Polly Withers

London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Media and Communications, Faculty Member

University of Exeter, College of Social Sciences and International Studies, Graduate Student

Council for British Research in the Levant, Research, Post-Doc

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I work as Leverhulme ECF at the LSE Middle East Centre, where I hold a grant to research contemporary feminisms in the consumer cultures of the Levant. This project traces neoliberal shift in Palestine, in particular, through gendered and sociological lenses. I also work on alternative music and popular culture in Palestine, which I similarly examine through a gendered lens.

I have also worked as an LSE Fellow in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where I taught on issues related to global media, culture, feminism, and theories of media and communications. I was also a Research Officer in the Middle East Centre at LSE (2019-2021), where I led the project “Neoliberal Visions: Exploring Gendered Adverts and Identities in the Palestinian West Bank” (http://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/research/collaboration-programme/2019-20/polly-withers) in collaboration with Rema Hammami at BZU in Palestine. I also worked as as an ESRC LSE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the department of Media and Communications, (2018-2019), and as a Visiting Fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem (2017-2018).

I have an ESRC funded PhD in Middle East politics from the University of Exeter (2017), for which I was awarded the 2018 BRISMES-Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for best PhD dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic in the humanities and social sciences. My doctoral research explored the gendered politics of popular music in Palestine. It is the backdrop to my forthcoming monograph and various other publications developed from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine (Haifa, Ramallah, and Jerusalem) and its diasporas (in Amman and London) on the politics of ‘alternative’ music in Palestine.

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Papers by Polly Withers

Mediating queer masculinities through alternative music from Palestine

Feminist Media Studies, 2024

Queer feminist media studies habitually overlooks how popular communications mediate same-sex sex... more Queer feminist media studies habitually overlooks how popular communications mediate same-sex sexualities beyond the global northwest. Thinking with this gap, this paper problematises mediated queerness in the Arab world. I use the case study of "alternative" music in Israeli-dominated Palestine to theorise how far (or not) Palestinian vernacular modalities constitute a politics of sexuality above and below-although not necessarily in opposition to-the master-narratives of LGBTQ+ recognition, visibility, and the individual closet that often overshadow global commodity platforms. Drawing on my twenty-eight-month ethnography on "alternative" music in Palestine, I explore how queer-identifying Palestinian musicians use music, drag, and performance videos to self-fashion gender and sexual identities, in the context of dominant, media-friendly visions of queerness on digital networks. Through close reading of Bashar Murad's 2021 song and video, "maskhara" (mockery), and via interviews and ethnographic data, I argue that music constitutes a shifting politics of sexual (in)visibility in Palestine. Musicians move between visible and invisible queer subject positions, depending on audience, locality, and framing. Expanding the field's focus on Anglo-American sexual representations, then, the contribution theorises mediated queer cultural worldmaking in contexts of settler-colonisation and militarised occupation.

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Neoliberal Visions? Exploring Gendered Media and Popular Culture in the Palestinian West Bank

LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series (79), 2023

Walking through Ramallah, it is hard not to notice the commercial advertising billboards, TV scre... more Walking through Ramallah, it is hard not to notice the commercial advertising billboards, TV screens, and posters that line the city’s streets. They frequently feature bright glossy images of young nuclear families – always a man and a woman, often with light skin – gazing longingly at ‘dream’ homes. These materials document how capital and aspiration are increasingly enfolded into everyday space in post-Oslo Palestine. They particularly show how neoliberal ‘reforms’ have transformed Palestine’s political economy over (at least) the past 30 years. Indeed, Ramallah today embodies the complexities wrought by the Oslo process more than any other space in Palestine: its inhabitants paradoxically live under a colonial present shaped by neoliberal capitalism. While recent works consider how such shifts reformulate the political economy of occupied Palestine, and/or reroute the struggle for national liberation, rarely are the cultural practices and media forms that mark, embody and communicate such political and economic changes centralised as sites of meaning-making. Even less forthcoming is work that explores how such representations cultivate shifts in gender and sexuality norms. This project offers a different interpretation of the West Bank’s neoliberal order that moves beyond these traditional theoretical straightjackets. Using textual and qualitative methods, it foregrounds both the production and consumption of gendered advertisements as a way to explore how neoliberal culture constructs gendered subjectivity. It broadly asks how transforming forms of political economy, social relations and cultural practices relate to changing modes of gendered subjectivity in contemporary Palestine.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/middle-east-centre/publications/paper-series

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/121019/?_gl=1*1qlwtyg*_ga*MTY5Mzk1MzExOC4xNjg5OTQ5Njk5*_ga_LWTEVFESYX*MTcwMjM3Njk1MS4zMi4xLjE3MDIzNzcwNDguNjAuMC4w

Digital feminisms in Palestinian hip hop

Global hip hop studies , 2022

This paper focuses on digital feminisms in Palestinian hip hop. Recently, Palestinian youth built... more This paper focuses on digital feminisms in Palestinian hip hop. Recently, Palestinian youth built a subculture they title the ‘alternative’ scene. Hip-hop is central and, lately, some rappers started making feminist tracks. In this paper, I analyse artists’ digital productions, as well as interviews with musicians, to examine what happens when hip-hop gets feminist and goes digital in the Palestinian context. My argument is twofold. First, I suggest that rappers circulate songs and videos on social media that transgress gender and sexuality norms. Second, however, while these productions ‘do’ critical identity work in Palestine, they also often iterate liberal 'solutions' to structural asymmetries. I therefore conclude that digital hip hop mediates multiple and often contradictory Arab feminisms as it travels online. Neither dystopic nor utopian, digital culture makes room for gendered critiques that co-exist and compete with depoliticised ideas about liberal personhood and individual agency.

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Feminism ruptured, or feminism repaired? Music, feminisms, and gender politics in Palestinian subcultures

The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Loubna Skalli and Nahed Eltantawy , 2023

Feminist media studies routinely ignores how popular music shapes femininities and feminisms. Mor... more Feminist media studies routinely ignores how popular music shapes femininities and feminisms. Moreover, while scholarship on gender and communication addresses intersections between feminist politics and social media in the global north, the global south remains undertheorized. This chapter fills these gaps. It examines the contradictory ways in which subcultural music communicates gender in contemporary Palestine. Withers asks how young adults’ cultural practices simultaneously rupture and reproduce gendered power structures at different geopolitical scales. She makes two arguments. First, that young women and men play with patriarchal codes through lyrics and performances. Such transmissions disrupt heteropatriarchal expectations about identity and desire. Second, however, popular music does not constitute utopian sites of wholesale gender ‘emancipation’. While transgressing some gender norms, performances – and musicians’ framings of their performances – often assert novel controls. Young women particularly mobilise postfeminist frames to assert their personal ‘success’. These narratives foreground migratory (neo)liberal scripts of gendered freedom, sutured to individual agency, choice, and autonomy. The paper therefore concludes that as these young adults challenge local gender codes, they simultaneously conform to transnational, postfeminist notions of gendered ‘progress’. Thus, neither fully resistant nor entirely compromised, musicians’ practices highlight the ambiguous ways that music communicates gender in Palestine.

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Neoliberal Visions: Exploring Gendered Adverts and Identities in the Palestinian West Bank

Middle East Centre Blog, 2020

A Palestinian flag, an olive tree, and Jerusalem’s iconic Dome of the Rock mosque. Three icons at... more A Palestinian flag, an olive tree, and Jerusalem’s iconic Dome of the Rock mosque. Three icons at the heart of Palestinian resistance and its visual mediation. These three national metonyms are similarly central in this billboard advertisement (Figure 1), blazoned above a car park in downtown Ramallah in summer 2018. Here, however, they do not perform the Palestinian nation, Palestinian nationalism, or cultural politics. Instead, they are themes through which a mobile phone company (Jawwal) brands a particular product (line rental) to an imagined future client. In this advert, then, historic national iconography is articulated to capitalist marketing culture, and the political project of liberating Palestine catapulted into a bygone era – useful only insofar as it might prompt people to select this commodity rather than another, from an ever-swelling consumer marketplace.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/06/01/neoliberal-visions-exploring-gendered-adverts-and-identities-in-the-palestinian-west-bank/

Ramallah ravers and Haifa hipsters: gender, class, and nation in Palestinian popular culture

British Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021

Palestinian popular music is usually researched through two frameworks: as folkloric identity or ... more Palestinian popular music is usually researched through two frameworks: as folkloric identity or resistance to Israeli occupation. This paper stretches beyond these theoretical straitjackets. Based on two-years of qualitative fieldwork in Ramallah and Haifa, it explores how DJs and party-goers negotiate ‘everyday’ power through popular culture. It argues that dance floors create alternative semi-publics from wider established spaces. Such sites form temporary liminalities where young adults rehearse unconventional identities. Dress and dance assert femininities, masculinities, and queer subjectivities centred on pleasure, joy, and fun. Audience spaces become important sites of identity formation and negotiation. However, since such aesthetic subjectivities are forged through consumption, youth require money (for clothes, tickets, time) to participate. Undoing gender and sexuality codes therefore relies on class-based hierarchies. Tracing identity embodiments on dance floors reveals neither dissent nor acquiescence to hegemonic controls. Rather, as class structures cement, gender and sexuality modes shift (and novel controls are instantiated). This, I argue, highlights a fractured, contaminated form of agency that challenges liberal assumptions about linear emancipatory action. While scholarship tends to link music to politics in Palestine, gender performances on dance floors thus yield nuanced insights into power, play, and social (re)imagination within emerging Palestinian expressive formations. This, I conclude, underscores the pressing need to approach popular culture in MENA and elsewhere beyond the overdetermined resistance/compliance binary.

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Tracing the alternative music scene in post-Oslo Palestine https://cbrl.ac.uk/news/item/name/urban-palestinian-youths-translocal-musical-practices

Conference Presentations by Polly Withers

"I’m not a Palestinian Musician, I’m a musician who happens to be Palestinian": Negotiating Nationalisms in Youth Popular Music in Palestine

https://palestinianstudies.org/workshops/2015/people/polly-withers Brown University, Palestinian... more

Talks by Polly Withers

Feminist media studies in the Middle East https://soundcloud.com/lsemiddleeastcentre/the-politics-of-representation-feminist-media-studies-in-the-middle-east

LSE-HBKU partnership, 2023

Link: https://soundcloud.com/lsemiddleeastcentre/the-politics-of-representation-feminist-media-st... more

Mediating queer masculinities through alternative music from Palestine

Feminist Media Studies, 2024

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Neoliberal Visions? Exploring Gendered Media and Popular Culture in the Palestinian West Bank

LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series (79), 2023

Digital feminisms in Palestinian hip hop

Global hip hop studies , 2022

Download

Feminism ruptured, or feminism repaired? Music, feminisms, and gender politics in Palestinian subcultures

The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Loubna Skalli and Nahed Eltantawy , 2023

Download

Neoliberal Visions: Exploring Gendered Adverts and Identities in the Palestinian West Bank

Middle East Centre Blog, 2020

Ramallah ravers and Haifa hipsters: gender, class, and nation in Palestinian popular culture

British Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021

Download

"I’m not a Palestinian Musician, I’m a musician who happens to be Palestinian": Negotiating Nationalisms in Youth Popular Music in Palestine

https://palestinianstudies.org/workshops/2015/people/polly-withers Brown University, Palestinian... more

LSE-HBKU partnership, 2023

Link: https://soundcloud.com/lsemiddleeastcentre/the-politics-of-representation-feminist-media-st... more

Polly Withers

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