Keeping their powder dry: Purity, pollution, and handgun ownership among Jewish women in Israel

This article examines the gendered practices through which Jewish women in Israel experience and negotiate personal handgun ownership in everyday life. Drawing on interviews, participant observation in gun-related spaces, and analysis of women-only online forums, we explore the expanding participation of Jewish women in civilian gun ownership, and more specifically why these women are so invested in concealing their personal handguns despite the absence of any legal requirement to do so. We argue that concealment operates as a moral framework through which women manage the perceived incongruence between femininity and violence. Rather than signaling straightforward empowerment, women's armed citizenship is mediated through practices of secrecy, restraint, and bodily management that render violence morally acceptable without making it publicly visible or celebratory. Mobilizing anthropological frameworks of purity, pollution, and gendered moral order, we conceptualize these practices as producing a form of “purified violence”–-a feminized, domesticated mode of engagement with state-sanctioned force that both disrupts and reproduces dominant gender hierarchies within Israel's militarized ethno-national context.