The Voice of Silence: Patterns of Digital Participation Among Palestinian Women in East Jerusalem

[摘要] Facebook is one of the world’s largest social networks, with more than 2,7 billion active users globally. It is also one of themost dominant platforms and one of the platforms most commonly used by Arabs. However, connecting via Facebook andsharing content cannot be taken for granted. While many studies have focused on the role played by networked platformsin empowering women in the Arab world in general and on feminist movements in the Arab Spring, few have exploredPalestinian women’s use of Facebook. During and after the Arab Spring, social media was used as a tool for freedom ofexpression in the Arab world. However, Palestinians in East Jerusalem using social media witnessed a decrease in freedomof expression, especially after the Gaza war in 2014. This article focuses on the Facebook usage patterns and political partic‐ipation of young adult Palestinian women living in the contested space of East Jerusalem. These women live under dynamicpower struggles as they belong to a traditionally conservative society, live within a situation of intractable conflict, andare under state control as a minority group. Qualitative thematic analysis of 13 in‐depth interviews reveals three patternsof usage, all related to monitoring: state monitoring, kinship monitoring, and self‐monitoring. The article conceptualisesthese online behaviours as “participation avoidance,” a term describing users’ (non‐)communicative practices in which themundane choices of when, why, and how to participate also mirror users’ choices of when, why, and how to avoid.

[学科分类] 医学（综合）

[关键词] Facebook;Israeli‐Palestinian conflict;Jerusalem;participation;women