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Countering Reproductive Genocide in Gaza: Palestinian Women's Testimonies

Speaker
Sarah Ihmoud
Date
Mon March 10th 2025, 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location
Building 50, 51A
headshot of colloquium speaker, Sarah Ihmoud

This talk explores Palestinian women’s ways of experiencing and narrating the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Drawing on women’s testimonies, I theorize this matrix of gendered colonial violence as Ibaada—Arabic for annihilation, which refers to the annihilation of the Palestinian collective. Palestinian women’s stories highlight the calculated infliction of multiple and intersecting forms of physical and psychological terror, pain, suffering, and complex forms of loss onto the gendered Palestinian body and collective as intertwined with dehumanization, territorial dispossession, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of being in the world. I argue that Israel’s genocidal project, hypervisible now in the intensification of warfare against the occupied and besieged Gaza strip, but also unfolding across occupied Palestinian territory for the last 76 years, should be understood centrally as reproductive genocide, an attempt to prevent the reproduction of present and future generations of Palestinian lives. Amidst this tapestry of grief and loss, Palestinian women’s stories narrate a collectively forged vocabulary of survival that contests reproductive genocide and challenges colonial structures and discourses, including those of hegemonic Western feminisms, that render the collective experiences of Palestinian women invisible.