Gender in crisis

Contemporary women's history and gender studies are framed largely within the conventional boundaries of the nation-state, with its clearly delimited territorial base and national economy. The issue of how gender relations are renegotiated in response to shifts in class and politics is rendered more complex when the society in question is comprised of refugees. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Palestinian diaspora communities; aside from Jordan, the single largest concentration of Palestinians in exile reside in Lebanon. Basing her study on intensive field research between 1980 and 1982, Julie M. Peteet has drawn a finely grained, engaging ethnographic portrait of Palestinian society from the perspective of women's lives as struggle. Although the author conducted on-site investigations in numerous Lebanese Palestinian camps and communities, she focused mainly, but not exclusively, on Beirut and the Shatila camp, caught in the capital's poverty belt, in the period before and after the 1982 Israeli invasion. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Sep. 29, 2016).