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Featuring Lihi Ben-Shitirt, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Yale University
How do women activists in gender in-egalitarian religious movements, with strict notions about male and female private and public roles, manage to expand spaces for activism in ways that seem to transgress the movement's gender ideology? Using a case study of the Jewish West Bank settler movement, this paper suggests that religious movements with a nationalist or communalist agenda provide women activists with unique discursive tools. These help activists construct motivational and prognostic frames which act to suspend aspects of the movement's gender ideology. Ethnographic work conducted during 2008-2009 in West Bank settlements sheds light both on official, traditional women's roles in the movement as activists articulate them, and on new and more militant roles that women take up. The paper demonstrates how women activists employ the nationalist element of the movement's ideology in a framing process that makes the new and transgressive roles possible. In addition, the paper also offer some thoughts on the ethics of engagement with activists in movements whom many would term "fundamentalist."