LAUSR

Abstract This article discusses one attempt by Palestinian women theatre-makers to unsettle the high value Palestinian society places on the patriarchal roles of wife and mother. It results from doctoral fieldwork carried out from April to July 2014. During this time, I attended a performance of Al-Harah Theatre’s Shakespeare’s Sisters in Bethlehem, and conducted interviews with artistic director Raeda Ghazaleh. Shakespeare’s Sisters began as a research project on Palestinian attitudes towards single, divorced and widowed women aged over thirty followed by a series of workshops with women from Beit Jala in the West Bank. The research and workshops provided the inspiration for the script, which was written in conversation with the actors. The play opened in Jordan in December 2013, and toured across the West Bank from January to May 2014. In total, twenty-one performances took place. In this article, I argue that Shakespeare’s Sisters functions at two discursive levels. First, it presents the Palestinian homeplace as a radical counter-space capable of dis-ordering the centre-periphery dialectic structured by Palestinian patriarchy and Israeli colonialism. Second, it practices a form of border thinking that allows it to draw upon Palestinian and European epistemic practices to articulate its call for women's liberation.