Third World Women In Gaza

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The Gaza Strip, situated on the Mediterranean Sea, Israel, and the northeast tip of Egypt, is a small, densely populated, Palestinian territory. It is only about two times the size of Washington D.C., under Islamist military control, and intensely impoverished. The country has a 42 percent unemployment rate, and most of these people live under the line of poverty. Despite this, women in Gaza have begun to join the workforce. For International Women’s Day, March 8th this year, Al Jazeera posted an article on these Gazan women, titled “Gaza’s Women of Steel”.
The piece highlights several specific women in Gaza, telling the reader right off the bat that “women in Gaza are stepping up as family breadwinners, breaking cultural norms as they strive …show more content…

Mohanty explains how women in third world countries are almost always seen with a multitude of negative characteristics, such as “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” (337). These qualities may or may not be true of the women in various third world countries, but they are assumed and attributed to all of them. The Al Jazeera article supports this negative perspective of third world women. The article spends time pointing out each woman’s struggles and hardships, the traits that make them stereotypical third world women, despite the fact that they are breaking social norms and working hard to become more than …show more content…

Rubin believes that there is a division between first and third world women, but she focuses mainly on sexuality. Rubin divides women into two distinct categories: the sexually ‘charmed’ and the sexually ‘marginalized’. ‘Charmed’ women include women who are married, monogamous, heterosexual, and plain, whereas ‘marginalized’ women are women who trade sex for money, are unmarried, gender fluid, or polygamous. In her article “Thinking Sex”, Rubin points out that “This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics. It grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged.”(15). Two of the women in the article are unmarried, seemingly because of their professions, while the last was married away at the tender age of 15 to a man with the same profession as her father. While the article does not dive deeply into the sexual lives of the women, it can be inferred that their jobs played a part in what happened in their personal lives. Rubin may have been pleased that the article did not put a focus on the sexualized lives of women in third world

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