It’s deliberate, and there’s a reason why: Shahira Hathout, ‘Satire in the Time of Genocide: a diffractive reading of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) through Israel’s gendered settler-colonial practices in Palestine’, Gender, Place & Culture, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

It’s deliberate, and there’s a reason why: Shahira Hathout, ‘Satire in the Time of Genocide: a diffractive reading of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) through Israel’s gendered settler-colonial practices in Palestine’, Gender, Place & Culture, 2025

11Apr25

Abstract: As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine continues to unfold, the number of murdered Palestinians has now surpassed 46,000 civilians, half of which are women and children. This number includes over 10,000 women, mostly in their reproductive age or pregnant, and 15,780 children, mostly infants and toddlers. This paper argues that the gendered nature of Israel’s genocide in Gaza theorizes the ontology of Palestinian women as socio-political agents in their embodied connection to time and place. Resisting Israeli settler colonial practices of dehumanization, women emerge as embodied ‘time beings’ whose capacity to remember and (re)produce differentially affirms Palestinians’ historical and socio-cultural connection to the land. Using Karen Barad’s agential realism, I diffractively read the British settler colonial practices in Ireland as captured in Jonathan Swift’s satire, ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), through the Israeli practices of erasure in Palestine. My goal is to show how satire is a literary form that ‘stay[s] with trouble’, explains unexpected space-time entanglements and collaborations, and reveals the importance of Palestinian women as central agents to an open-ended becoming of a Palestinian state and identity.

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