2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

With the end goal of producing a revisionist history of the tenuous and complex place of Palestine in US intellectual thought and social justice movements, this roundtable brings together Palestinian women scholars and public intellectuals to analyze and discuss representations of Palestinian women in the US media and popular culture and critically read a slice of the history of the US women’s movement and women’s studies regarding Palestine and Palestinian women’s activism in North America and challenges to such hegemonic understandings of the scope and the mission of women’s studies and feminism.

This roundtable is part of Mapping Arab Diasporas, a larger and ongoing project of compiling, archiving and critically preserving the oral history of Arab and Muslim organizing in North America, at the center of which was the quest for justice in/for Palestine. Justice for/in Palestine has been an antidote to the inaccurate and misleading accounts that have recently surfaced in some academic quarters and that have misrepresented the lived experiences of Palestinian (and Arab and Muslim) women thus usurped how activist members of these communities understood their context and relationship with others in their communities (in the US and other Arab Diasporas and back home in Palestine); negotiated their multiple relationships and alliances; and created a vision for their liberation as women, as Palestinians and as part of the wretched of the earth.