Im/mobilities and the Occupying Gaze

This article considers how the occupying gaze transforms bodies and objects into suspended sites of gendered and political violence. While in peacetime waiting suggests ennui and stasis, the im/mobility that occurs at Israeli checkpoints is entangled with power, including who decides how time is valued, and how and whose bodies move (and where to). Against this backdrop, the gaze transforms bodies and objects into political and gendered sites of violence. While there is a rich corpus concerning the politics of waiting in Palestine, less discussed is how waiting touches the body, as well as how those experiences are embodied, shared, and navigated in terms of trauma. As the checkpoints continue to evolve, visual representations of waiting and im/mobility provide a visceral layer. This article considers the design project, Disarming Design from Palestine (DDfP), which redesigns everyday objects to ‘bear witness to the charged reality’ in which the wearer lives. As the objects, and the bodies wearing and using them, are repositioned by the artists, this article revisits our existing understanding of visual occupation and the colonial gaze to argue that ‘the occupying gaze’ not only reframes space but contributes a ‘hard gaze’ that facilitates state violence.