"Desiring Modernity: Family Planning Among Palestinians in Northern Israel" by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh

Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh

Deposited 1998

Abstract
This dissertation is based on the idea that reproduction is a central locus of contest in the Galilee. "Modernization"--in the interrelated forms of nationalism, economic transformations, medical regulation, new forms of social stratification, and changing gender relations--have emerged through issues of reproduction and strikingly transformed them. Indeed, reproductive decisions have become central sites for the negotiation of significant social concepts, including "the feminine" and "the masculine," "the household," "culture" and "the nation." Differences in number of children, spacing of births, sex of the child, the health of the fetus, child-raising techniques and investments and contraceptive methods have all become key in daily negotiations and recreations of personal, collective and national identity and daily engagements of power.

These transformation include the politicization of reproduction and the nationalization of maternity. Women's bodies are deeply inscribed as reproducers of the nation, whether by bearing few, or alternatively, many children. Family planning has been engendered as an essential new household economic strategy and salient belief system. Development theory with its binaries of modern/primitive, controlled/uncontrolled reproduction, has come to resonate strongly in the Galilee. Social categorizations of urban/rural/Bedouin, and those of clan and religion, gain new valence through new conceptions of reproductive difference. Reproductive behavior--and the ideal production of small, spaced, controlled, nuclearized, consuming families--has become an important way to contest and negotiate shifting categories of personhood and community in the Galilee. Medicalization and scientific innovations have transformed reproduction and the body, its care and social significance. Finally, shifting gender relations are manifest in changing expressions and practices of family planning. Preferences for giving birth to boys rather than girls are being constructed as compatible with modernity.

It is striking how powerfully "modernity" has transformed the lives of Palestinians in the Galilee. Pro- and anti-modernization shape and limit the debates on reproduction, gender, nation, class and religion. It is true that these transformations have not affected all Palestinians equally or in the same way. However, the salience of the narratives of modernity, including that of traditionalism, is indicative of the proximity of the state and its deep incursions in daily lives.