Insurgent Social Reproduction: The Home, the Barricade and Women’s Work in the 1936 Palestinian Revolution

While the Palestinian home has been a target of relentless demolition and displacement, it has historically also been a place of care, culture, labour, and resistance. Indeed, the home is always becoming, constantly remade with every demolition and every displacement. The home embodies these contradictions: both a crime scene and a revolutionary space; a site of colonial surveillance and destruction, and a grounding site of labour and reconstruction. To engage with these tensions, I return to the revolution of 1936–9 against the British Mandate, a snapshot in the long and ongoing Palestinian revolution. But instead of only looking for revolutionaries in the barricades and the mountains, I look for them in the kitchens, in the bedrooms and in the living rooms. In that sense, I propose that the production of the home space is itself a conceptual site of theorization for what can be called insurgent social reproduction.