Suspended death: on freezing corpses and muting death of Palestinian women martyrs

Abstract

During the 2015 Palestinian ‘al-Quds’ uprising, more than 80 Palestinians were killed and their corpses were held by Israel in freezers. Fifteen of these corpses belonged to women and girls. This article draws on ethnographic data and traces the rites of passage of three Palestinian women’s corpses, examining the intersectionality between colonial, social-patriarchal, and resistance performances during their (in)secure life and death. Based on interviews with the women’s families, it examines the necropolitical and biopolitical powers inscribed over women’s frozen dead bodies. Necropolitics in this case is not only the decision about who deserves to live and who deserves death but also the decision about the structure of the dead body’s time-space, about its social-political and biological death. It is about allowing or disallowing burial, grief, and bereavement. Muting, erasing, and managing the death rites of the Palestinian women martyrs, calls for stepping beyond existing Western theory on the linearity, ‘liminality’, ‘anomaly’, and ‘abjection’ of death.