Between “Joseph's School” and “Jonah's Whale” Palestinian women's coping strategies and the temporal politics of incarceration

Abstract

This article examines how Palestinian women navigate imprisonment under shifting carceral regimes, focusing on the relationship between political context, prison temporality, and strategies of survival. Drawing on 65 testimonios with formerly imprisoned women, alongside published carceral narratives and archival accounts, the study challenges approaches that treat coping as a stable psychological disposition. Instead, it conceptualizes endurance as a historically contingent practice shaped by transformations in the prison itself. The article develops two analytical concepts grounded in women's own narratives: the School of Joseph, which captures periods in which minimal order, collective organization, and temporal continuity allowed prisoners to invest captivity with meaning, cultivate solidarity, and sustain future-oriented projects; and the Whale of Jonah, which describes moments of intensified repression marked by suspended time, bodily vulnerability, and the collapse of relational and ethical horizons. Through close engagement with testimonios spanning multiple periods—from the late 1960s to the aftermath of October 7, the article traces how practices such as learning, symbolic resistance, intimacy, marriage, and reproductive struggle became possible, and later structurally foreclosed. By centering Palestinian women's voices, the article contributes to carceral studies by foregrounding the temporal and relational dimensions of imprisonment in colonial and wartime contexts. It argues that the disappearance of outward-oriented practices of resistance signals not a decline in women's agency, but a transformation in the carceral regime itself, from one that sought to discipline life to one increasingly hostile to life-making altogether.