postcolonial Racialisation of Gender and Religious Experience within the Settler Colonial Context: Ahed Tamimi’s Experience of a Racialised Practice

Abstract

Abstract Processes of racialisation and gendering take place within social relations and hierarchies that have an impact on bodies and inform people’s actions. ‘Material religion’ describes the exploration of how religion happens in material culture, that is, in different practices that draw on the category of religion or put it to work. In this article, I explore how the meaning of acting as a Muslim differs depending on interrelations with social categories such as race and gender within the Israeli settler colonial project in Palestine. I focus my case study on a young activist, Ahed Tamimi, whose everyday resistance to the Israeli occupation, both in terms of categories of religion and gender, has been racialised as Palestinian. Her experiences add to the discussion of how postcolonial women challenge various forms of hegemony in their everyday lives and how others interpret their actions. I also challenge the limitations of the category ‘postcolonial’, especially in this context.