This thesis focuses on the role and impacts on women of the system of wilaya (guardianship) - enshrined in Muslim family laws and, more specifically, in the Jordanian Personal Status Law. In this thesis, wilaya over women is treated as crucial to maintaining a system of domination over women, as such designates women as legal minors and forms the basis of women's legal and social subordination. Therefore, I argue that wilaya plays a key role in the reproduction of the gender hierarchy system. The thesis makes three central points with regards to wilaya. First, the systematic inclusion of provisions of wilaya over women serves as a construct of normative femininity. In this light, I address the relevance of the state as a gender regime in analysing how the masculine and feminine selves are constructed and reproduced in the context of Jordan. I also probe how a masculine state works in collaboration with other institutions to give power, founding legitimate operations and procedural methods for institutions such as family and tribe to manage, produce, and construct normative femininity and masculinity. Second, a relationship exists between the extent/degree of wilaya over women and the view of the Self from within, through, or outside the normative construction of femininity. I argue that women's experiences of male authority that intersects with tribal, ethnic and class membership inflect the ways in which women interpret and experience the boundaries of the wilaya system. Therefore, this system impacts the diverse and contradictory constructions of Jordanian women's femininity, where some conform to the system and others contest or embrace a complex combination of compliance, accommodation and resistance. Third, the ambiguous and contradictory state of women's various forms of femininity resulted in women's adoption of practices with a tactical nature, which are also informed by available options, opportunities, and the potential for escaping the wilaya system without facing sanction or punishment. Although these tactics of survival and/or resistance have not ensured a substantive transformation in women's lives at the collective level, they can materialise into strategies aimed at achieving autonomous selves at the personal level, where wilaya is questioned and possibly contested.

This study breaks new ground in the literature of gender and work in the Middle East, by providing an ethnographic account of the public and visible economic activities of women as active protagonists within the formal economy. It examines how gender, class and religion intersect within a factory workplace. Management and labour practices are analysed to show how gendered roles are flexible and multiple, and how discourses of class and piety are articulated in codes of propriety and discipline - as well as in shop-floor strategies of accommodation, resistance and appropriation. The research setting is an export-orientated garment manufacturing enterprise in Port Said, Egypt, bound into a globalised sub-contracting chain. Beset by economic difficulties, management struggles to recruit and retain a mixed-gender workforce to meet rigid contractual deadlines and quality standards. Its control strategies include manipulating issues of class, gender and religion to create a discourse of 'firm as family' which emphasises ihtiram (respectability), legitimating close-quarters contact between female and male workers, and binds workers through constructs of filial ikhlaas (loyalty) to the 'proprietor as patriarch'. As well as staging go-slows and walk-outs, workers turn the 'firm as family' metaphor back on itself to create a framework of entitlement based on a shared sense of taraabut (togetherness). Codes of class and religion are flexed to craft new gendered labour roles, including productive masculinities in a formerly all-female work environment, and distinctive femininities in a previously all-male supervisory cadre. The workers also appropriate the workplace, turning it into an arena for the realisation of their wider hopes and aspirations, including the search for love and material well-being.

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Ma la'asot? 'What can we do?' Spoken with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders, this sentiment often brings to a close the tense pause which follows discussions of ha sichsuch, 'the quarrel', in Israel- Palestine. As expressed by Leftist Jewish Israelis, the phrase ma la'asot becomes a way of conveying political emotions of despair, helplessness and disappointment at the same time as it presents a practical question of power. Faced with the seeming intractability of conflict, the interminability of a stalled peace process and increasing social and political conservatism, those Jewish Israelis opposed to Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories find themselves at loose ends: what to do indeed? While an extensive body of research critically engages with 'the Israeli-Palestinian conflict' through lenses including history, political economy and activism, this thesis shifts focus to the production of stasis. In considering how things stay the same, we might better understand the roots and routes of how they may become different. Drawing upon one year of ethnographic research with Jewish Israelis living in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, this thesis explores the processes, practices and beliefs which sustain normalcy in conditions of conflict. Central to this investigation is gender - as an aspect of subjectivity, relation of power and ordering principle of state and society, gender is integral to the conduct of everyday life and the maintenance of political realities. Thus, this thesis asks what a gender analysis of Jewish Israeli society might tell us about the trajectory of 'Israel-Palestine', what the textures of normalcy, apathy and stasis mean for our visions of the future. Moving through degrees of division and entanglement, modes of avoidance and activism, sites of investment and withdrawal, and instantiations of normalcy and rupture, this thesis foregrounds the gendered subjectivities and sociality central to the production and maintenance of power in Israel-Palestine. By attempting to unpick to relationship between gender and political stasis, this thesis ulti

This thesis engages with the politics of gender equality in the context of democratisation processes in the Middle East, with specific reference to an oftenneglected case study, i.e. Jordan. By analysing the gender dimension of representation and political participation, my thesis contributes to the literature on gender quotas, social change and gender mainstreaming in the region, and does so from a bottom-up perspective, bringing in women's lived experiences. More specifically, I investigate how the international gender equality rhetoric is understood and translated into practice in the context of women's political empowerment. I also problematise the role of women's organisations in advocating gender justice. Drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Jordan between 2010 and 2011, my case study focuses on the experiences of female candidates in the parliamentary elections of November 2010, the role of local and international organisations in empowering women in politics, and the influence of the authoritarian regime on the promotion of women's rights. Analysing the intersections between diverse dynamics involved in the promotion of gender justice in Jordan, I argue that gender equality is often instrumentalised and/or treated as an add-on in local, national, regional and international policies. In addition, while analysing the reasons behind the adoption of gender quotas, I stress the need to look at the sociocultural and political context in which quotas are introduced. In the specific setting of gender justice advocacy, my research findings indicate that the association of women's rights promotion with government-related or royal-supported organisations may be problematic, especially when the role of the state is being discredited and challenged in the wake of the recent uprisings (2011 and 2012). Finally, in the context of gender equality rhetoric, I suggest that it might be more productive for practitioners and researchers to employ an intersectional approach that not only addresses women's multifaceted and diverse gender interests, but also recognises that gender-based struggles are frequently linked to neoliberalism and neocolonial policies.

This thesis expands the currently available approaches to theorising the relation between subjectivity and the body – by developing a notion of an embodied subject. This is done by exploring the implications which Henri Bergson’s process philosophy has for understanding Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. I undertake an analysis of Butler’s account of the gendered subject, demonstrating its value for thinking the politics of sexual difference but emphasising its methodological short comings. Specifically, I criticise her reduction of the body to a signifying effect, her exclusion of a notion of self-reflexivity, and the way she explains the psychic investment in gender through a principle of melancholia. Taken together, I argue that these theoretical perspectives become problematic because they radically limit an understanding of how and why hegemonic subjects repeat normative signifying practices. In turn, this limitation distorts Butler’s understanding of how subversive repetitions can effectively de-naturalise gender norms. Following this critique, I use Bergson’s temporalised understanding of the relation between consciousness and language to theorise an account of the gendered self which conforms to Butler’s ideas concerning regulated subject positions, but provides the possibility of attaining reflexive distance from the norms of gender intelligibility. I then develop Bergson’s sensory-motor conception of the body, and its relation to consciousness and memory, in order to re-evaluate the lived dynamics of repetition, gender investment, and identification. Through Bergson, I will demonstrate how historically sedimented gender practices are reproduced by forming the motor habits of individual bodies. This allows me to explain the circulation of gender norms in terms of bodily processes and tension rather than signifying effects and, I argue, grounds the basis of gender investment in the familiarity which habits provide for action. I then use Bergson’s principles that consciousness expands when action is indeterminate, and that memory forms general ideas in response to the present moment of action, to explore how variable processes of gender identification develop when habits are subverted. Through these perspectives I re-describe Butler’s notion of performativity as a lived, embodied process in which gender investment and identification are contingent upon an individual subject’s reflexive responses to the immediate social conditions of action. In order to clarify the nature of these responses I then call upon Yaak Panksepp’s neurological theory of emotion to characterise several prominent tendencies and, ultimately, argue that the effectiveness of subversive repetition depends upon producing the right emotional response. This, I suggest, provides a more diverse explanation of the naturalisation and potential transformation of signifying practices than is available in Butler’s own theoretical framework.

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