Erasing Gaza's Foodways: Colonial Modern Genocide and Women's Refusal

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the historical ruptures transforming Gaza's relationship with its foodways, to investigate how the entangled forces of colonial modernity, within which are nested the socio‐technocratic regimes of developmentalism, have manufactured precarity. Uniquely centring the experiences of women producers, we draw on interviews and discussions between 2022 and 2023 to explore memories of disappearing foodways and provisioning traditions, to reveal dynamic practices to maintain their means of social reproduction and connection to land. In applying a gender lens to the concept of refusal and women's stories of foodways—strawberries, livestock and seed—we find five generative acts of refusal: (1) to settler colonial logics of elimination, (2) to cultural erasure, (3) to developmentalist assumptions of superiority, (4) to patriarchal orders and (5) to legibility. These practices reveal women's experiences under coercive conditions that reinforce spatial, political and national dismemberment while furnishing us with a greater understanding of the tensions faced by women within popular struggles against dispossession and the erasure of foodways.