Modesty as defiance: Hijab and isdal in the resistance of Palestinian-Muslim women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Palestinian identity and resistance are deeply tied to traditional clothing, especially embroidered thobes and the keffiyeh . For Palestinian-Muslim women, items like the hijab and isdal represent unique and gendered forms of resistance. The isdal , which is a one- or two-piece modest covering, is commonly worn during prayers, when meeting unexpected visitors or for short trips outside the home. Moreover, the isdal has become a familiar image in media portrayals during times of crisis, where women wear it consistently to shield their bodies from exposure in the event of physical harm or death. Amid recurring genocidal violence, displacement and uncertainty, hijab and isdal offer Palestinian women a way to preserve modesty in moments of abrupt flight. Even though the tradition of veiling predates Islam, it is nevertheless controversial worldwide, because the West considers it oppressive. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s assertion, ‘this woman, who sees without being seen, frustrates the colonizer’, this article argues that the hijab and isdal disrupt the colonial gaze that seeks to dominate, expose and dehumanize. Through this process of disruption, these garments transcend Orientalist and Islamophobic associations and are reconfigured into manifestations of agency and defiance. By analysing media representations and relevant literature, this article examines how Palestinian-Muslim women use veiling as a means of anti-colonial resistance, reclamation of narrative, identity and as a tool of social non-movement activism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".