Bodies at the Border: How Liberal Feminism Erases Women

A report that dates back to July 2024 claims that over 10,000 women have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. UN Women gives it a slogan, calls it a “war on women”. 

The gendered nature of state-sponsored violence is not new. Wars, and in this case genocide, have been built upon the hierarchies of masculinity; control and domination being promoted as ‘strength.’ In Gaza, where the conflict of borders extends to the humanitarian, reproductive, and domestic spaces of women’s lives, their suffering becomes collateral to male power.

Liberal feminism, and agencies founded on its tenets, claim solidarity for women everywhere. Yet, this very solidarity falters when womanhood exists outside of the Western frame of autonomy and democracy. Feminist discourse rooted in European liberalism finds itself uneasy when confronting women whose lives are shaped by occupation and displacement

In Palestine, the language of ‘saving women’ often becomes another instrument of erasure, a form of pinkwashing that sanitises militarism with feminist rhetoric.

Here, gender is not merely an effect of war; it becomes the organising principle. The checkpoint, the maternity ward, and the humanitarian tent all become spaces where patriarchy, nationalism, and militarism converge to redraw who counts as human and who counts as saved.

The Gender of Occupation 

Occupation redraws the boundaries of womanhood itself. In Gaza, the gendered nature of occupation rears its head — it is seen in bombarded homes, in the deliberate starvation of their bodies, and the reality of childbirth and pregnancy without proper maternity care. 

Occupation domesticates war. It reaches kitchens and hospitals, defeating the long-drawn myth of the strictly political realm. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), approximately 14,000 women in Gaza are at high risk during pregnancy, with 23% of births being preterm and around 10,000 neonates requiring immediate care annually. These figures point to the dire situation faced by pregnant women in the region, where access to essential healthcare services is severely limited.

Feminist scholars like Cynthia Elnoe talk about how women under occupation are often entrusted with reproducing the nation, both literally and symbolically. In Gaza, women raise children under siege and perform care work that is both invisible and essential. The same global gaze that frames Palestinian resistance as terror often paints these women as helpless victims in need of saving.

This narrative is not new. During the French occupation of Algeria, the colonial civilising mission was promoted under ‘liberating’ muslim women from the veil. Joan Scott, in The Politics of the Veil, points to how unveiling ceremonies were staged as ‘proof’ that French rule brought enlightenment. The veil became a spectacle, a symbol of backwardness that supposedly only colonialism could get rid of. Algerian women who took to veiling as an expression of defiance came to be seen as submissive instead of independent. 

This pattern, where ‘saving women’ becomes a moral pretext for occupation, keeps replaying. The same language resurfaces today when Western liberal feminists justify or ignore Israeli violence under the banner of democracy or women’s rights. Palestinian women do not fit the image of the ideal feminist subject. They are not secular enough, not liberated enough, not grateful enough for the world’s selective empathy.

The gender of occupation, then, lies in this paradox: women’s suffering is hyper-visible when it can serve imperial morality, and invisible when it indicts it. Whether in Algiers or Gaza, the empire always finds a way to make patriarchy look like progress.

The Feminist Dilemma: Whose Liberation Counts?

If colonialism taught us anything, it was that women’s bodies can be both battlefield and trophy. The partition of India offers a brutal example. According to Urvashi Butalia, thousands of women were abducted, raped, or murdered, their bodies treated as instruments of revenge between communities. 

Their suffering, however, rarely became part of the public story; nationalist histories celebrated borders and nationhood while silencing female trauma. The partition was relegated to the background while Nehru spoke of the nation’s infamous Tryst with Destiny. Women’s bodies, mutilated and tattooed with the intention of dishonour, were seen as a mark on the nation’s glory. 

Across the world, similar dynamics unfold. In Iran, the hijab has become a flashpoint, a symbol politicised both internally and by external observers. Western liberal feminists often frame their removal as liberation, yet Iranian women’s own movements complicate this narrative. Many advocate for choice, dignity, and safety under authoritarian regimes, resisting simplistic binaries imposed by outsiders. Feminist solidarity that ignores these contexts risks erasing the women it claims to champion.

In Gaza, this dilemma is magnified. Global attention frames Palestinian women either as victims to be rescued or as symbols of a broader nationalist struggle. Those who resist occupation on their own terms, being a part of women-led collectives,  being writers, activists, often find themselves marginalised in international feminist discourse. The liberal gaze prefers narratives it can consume: women who resemble the West’s idea of emancipation, who perform liberation according to external scripts. The result is a feminism that praises power where it already exists and neglects the courage and resilience of those whose struggle cannot be neatly packaged.

The question becomes urgent: whose liberation counts, and according to whose standards? Across Algeria, India, Iran, and Gaza, we see that when the world attempts to save women,  it often ignores the structures (patriarchy, occupation, militarism) that shape their lives. True solidarity demands more than rescue; it requires listening, centering the women themselves, and recognising that freedom is not universal.  It is lived, contextually, and sometimes painfully, in the spaces of survival.

Rethinking Feminism Beyond Liberal Scripts 

The histories we have traced reveal a troubling pattern: women’s liberation is too often defined by the frameworks of those in power. Liberal-democratic ideals, rooted in the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, were formulated to preserve property and a laissez-faire economy dominated by men. 

Feminism that uncritically adopts these frameworks risks repeating the same exclusions, applying a standard of freedom that never accounted for women under occupation, in exile, or resisting structural violence.

True solidarity demands that feminism be untethered from these historical legacies. It must recognise the political, cultural, and material conditions that shape women’s lives, instead of imposing an alien template of empowerment. 

Palestinian women, like their counterparts in Algeria, India, and Iran, do not need saving according to Western norms. They demand acknowledgment of their courage and resilience within systems designed to constrain them.

Suppose liberation is to have meaning beyond rhetoric. In that case, feminism must be reimagined as a practice that listens, centers the lived realities of women across contexts, and resists co-option by power. It is not a universal script of choice or consumption; it is a recognition that freedom is lived, negotiated, and fiercely embodied, often in spaces that the world has long overlooked.