Where is the Mizrahi-Palestinian Border Zone? Interrogating Feminist Transnationalism Through the Bounds of the Lived - A talk by Smadar Levie January 27, 2011

Gloria Anzaldua describes the border as an "open wound...where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture." She proposes that this "third country" is where South/South feminist coalitions are possible without the mediation of U.S.-European feminism. For Anzaldua, the border zone between transnational "hyphens" connotes fluidity and movement across boundaries. In the case of Euro-Israel, the volatile gender/race/nation South/South coalition among subaltern Arabs is forced upon both Mizrahi women and Palestinian women who have Israeli citizenship. These women do not want to be in this "third country," which emerges from the dispossession of their lands, languages, and cultures. But they are stuck.

Samadar Lavie was an associate professor of Studies in Women and Gender visiting the University of Virginia during the academic year 2009/10 and between 2007 and 2009, she had been the Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Professor for Islam and the Arab World at Macalester College. Her current book project, Crossing Borders, Staying Put: Mizrahim, Palestine, and the Racial Formations of Israeli Zionism, is located at the intersection between localized, radically empirical ethnographic inquiry and the following fields: public anthropology, ethnic studies, transnational feminism, oral and archival histories, the problematics of interfaith relations between Jews and Muslims, and issues of diaspora and border crossings.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscals11.php