Intersections of Patriarchy, Colonialism,and Ecological Violence in ContemporaryPalestinian Fiction

Chirayu Gupta; Priyanka Singh

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.80493

Intersections of Patriarchy, Colonialism,and Ecological Violence in ContemporaryPalestinian Fiction

Author(s)	Mr. Chirayu Gupta, Dr. Priyanka Singh
Country	India
Abstract	This research paper is an examination of the intersection of patriarchy, colonialism and ecoviolence in the Palestinian fiction of the contemporary period, which the paper argues are not discrete or analogous but rather overlapping and structural forms of domination. The paper builds upon postcolonial ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and slow violence theory to make a case for Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani, Susan Abulhawa, Adania Shibli, Mourid Barghouti, and Selma Dabbagh’s complex depictions of the interlinkages between environmental degradation, colonial dispossession, and patriarchal violence. The research complicates the nationalist and political framing within literary-critical discourse that has shaped scholarship on Palestinian literature while underscoring ecological and environmental dimensions as central instead of marginal. This research paper thus reveals the operation of Palestinian settler-colonialism not solely as territorial but as ecological and gendered. Using Rob Nixon's framework of slow violence, the paper will suggest that Palestinians have devised complex textual strategies to reveal and give voice to the protracted, dispersed, cumulative, but ultimately invisible effects of occupation, ranging from the dispossession of olive groves to water contamination to the militarisation of domestic space. It centres the analysis on Palestinian women by exploring their embodiment as sites of both patriarchal and colonial control, and women's bodies as keepers of indigenous ecological knowledge, and women's reproductive and care labour as the sites of the politics of counter-hegemony. Through in-depth reading of contemporary Palestinian texts, this research traces an ecofeminist literary ethics rooted in a concern with relations, mutuality, and a radical critique of the hierarchical dualism of colonial and patriarchal knowledge that structures the relation between human beings and nature. This work contributes to the fields of postcolonial ecocriticism by bringing into conversation texts from the Palestinian canon, foregrounding ecological concerns as key dimensions of Palestinian fiction, and using an intersectional analysis as the centre of literary ecocriticism. Through these analyses, the paper proposes that Palestinian literature is an epistemological act toward envisioning an uncolonized human-nature relation that transcends the settler-colonial imaginary.
Keywords	Palestinian literature, Eco-Violence, Patriarchy, Colonialism, Settler-Colonialism, Eco-Feminism, PostColonial Ecocriticism, Slow Violence, Environmental Degradation
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On	2026-06-04
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.80493

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Intersections of Patriarchy, Colonialism,and Ecological Violence in ContemporaryPalestinian Fiction

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