Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints

Military checkpoints are inherently unstable technologies of rule due to their contradictory functions of blocking as well as sorting bodies. This paper examines the dynamics of gender, corporeality, and embodiment at Israeli military checkpoints. Since their transmutation into a "checkpoint regime" over the past 15 years, the majority of Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank remain primarily low-tech with "sorting" dependent on embodied proximate interaction between soldier and Palestinian. Despite attempts to mediate their dynamics through bureaucratic and technical intervention, they remain technologies constituted by the volatile and contradictory dynamics of embodied interactions between those manning them and those attempting to pass through them. This makes them sites of exaggerated corporeality: they are about dividing and excluding bodies according to racial and other categorical rationales and are settings where corporeal assumptions and embodied practices and interactions connect and collide. In this context gendered and sexed bodies can be a force for stabilizing their everyday operations as well as for exacerbating their contradictions. At the level of the everyday, gender simultaneously makes the military checkpoint as well as constantly unmakes it.