS University of London, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume49
Issue3
Pages742-760
Publication date2016-11-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntipode (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anti.12299
OpenAlexW2527251032
LanguageEN
Citations received36
References cited33

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place-making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity-place-nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of "social muscles", as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world

Aesthetics · Art · Displacement (psychology) · Identity (music) · Metaphor · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Refugee · Sociology · Vulnerability · Vulnerability (computing) · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology