Women Lacking Femininity: A feminist investigation
DAWN is proud to announce the first recipient of the DAWN Fellowship: Nour Mohammad Jabr Bader, a 39-year-old Palestinian sociologist, farmer, mother, and feminist. Nour teaches at Bethlehem University, cultivates the land as a political and epistemic act, and produces decolonial feminist knowledge rooted in struggle, survival, and the refusal to be silenced.
Her project, titled “Women Lacking Femininity: The Experience of Palestinian Women Diagnosed with Breast Cancer After Mastectomy in the West Bank”, offers a powerful narrative-based analysis of breast cancer, gender, and inequality under occupation.
This research connects directly with DAWN’s Political Economy of Conflict and Gender-Based Violence framework, which examines how political, economic, social, and ideological processes intersect to shape conflict-related violence against women.
Rather than treating breast cancer solely as a medical issue, she reads it as a site where cultural, colonial, and class violence converge, where bodies are marked, reshaped, and disciplined according to social expectations of femininity and worth. Her research reveals how occupation, militarisation, and health exclusions rooted in class shape Palestinian women’s experiences of mastectomy, situating the procedure within broader structures that produce both physical and structural harm.
By tracing the intersections of gender norms, systemic barriers, and unequal health systems, her work reflects DAWN’s feminist analysis of how economies, power, and the gender order are sustained during and after conflict, while challenging dominant health and peacebuilding narratives and centring women’s lived experiences as spaces of resistance and knowledge-making.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, I thought I was going to lose her. I cried a lot; I felt as if the world was collapsing. But out of that pain, something deeper than fear began to grow inside me: a new awareness of this unspoken wound. Since that moment, my relationship with illness has become a journey of searching for the hidden meanings of pain, for the women who silently endure this experience, and for the bodies that are lost and reshaped without being listened to […] I will continue this personal inspiration with the DAWN Rising Fellowship, where I dedicate my research to exploring the open wound not merely as a medical tragedy, but as a gateway to a deeper understanding of identity, power, and life.
Nour Bader
Research focus: the body as contested terrain
Nour’s work interrogates how the post-mastectomy body becomes a battleground of meaning, stigma, and exclusion. It identifies three main layers of violence:
- Colonial violence, in the form of health infrastructure collapse under occupation, restricts early detection and treatment, forcing many Palestinian women to undergo preventive mastectomies as the only accessible option.
- Cultural violence, where the breast is symbolically tied to femininity—both as an aesthetic marker (for consumption) and as a reproductive organ (for motherhood). Its loss is perceived as a gendered punishment that strips women of socially accepted femininity.
- Class violence, as breast reconstruction is considered a luxury, not a right. Excluded from insurance coverage, reconstruction becomes an elite privilege, exposing health-based classism and unequal access to healing.
Within this framework, Nour introduces the concept of coercive gender identity as a mechanism of control within the gender economy. This identity is imposed on women through two interconnected mechanisms: cultural stigmatisation of bodily difference, and institutional denial of reconstruction for those who cannot afford it. Thus, the “acceptable” female body becomes not a given, but a class-based ideal available only to the privileged.
Methodology and epistemic location
This project builds on feminist narrative ethnography, institutional analysis of healthcare under occupation, and decolonial feminist theory rooted in the Palestinian experience. It is shaped by Nour’s multi-positionality as:
- A daughter who accompanied her mother through breast cancer,
- A mother raising children under colonial necropolitics,
- A farmer reclaiming land and selfhood through seeds and seasons,
- A scholar who resists dominant knowledge frameworks and writes from, with, and for her people.
By listening to the lived realities of Palestinian women after mastectomy, she developed the theoretical concept of “The Exposing Scar.” This concept powerfully captures how political power, medical authority, and social norms intersect to shape and discipline the female body under occupation.
I belong to the land as a farmer, practising my relationship with soil, seeds, and seasons—not merely as a source of nourishment, but as an extension of identity, resistance, and steadfastness. I also live the position of motherhood within a context of systematic daily necropolitics, raising my children under a colonial regime that strips life away piece by piece, redefining the everyday meaning of survival. […] I work on deconstructing breast cancer, not as an isolated medical condition, but as a structure of overlapping authorities, where gendered, cultural, political, and economic violence converge and manifest in the body as a site of both symbolic and material struggle.”
Nour Bader
Nour’s work embodies the radical epistemic potential at the heart of DAWN’s mission: reclaiming the body, rewriting knowledge, and building feminist futures from places of silence and struggle. Through the DAWN Rising Fellowship, Nour had the opportunity to expand this work with guidance and visibility. DAWN’s feminist community will learn with and from her insights, and gain an urgent, powerful voice: one that speaks through pain, political memory, and resistance.
Genocide reshapes fear, care, and the very conditions of survival.”
As our DAWN Rising Fellow 2025-2026, in April 2026 Nour Bader presented a paper at the Specters of the Undercommons Conference, at the American University in Cairo. By analysing motherhood within a genocidal context, she interrogated the ethical and embodied dimensions of raising children when the everyday meaning of survival is systematically stripped away.
Justice is about changing the conditions that turn motherhood into a daily struggle against death.”
At our parallel event ‘Women’s Everyday Survival in War, Occupation, and Genocide’, at the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) NGO Forum, in March 2026, Nour Bader challenged us to rethink accountability in the context of genocide. By exposing the deliberate destruction of life-sustaining infrastructures, she reminds us that motherhood in Gaza is a matter of daily survival, which needs structural transformation rather than mere recognition of suffering.
The DAWN Rising Fellowship offered me far more than dedicated time to write; it gave me the space to think. Amid the daily demands of research, we often become preoccupied with answering questions rather than returning to question them. Throughout the fellowship, I found myself returning to my project from a different perspective, rethinking its concepts, and refining its theoretical foundations through thoughtful conversations with fellows and the DAWN team, who cultivated a space that was both intellectually rigorous and deeply supportive. It was a space where we could collectively reflect on questions of research, knowledge, and justice.
During the fellowship, I continued working on my research on the experiences of Palestinian women after mastectomy. Yet the discussions we shared encouraged me to deepen my theoretical inquiry and further develop the concept of “the Exposing Scar” as a way of understanding how political power, medical authority, and social norms intersect to shape the body after illness. More importantly, this process was not simply about refining a theoretical concept; it became an opportunity to rethink how knowledge is produced, the position from which I speak as a researcher, and the position from which women themselves speak as they narrate their lived experiences.
What I carry forward from this extends well beyond the pages I wrote. DAWN reaffirmed for me that knowledge production does not begin with theory alone; it begins with listening to the stories that emerge from experiences of pain and struggle, and with recognising that lived experiences are not merely empirical material to be analysed, but sites from which theory itself can emerge.
The fellowship has become a defining milestone in my academic journey and has strengthened my commitment to contributing to a critical feminist knowledge project rooted in feminist scholarship from the global South, one that restores women’s voices and lived experiences as legitimate sites of knowledge production, rather than treating them merely as objects of study or cases to be interpreted from the outside.”
Nour Bader
Farmer, researcher, and DAWN Rising Fellow 2025
July 2026