Gender, Identity, Media, and Biopolitics: War Within the War in Palestine and Syria

Gender, Identity, Media, and Biopolitics: War Within the War in Palestine and Syria

Shahadat Hoshen

University of Dhaka

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.909000158

Received: 26 August 2025; Accepted: 04 September 2025; Published: 03 October 2025

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the aspects of gender, identity, media and biopolitics in the longstanding conflicts of Palestine and Syria using a philosophical approach. It is grounded in the contributions of Foucault, Butler, Agamben, and Mbembe, and contends that the media influences the creation of meaning around political actors by constituting visibility as a biopolitical mechanism that conditions the popular understanding of political subjects. Specifically in conditions of militarization and occupation, gender is revealed to be performative and recontextualized strategically by performers who seek to resist hegemonic discourses. The article also discusses the grievability and the state of exception in an effort to see how the state here renders some lives as mournable whereas others are floated out of consideration. It discloses a symbolic war that exists in tandem with the armed conflict by developing three major themes, namely, media as a place of control, gender as a performative resistance, and politics of recognition. These findings reflect the philosophical and ethical implications of representation and identity in the face of systemic violence and provide policy considerations on media ethics, human rights discourse, and critical involvement in the study of conflicts. This book can be used in debates and arguments related to gender theory, philosophy of media and political ethics by using the lived realities and representational struggles of those who are marginalized in warzones.

Keywords: Biopolitics, Gender Performativity, Media Representation, Necropolitics, State of Exception, Identity in Conflict

INTRODUCTION

In modern regions of protracted conflict, especially Palestine and Syria, the entanglement of gender, identity, media and biopolitics is an urgent area of philosophical concern. Those two regions have been historically molded by military occupation, civil war, and systematic displacement, pointing towards a view that warfare is more than just about fighting on the ground, but it is also part and parcel of the constitutive elements of social and political life. In this case, identities are not only created but constantly vigorised in a way of control, cultural production, and discursive representation (Aqeeli, 2023). The violence experienced is not only physical, but it filters into domains of culture, the symbolic, and epistemology, making hegemonic accounts of masculinity, rebellion, and legitimacy extremely challenging.

The main philosophical issue that this article seeks to address is the interconnection of formation of identity with power and representation processes in war-torn societies. Media can be seen as an instrument of surveillance and resistance, so it defines how gender and identity can be performed, received, and politicized in Palestine and Syria (Black et al., 2020). The roles of women and gender-nonconforming individuals are especially targeted within these dynamics as those individuals are often the intersection of differing gender roles (Akurugu, 2019; Bizjak, 2017). The issue is in the comprehension of how these identities are, but not only lived experiences, but also political performances resisting or reinforcing hegemonic systems, and, especially, under conditions of occupation, displacement, and state violence (Maycock et al., 2020; Saraswati & Engliana, 2023; Riach et al., 2016).

Historical-Political Context of the Conflicts

Before delving into this exploration on the ground, it is critical to provide a succinct history of conflict in Palestine and Syria. Both regions underwent long-term political instability, militarization, displacement, and institutionalized repression in the last twenty years. Such structural conditions are not marginal background noise, as they make up the biopolitical terrain on which identities can be regulated, resisted, and represented.

The timeline below presents the processes shaping both regional and biopolitical and socio-symbolic landscapes in both regions since 2011. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, and the changing possession of territories, as well as repeated attempts to take control of the sovereign state, the shifting of media attention and the sustained media framing, events involved elements of sovereign power, states of exception, and media framing. These are not the chronological events, they serve as conceptual landmarks where identities are made visible or invisible, lives grievable or disposable and gendered subjectivities are renegotiated under conditions of occupation and siege.

Table 1 below shows a pictorial realization of the three main political developments that determine the modern political tensions in Palestine and Syria. Though not comprehensive, the timeline reveals significant disruptions and continuities that characterize changes in visibility, legality, and sovereignty as defining issues in the biopolitical and performative theoretical foundations of the study.

Rationale of the Study

The theoretical work on this study is informed by the thinking of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, specifically on the topics of biopolitics, performativity, sovereignty, and necro politics. These structures permit a subtle consideration of how the subject is constituted and subjected to regimes of power and violence. It is the concept of biopolitics as described by Foucault that can examine power not as an act of violence, but as a measure of control over life itself (Foucault, 1978; Dickinson & Morgan, 2015).

The Performative definition of gender presented by Butler can support the view that identity can be construed as performed and reenacted within a sociopolitical limitation (Butler, 1990; Giladi, 2021). The legal and political mechanisms in which some lives are condemned to disposability through their exclusion by law, as elaborated by Agamben on his theorization of the state of exception, are relevant here (Agamben, 1998). At the same time, necropolitics popularized by Mbembe sheds light on how sovereign power delineates between which groups must live and which must die, making especially the occupation and structuralised violence (Mbembe, 2003, Wehrle, 2020).

Through a critical reading of these philosophical thoughts, the article aims at unveiling the way in which media representations of war create not only reflection about violence but also formation and control of gendered and politicized identities. This strategy will enable this study to raise very fundamental philosophical questions relating to the environment of identity negotiations and resistance in conflict regions especially in Palestine and Syria.

Objectives of the Study

In accordance with the philosophical purpose of this paper, the research aims to accomplish the following:

• To critically analyze and examine how gendered, and politically constructed identities are contested, constructed and performed in media representations in the context of war in Palestine and Syria.
• To consider how biopolitical and philosophical theories – notably Foucault, Butler, Agamben and Mbembe – might be used to understand identity, power and resistance in conflict regions.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Over the past several years, research in the areas of gender, identity, media, and biopolitics in conflict zones has increased quite dramatically in the Middle Eastern settings of Palestine and Syria. Arm conflicts in these territories transform the norms of societies, break the traditional understanding of gender and identity. Research indicates that women tend to hold multifaceted positions as carers, activists, and warriors, and therefore defy gender polarities and break the mainstream cultural constructions (Jalambo et al., 2018; Phillips, 2015). The fluidity of gender identity in war is multidimensional and circumstantially determined, depending on the political and cultural demands of the emergency situation (Uluğ et al., 2021; Morales et al., 2023).

The main factor in developing and propagating these narratives lies with media. The traditional media tends to reinforce the hegemonic discourses at the expense of women voices and experiences. Conversely, digital media, and social in particular, have proved to be valuable counter-narrative tools, allowing individuals and groups to testify to their own reality and challenge the established explanations of the conflict (Rashid, 2021; Baden & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2017). The latter is especially true of citizen journalism, which has offered disenfranchised groups the chance to take control of their identities and transform discourse in society (Horoub, 2023; Alkhateeb & Abdalla, 2021). Such developments not only lead to an elevated awareness of gendered approaches to the warfare, but also highlight the mediatized approach to the memory, identity, and resistance.

Philosophical frameworks provide a more elaborate interpretative spectrum for these phenomena. The notion of biopolitics explains the dynamics of power in society with a special focus on the process of regulating bodies and population in the face of state violence and militarization (Foucault, 1978; Dickinson & Morgan, 2015). Following the theory of gender performativity, identity should not be viewed as a given but the results of a production of recurring, socially warranted performances (Butler, 1990; Manago, 2015). The concept of the state of exception places an emphasis on how sovereign authority operates by excluding particular groups of people under the protection of the law, whereas, necropolitics expounds upon how states define which lives are grievable and which are disposable (Mbembe, 2003; Giladi, 2021; Wehrle, 2020). Collectively, these theories develop a conceptual framework to discuss identity as a battleground of both control and resistance during war.

Literature on regions sheds more light on how the Palestinian and Syrian identities are negotiated in the context of transnational and diasporic. To give an example, research on diasporas indicates how belonging and political expression has been redefined through displacement and exile (Lindholm, 2021). Nevertheless, despite the existing body of literature, barriers remain to a more detailed analysis of how intersecting identities, constructed under the influence of gender, class, ethnicity, and geography, are mediated by traditional and online media during partisan conflicts (Zhao & Wang, 2024; Alkhateeb & Abdalla, 2021). Additionally, it is necessary to have further empirical studies of the media and identity based on philosophical interpretations by intertwining theories of biopolitics and performativity.

This review demonstrates that while existing research has made significant contributions to understanding gender, media, and identity in conflict, few studies explicitly interrogate these dynamics through a combined philosophical and critical media lens. This study addresses that gap by bringing together political philosophy, gender theory, and media analysis to explore how identities are constructed and resisted in the context of war in Palestine and Syria.

Theoretical Framework

This paper is based on a cluster of philosophical theories that fundamentally look into the links between power, identity, media, and the body, especially when considering conflict and state brutality. The thematic grounding is based on the works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, all of whom contributed a unique way of thinking about identity constructive and resistive mechanisms within a system of oppression.

Biopolitics helps establish an initial theory of the power exercised by the modern states not only based on law but on the regulation of a body and population and their daily existence (Foucault, 1978). The politics of biopolitical control in Palestine and Syria is manifested in the regulation of mobility, surveillance, healthcare, and life itself as the conflict reshapes life as a quantifiable object of governance (Dickinson & Morgan, 2015). They are especially valuable in terms of how media technologies generate and re generate this biopolitical order.

This is complemented by the theory of gender performativity which asserts that gender identity is not bound or fixed but performed out of social, mediated repetition (Butler, 1990). These ritual actions turn more heightened and interrupted in war zones. Such roles as fighters, caregivers, or activists choices by women, during instances of political acts through body and visibility, thus destabilizing traditional gender (Maycock et al., 2020; Saraswati & Engliana, 2023). This framework allows us to interpret in a more subtle manner how gendered identities are not only constructed but politicised during a period of crisis.

• Biopolitics (Foucault): Modern power governs by managing life—health, movement, exposure to risk—rather than only by law. In warscapes, checkpoints, registries, and humanitarian metrics become techniques of rule.
• Gender Performativity (Butler): Gender is not a fixed trait but a repeated social performance under constraint. Conflict unsettles scripts, making care, protest, and survival themselves political acts.
• State of Exception (Agamben): Sovereign power suspends normal law, producing zones where people become “bare life”—killable but not murderable.
• Necropolitics (Mbembe): Power draws lines between lives to be protected and those exposed to death; media visibility can track (and contest) those lines.

Combined with the theory of biopolitics the state of exception helps to show how a sovereign power can suspend the rule of law to achieve dominance over populations that it views as threatening or disposable (Agamben, 1998). Such suspension is usually normalized in long periods of conflict, particularly in the case of Palestine and Syria, where the exceptionality of military occupation and civil war is the norm. Under these circumstances, the person may be deprived of their rights and reduced to the status of bare life, which is outside the political community (Giladi, 2021).

This is expanded through the theory of necropolitics that questions how political authority defines not only the ways of people living, but also dying (Mbembe, 2003). Necropolitics draws attention to the racialized and colonial aspects of state violence which is why it may be especially applied to the practice of the Israeli occupation of Palestine or to internal state violence in Syria. Such a framework facilitates an examination of how such processes are mediated through media representations, as well as their silences, which confer grievability on some lives and erase others (Wehrle, 2020). Table 1 summarizes the core philosophical concepts that guide this inquiry and demonstrates how each framework helps elucidate the interplay between identity, media, and power under conditions of war.

Table 2. Key Philosophical Concepts and Their Relevance to the Study

Together, these theoretical frameworks offer a multidimensional lens for analyzing the entanglement of gender, identity, media, and biopolitics in war. They support a critical interrogation of how identities are regulated, contested, and expressed within conflict zones, and how media operates as both an instrument of state control and a platform for counter-hegemonic resistance.

METHODOLOGY

Study Design and Positionality

This study adopts a qualitative, conceptual design that integrates philosophical analysis with critical media reading. The author’s positionality—as a researcher interpreting conflicts from within postcolonial and feminist ethics—shapes choices of texts, framings, and vocabularies; reflexive notes were kept to surface these influences rather than efface them.

Textual/Media Corpus and Selection

Primary materials comprised canonical theoretical texts (Foucault, Butler, Agamben, Mbembe) and regionally relevant scholarship and reportage on Palestine and Syria; media artifacts included news features, opinion essays, NGO reports, and curated social-media posts (images, short videos, threads). Inclusion criteria: (i) explicit engagement with gender/identity under conflict; (ii) relevance to biopolitics, performativity, exception, or necropolitics; (iii) traceable provenance (publisher, outlet, or archived link). Exclusions: de-contextualized clips and unverifiable items. Sampling proceeded iteratively (maximum-variation logic) until theoretical saturation of recurrent motifs (visibility, grievability, performative resistance).

Analytic Strategy

Analysis combined close reading of philosophical concepts with media-discourse interpretation. Steps: (1) concept mapping (e.g., biopower, grievability); (2) artifact annotation (who/what is made visible/invisible; gendered scripting; frames); (3) pattern synthesis across cases; (4) triangulation back to theory, noting tensions and limits.

Limitations and Ethics

This work is not an empirical content analysis; it privileges conceptual elucidation and illustrative cases. Ethical care was taken to avoid re-circulating harmful imagery; paraphrases and anonymized descriptions are preferred where feasible.

Case 1 (Palestine): Gendered Care as Resistance in Siege Conditions.

Focus: Women’s mutual-aid and caregiving networks (field clinics, food lines, community schools) as performative resistance. Analytic hook: Performativity re-authors femininity as public courage; biopolitics appears where the rationing of electricity, water, and medical access governs life itself. Grievability is negotiated through visual testimonies (short videos, posters, digital memorials) that insist these lives matter.
Use: Quote 1–2 short testimonies (paraphrased if needed); describe one visual artifact; link to Theme 2 (resistance) and Theme 1 (media apparatus).

Case 2 (Syria): Diaspora Memory and the Politics of Visibility.

Focus: Syrian feminist and youth networks in exile (workshops, online memorial pages, podcast episodes) that archive atrocities and everyday survival. Analytic hook: Exception becomes normalized; necropolitics structures who is visible. Visual micro-documentaries and Instagram/TikTok reels mobilize networked mourning and counter-spectacle.
Use: Include a brief testimony; map how platform rules, takedowns, or “sensitive-content” gates shape circulation (link to Theme 3 on grievability).

Visual Testimony and Counter-Spectacle: Short-form video and still imagery reorient spectatorship from distant pity to implicated witnessing. Visuals of care work (triage, bread lines, classroom circles) invert the dominant association of masculinity with combat by centering feminized labors of survival, thereby politicizing the “ordinary.”

Networked Mourning and Hashtag Publics: Hashtags cluster distributed grief into publics that outlive the 24-hour news cycle. The repetition of names/faces builds a ledger of grievability that resists erasure; memorial threads function as vernacular archives.

Grassroots Media Infrastructures: Feminist collectives and community pages act as micro-newsrooms (verification scripts, archiving protocols, safety guidelines). Such infrastructures expose how platforms themselves are biopolitical actors—throttling reach via content-warning gates or opaque moderation.

Risk, Security, and Care: With visibility comes danger. Activists mitigate doxxing and reprisals by blurring faces, delaying posts, and using closed groups—ethics of care that balance testimony with safety.

Thematic Argumentation

This section develops three interconnected philosophical themes that emerge from applying biopolitical and performative frameworks to the media and identity dynamics of war in Palestine and Syria. These themes do not arise from empirical coding but through critical interpretation of theory, discourse, and mediated conflict narratives. As summarized in Table 3, each theme reveals how philosophical frameworks illuminate the regulation and representation of identity during war.

Table 3. Philosophical Themes and Their Application in the Palestine–Syria Context

Media as a Biopolitical Apparatus of Control

Under conditions of sustained war and occupation, media operates not just as a source of information but as a mechanism of political power. The concept of biopower reveals how states exert control by managing life itself—deciding who is protected, who is surveilled, and who is abandoned (Foucault, 1978). In Palestine and Syria, media narratives often participate in this ordering by selectively framing certain populations as threats, victims, or invisible. The circulation of images, omissions, and discursive patterns is not accidental but reflects a biopolitical logic wherein visibility becomes a form of governance (Dickinson & Morgan, 2015).

This visibility, however, is uneven. Lives deemed politically valuable are spotlighted in media, while others are erased or reframed through state-centric or securitized lenses. Such framing aligns with necropolitical operations, where media reinforces hierarchies of whose death matters and whose suffering can be ignored (Mbembe, 2003). In this light, media can no longer be considered neutral; it becomes an agent of distributed sovereignty, shaping global consciousness and normalizing state violence by privileging specific narratives and obscuring others.

Gender Performativity and the Disruption of Norms

Conflict reconfigures how gender is performed, perceived, and politicized. Drawing from the theory of performativity, gender is not a fixed trait but a series of repeated acts constrained by social norms (Butler, 1990). In warzones, these norms are radically destabilized. Women and queer individuals in Palestine and Syria often inhabit roles that challenge dominant gender expectations: as frontline medics, protestors, digital activists, and even armed resistors. These acts are not only functional but symbolically subversive—they disrupt hegemonic codes that associate femininity with passivity and masculinity with violence.

Such disruptions do not exist in a vacuum. They are politically charged performances that assert identity in spaces of occupation and militarization. The body becomes a site of resistance where gender norms are not merely transgressed but re-authored. These forms of performative agency generate new subjectivities that are irreducible to binary frameworks (Saraswati & Engliana, 2023). In this context, gender becomes an instrument of survival and resistance—where what is enacted under duress speaks volumes about the possibilities of identity reconstitution in violent political terrains.

The State of Exception and the Politics of Grievability

In both Palestine and Syria, the legal order is frequently suspended, creating enduring states of exception where lawlessness is normalized (Agamben, 1998). Individuals caught within these zones exist in a condition of “bare life”—stripped of legal protection and subjected to systemic precarity. This suspension is not merely administrative; it redefines the political subject as one who can be killed without consequence. Identity itself becomes dangerous—especially when tied to resistance movements, religious affiliations, or non-normative gender expressions.

Overlaying this is the politics of grievability, which determines whose lives are publicly mourned and whose deaths remain unnoticed (Butler, 2004). Media and state actors selectively frame which deaths deserve recognition, thus producing hierarchies of human worth. The international press often sensationalizes some deaths while neglecting the cumulative suffering of civilians in besieged regions. This asymmetry reflects a necropolitical ethic in which some lives are deemed disposable and others are amplified for ideological ends (Mbembe, 2003). Understanding this representational disparity is crucial for analyzing how conflict zones regulate not only bodies and identities, but also the narratives that surround loss, trauma, and recognition.

DISCUSSION

The above discussion has revealed the reason why the intersection of gender, identity, media, and biopolitics in the Palestinian and Syrian conflicts are beyond the question of representation, but the question of life, death and resistance. Their findings confirm that identity in war is not something that a person is but an active process of control and subversion. The current section highlights these topics by summarizing theoretical approaches to the subject and illustrating the interpretation reflections, as well as placing the work in the context beyond the scholarly debate.

The use of concepts of biopolitics and performativity proves that media is abundantly involved in regulating life and death. Media is not a reporter of conflict, it frames what identities can be read, whose lives are valued and what kind of violence can be narrated. This backs up previous studies of mediated warzones, which draw on visual regimes and rhetoric game-plans to construct imaginaries within the public that justify state violence or the concealment of subaltern agency (Dickinson & Morgan, 2015; Mbembe, 2003). In Palestine and Syria, the media narratives appear to privilege geopolitics on humanitarianism by highlighting terror in some instances, and hiding structural and systemic occupation and dispossession.

In such a way, gender as an area of power struggles becomes contingent and variable. Based on performativity as postulated by Butler, it is clear that conflict not only reconfigures gender roles, but also creates breaches in the normative scripts by facilitating resistant performances of subjectivity (Butler, 1990). Women and gender-nonconforming nationals do not just conform to the war- they reframe its symbolic order through occupying roles and identities that run counter to nationalist, patriarchal as well as militarised constructs. Their acts make up what Saraswati and Engliana (2023) refer to as gendered disruptions, where bodies serve as vulnerable tools of power.

In addition, the long-term states of exception in these conflict regions question the morality of political recognition. Both the concept of bare life by Agamben (1998) alongside the concept of grievability by Butler (2004) come together to point out the morality imbalance existing in reaction to war in the world. Who is grievable? Whose humanity entitles them to human rights? Those are not the rhetorical questions, but rather philosophical imperatives that are the building blocks of the conflict narratives. The necropolitical script which is embedded in media silence, selective mourning and international inaction uphold the systems of violence normalcy and delay of justice.

These findings extend the existing scholarship by emphasizing the symbolic violence of invisibility and the epistemic power of media in shaping collective memory and ethical response. They also point to the necessity of a more reflexive, intersectional media ethics—one that recognizes how gender, geography, and political status intersect in the portrayal of suffering.

The study’s implications are both conceptual and ethical. Conceptually, it contributes to a growing body of philosophical work that theorizes identity under conditions of state violence and mediality. Ethically, it urges scholars, journalists, and policymakers to reconsider how they engage with mediated representations of conflict. The war within the war—the battle over visibility, representation, and human worth—requires just as much scrutiny as armed conflict itself.

Concluding Remarks with Policy Implications

This paper has discussed the dynamics of gender, identity, media, and biopolitics collided with each other in the conflict zones of Palestine and Syria. It has proven through philosophical critiques that identity is not simply given or expressed, but is made, challenged and ordered via material as well as symbolic systems of power. Media is revealed as a tool of biopolitics that determines who or what can be seen and mourned and what or who is disposable and gender is a playing field through which resistance and agency is performed. The persistent conditions of exception and necropolitical relationships in these spaces also highlight the necessity of reorienting the significance of legal, media, and moral conceptualizations of political subjectivities. These conclusions have valuable policy and practice implications. There is an urgent necessity that media institutions embrace ethics that guarantee plural and non-reductive portrayal of populations that are victims of conflict. It is also important to uphold independent and feminist reporting in war zones to break the hegemonic discourse and save the testimonies of the marginalized. International human rights institutions should also multiply their systems to guard the groups that are not legally recognized and visible. Lastly, incorporating such critical theoretical frameworks into the practice of peacebuilding, advocacy, and education can also bring more intersectional, ethically sound strategies into conflict resolution. In the end this paper confirms that the philosophical reflection on identity and representation is not a theoretical project of abstractions but a basic tool to address the symbolic and structural violence that is rooted in contemporary warfare.

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