Erasing and Reclaiming: How Gaza’s Women Survive Physical Violence

Abstract

This paper advances the Stratad Theory of Erasing and Reclaiming as a novel framework for understanding physical violence against women, with a particular focus on the experiences of Gaza’s women under conditions of war and occupation. The chief issue of erasing is conceptualised through the systematic violation of bodies, elimination of lives, and devastation of environments, enacted through raping, torturing, wounding, killing, murdering, executing, bombing, destroying, and displacing. In response, the central solution of reclaiming emerges as an agentic counterforce, articulated through resisting oppression, restoring lives, and rebuilding futures, with survivors and allies engaging in campaigning, engaging, participating, aiding, helping, supporting, rebuilding, reporting, and leading. By situating this theory alongside prior work—including Procurizing Land through Alternating Territorial Stratagems (Last 2019), Transducing Terror (Last 2020), Safetifying (Last 2020), and Humanising (Last 2024)—and broader feminist and anti-violence literature, the paper offers a theoretically grounded and empirically sensitive analysis of the dialectic between violence and survival. The paper concludes with a call to recognise, amplify, and materially support acts of reclaiming, positioning theory not merely as analytic but as a vital intervention into the conditions of women’s survival.