Women Unsilenced: Hope, Freedom, and Music in Palestine - Paperback

by Sommer Helweh Forrester (Author)

Women Unsilenced: Hope, Freedom, and Music in Palestine explores how Palestinian women use music to express, protest, and celebrate their identities. Divided into two parts, the book is told through two different narrative styles. In Part 1, the author uses evocative autoethnography to illuminate their experiences of traveling through Palestine and meeting the women whose stories they tell through narrative case studies in Part 2. They share harrowing accounts of daily life that chronicle the untold stories of women living under military occupation and patriarchal oppression to challenge dominant narratives about Palestinians and women in the Middle East and disrupt assumptions that are rooted in settler-colonialist and imperialist narratives.

Offering an intimate look at the lives and identities of Palestinian women as celebrated through music, this is a useful resource for students and scholars across Music Education, Women and Gender Studies, and Political Science. It will also be of interest to those completing their own narrative research and the general reader wanting to learn more about Palestinian women's everyday lives.

Author Biography

Sommer Helweh Forrester is Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Toronto, Canada.