Arranging Marriages: American Palestinian Women Transforming Gender Boundaries

This study investigates changes in marriage patterns among Palestinian immigrants in the Milwaukee region of the United States during two historical periods: 1950s-1980s and 1990s-2000s. Certain particularities in the institution of marriage, such as cross-border marriages and intermarriages experienced alteration in this transnational Palestinian community. Though cross-border marriages and intermarriages are considered transnational and cross-cultural, they can reinforce cultural and national boundaries. I explore the criteria that constitute a potential spouse’s suitability and how suitability is identified in terms of nationality, ethnicity, religion, kinship, and class. These preferences simultaneously limit women’s freedom and enable their choices of marrying outside these canons. The emotional ties of Palestinians to their homeland and their sense of identity as a displaced group, promotes endogamous marriages that complicate women’s choices of potential spouses. Paradoxically, the limited number of suitable potential spouses, the changes in the size and diversity of Arab and Muslim communities, increasing education levels, and temporal and spatial contexts facilitate the destabilization of national and cultural boundaries and increase women’s negotiation of marriage outside their group. My research utilizes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to highlight the similarities and differences among Palestinian women’s behavior concerning marriage in different temporal and spatial contexts. Applying social theory and historical perspectives to more than 40 ethnographic narratives to examine marriage patterns among Palestinian immigrants and their offspring.