Gendered and Embodied Geopolitics of Borders, Marginalization, and Contingent Solidarity

When pushed to the margins and borders of the nation and state, do women produce new forms of political engagement? How does embodied life trouble borders and margins? This issue brings together cogent analyses of embodied politics and religious practice and pushes forward our understandings of the intersectional, contingent, and sometimes transformative nature of life on the margins. Nadje Al-Ali and Latif Tas write, “War is like a blanket,” covering adjacent forms of gendered violence: state violence is patriarchal violence, regardless of the gender of those who enact it. In the four articles that open this issue, the paradoxical and fluid patriarchal practices of the state run through the embodied experiences of women, of Palestinians, of the poor, and of all manner of others. Their bodies not only are symbolically cast as the nation through the celebration of gendered norms and national ideals (Mayer 2000; Yuval-Davis 1997); they...