Existence as resistance: Children and politics of play in Palestine

Abstract

Normative representations of childhood shape the material spaces and embodied subjectivities of young people, who in turn reshape these subjectivities at the level of the body and everyday practice. Children may carry out these embodied resistant practices within an awareness of broader spatiotemporal contexts, geographic imaginaries, and ideals of social justice. In this way, embodied forms of resistance are inseparable from a politics of representation. Using the example of play, this chapter examines how Palestinian refugee children encounter and confront the Israeli occupation in everyday spaces of the camp. Through play, refugee children perform resistance to the circumstances of occupation and displacement and in so doing also challenge narrow representations of Palestinian children’s lives as characterized only by suffering and violence. However, though play may represent a form of resistance against occupation, it can also reproduce exclusionary gender and age hierarchies. Girls use a variety of embodied tactics, including play, work, and study, to resist this, and they do so within a wider critique of gender inequality and occupation, as well as hope for the future.