The Grammar of Oppression: How Language Warps Labor, Marginality, and the Wounded Body
M. Depardon / ICRC / Getty images
“Every successfully socialized agent,” writes Pierre Bourdieu, “possesses in their incorporated state the instruments of an ordering of the world.”[1] In other words, domination rarely needs to speak its name, it speaks through bodies. It is not through explicit coercion but through the sedimentation of gesture, posture, and speech that social hierarchies are made to feel natural. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus reveals how the most intimate aspects of bodily movement and language become carriers of social meaning, encoding classed, racialized, and gendered distinctions that precede consciousness and resist critique. In reading Bourdieu and those that write on gender and bodies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, language is seen as Polymorphous, in that it is a tool of communication and a mechanism of classification. It tags, ranks, and sorts bodies into categories that appear self-evident, even objective: unskilled, illegal, dependent, foreign are just some of these classifications. Words in this regard can play a sinister role in that they do more than describe--they replace. They overwrite wretchedness with order, subjugation with stereotype, lived violence with technocratic neatness. In the process, language helps to normalize the very systems of labor, migration, and marginalization that strip people of rights while cloaking dispossession and subjugation in the rational grammar of bureaucracy and law. This essay traces how the works of Natasha Iskander and Heba Gowayed reveal the normalization of oppression through regimes of language, labor, and rights, demonstrating how the body, once spoken for, is no longer allowed to speak of its own suffering. The argument that follows will also point to how when the body does speak, as Basha’s Naila and the Uprising shows, it is often caught in the machinery of normalization--not willfully or consented, but because the act of retelling is constrained by the grammars and expectations of the very systems that rendered it voiceless to begin with.
To begin with language as an instrument of damage, Iskander’s work offers a devastating indictment of how words become the architecture of harm. She poignantly sites the appearance of “skill” as a deceptively benign category that technocratically performs violent political work. Emblematic of this is the way Iskander begins chapter five, where the coffin and the body it carries are turned into a symbol of violence that is quiet, hidden, but bureaucratic, semantic, and meticulously disavowed. Through testimonies and discourse analysis, the reader views Qatar’s World Cup labor economy from the category of “skill” where such binaries operate as a linguistic apparatus of exclusion, naturalizing division between those whose labor is valued and protected and those whose very death is stripped of meaning and stripped, too, of even the pause to reflect on the loss of life inflicted. Central to Iskander’s critique is the distinction she draws between how “injury” and “accident” are understood, pointing to the legal grammar that constitutes violence, deciding what counts as harm and who is permitted to be harmed.[2]
With Iskander, the reader toggles with how the concept of “skill” acts as a proxy for moral and political recognition, where “skilled” workers are provided better pay and a kind of ontological value that stands in stark contrast to that of the “unskilled.”[3] In this regard, “skilled” workers are seen as rational actors, capable of decision-making, deserving of rights, while the “unskilled,” -- those who are largely racialized, migrant men from the global majority--are constructed as bodies without intellect, without interiority, and ultimately, without recourse. When the “unskilled” die from cardiac arrest, heat exhaustion, or collapsed scaffolding, their death is labeled “natural,” “unforeseeable,” or “statistical.”[4] The body, in such cases, becomes a site of bureaucratic exoneration. Iskander argues that in the Qatari context, a worker must die in a particular way, with traceable wounds, in order to be recognized as injured. Otherwise, their death is categorized not as violence, but as a failure--of the body, of luck, of fate.
This is where Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence[5] is helpful. The classification of workers as “unskilled” becomes a social fiction with real, detrimental consequences, shaping the worker’s habitus, their way of sensing and being in the world, while simultaneously justifying their disposability. Through this label, suffering is rendered ordinary and normalized. Iskander critiques this normalization as a transformation of structural exploitation into administrative routine. To be labeled “unskilled” is to be excluded from the right to be injured, and therefore, from the right to accountability, to justice, or even to be mourned.
Even more insidious is the way language, and how it is deployed, disqualifies the living. Iskander notes that global conversations around labor conditions often focus on the dead, with “skilled” analysts counting coffins, measuring mortality rates, and comparing injury statistics. As the dead are made legible and worthy of analysis, the living worker who endures unbearable heat, psychological degradation, and long-term physiological harm is rendered epistemically illegible, left out of headlines, and unaccounted for by the “skilled” analyst. Their accounts of nausea, confusion, chronic pain, and conditions that make the body suffer are dismissed as unprovable or irrelevant unless they match a forensic model of injury. In this sense, the category of “skill” transforms from a discipline of labor to a discipline of pain itself where pain is only legible if it can be translated by an expert. And when it cannot, it is the worker, not the system, who is deemed faulty, negligible, and undeserving of remedy.
While Qatar’s World Cup economy disqualified the body from its own suffering under the regime of “skill,” Heba Gowayed shows how that same process unfolds in the language of humanitarianism. Her book Refuge touches on how becoming a refugee cannot, and has not, been defined by the simple act of crossing a border, but rather as a process in which the body is renamed, rerouted, its story rewritten. Through ethnographic research, Gowayed parallels being a refugee to a social sentence that cleaves a life in half, marked by a before and an after. Like “unskilled,” her use of “refugee” highlights how recognition for alleviation is only granted through a demand that the body and its beholder face erasure.[6] The body in this instance must be emptied of its political memory, its histories of labor, care, and community before it can face its savior. It’s a process of emptying out the individual so that they can be filled with institutional scripts that, much like the tagging of “skill,” strips authorship.
Throughout much of her book, Gowayed confronts the brutal irony of institutions that claim to protect the displaced. Her brief discussion on the very process that Syrians fleeing war are met with--a battery of forms, interviews, orientation modules, and metrics of integration--is critical to our understanding of the mechanisms that normalize state power dynamics over the individual. The first instance in which the host country reveals itself to those seeing resettlement is in its demand that those applying must be studied, rendered knowable, surveyed, surveilled, and ultimately simplified. This is done ostensibly on humanitarian grounds. However, Gowayed’s work makes clear that it is, in fact, a filtering process, one designed to manage bodies deemed passive, grateful, and in need of training to control. Through this immediate interaction, those seeking resettlement are made to understand that their past, what they built, owned, or were taught, is irrelevant to the institutional gaze.
Here is where Gowayed is most chilling. In analyzing her work, the reader sees state humanitarianism beyond the veil of aid to the displaced, but as a form of epistemic violence that repackages displacement itself. The refugee is not met, they are formatted. What they lived is overwritten by what can be processed. Their memories are not preserved but compressed into fundable scripts. It is not that they are seen as empty, it is that they must be emptied to be seen. The refugee is not asked to speak, but to repeat. Not to narrate, but to comply. Like Iskander, reading Gowayed can show how language locks bodies into roles that feel inevitable. Refugees are asked to narrate their pain, but only within a narrow discursive window: you can grieve, but not rage; you can miss home, but not criticize the host; you can remember, but only selectively. Their suffering must be legible to the social worker, the case officer, the NGO report writer. It must be palatable, fundable, redeemable. In the process, the refugee becomes estranged from their own story to meet the state’s requirements.
Gowayed describes how many of the Syrians she worked with would introduce themselves through the lives they lived before the label. “I was a carpenter,” “I ran my own business,” “We were mabsooteen.”[7] Without overanalyzing, these introductions should be understood as attempts to cling to a temporal dignity that predates their fall into legibility. Much of their stories are warped in nostalgia and counter-narratives, that illuminate their refusal to be compressed into the role of victim. But even these acts of remembrance risk reabsorption into the very frame they resist. A man who identifies as a skilled tradesman was directed to a resume-building seminar; a mother who recalls communal life enrolled in “integration classes.”[8] Those seeking settlement abide by such ways to integrate. But as Gowayed, Cooper, and others[9] have argued, integration and assimilation for many coming to the West is a euphemism for re-education.
The violence Gowayed exposes is slow, intimate, procedural. It is seen in the waiting rooms, felt in the translation errors, felt by the patronizing workshops on how to be “independent” in a society that denies access to work, housing, and status. And it is especially evident in the gendered dimensions of displacement. Women, in particular, are hailed into programs meant to “empower” them, while their social positions, skills, and labor histories are systematically erased. One woman recalls how she was expected to be both invisible and inspirational: the ideal refugee is not just traumatized but resilient, grateful, quiet, and easy to fundraise around.
In Gowayed’s hands, “refugee” becomes less a category of protection than a technique of management. Like “unskilled,” it reorganizes social life around a set of bureaucratically authorized fictions. It normalizes rupture by narrativizing it, repackaging trauma in digestible formats, and ultimately, removing it from the sphere of politics. Refugees on the outside are seen as merely “displaced people” with needs, but how they’re treated are simply just another case study with paperwork. Since the inception of the system, refugees are expected to adapt, not critique; to assimilate, not ask why they were displaced in the first place. The label does not merely travel with them, rather it replaces them and they in turn must fit into its wardrobe.
When the “unskilled” and the “refugee” resist, when they fight for the right to have rights, as Naila and the Uprising portrays, their messages are often coddled in a language and rhythm that ultimately shields the power dynamics underlying the status quo.[10] Before continuing, it must be stated clearly that this essay veers away from presentism, from retroactively condemning Palestinians for the methods they chose in their historical moment. That is not our purpose here.
Immediately, from the opening frames, the audience is presented with 1967 as the beginning of the Question of Palestine, which is a framing that is deeply problematic. This approach reproduces a narrative long used to absolve Israel of its foundational ethnic cleansing prior to the Six-Day War and to confer retrospective legitimacy onto the Zionist project in Palestine. For Palestinians, this framing is too impactful on their daily conditions to be dismissed as historical oversight. Rather, it is experienced as an act of erasure: it severs the ongoing theft of land, the dismemberment of Palestinian life, from its roots in the Nakba. It recasts catastrophe as inevitability and positions the original dispossession as a regrettable prelude to conflict - a conflict normalized by the very powers that orchestrated it.
As Pierre Bourdieu teaches, the structuring structures of a historical moment continue to persist due to human internalization in the habitus, shaping not only how individuals act, but how they perceive history, struggle, and even possibility itself. Thus, even when Palestinians resist, as they do so powerfully in Naila and the Uprising, they often navigate within grammars, frames, and temporalities imposed by the very systems that first rendered them voiceless. On the surface, when 1967 is posited as the "beginning," one can read it as a narrative choice, but on a deeper level, the choice or the mirage of choice is the imposition of a colonial structure of meaning that invisibilizes the foundational violence of 1948 and normalizes the present order.[11]
Another facet of this dynamic appears when Jamal, Naila’s husband, seeks the release of his wife by utilizing the platform of Israeli journalists. Here, the documentary reveals, perhaps unintentionally, the deeper workings of the colonial habitus where the success of Palestinian liberation, in this frame, relies on the amplification of their plight by figures situated within the dominant order. The microphone, in this case, becomes a material symbol of a larger symbolic structure in which Palestinian suffering must be mediated, authenticated, and rendered "legible" through Israeli power to attain recognition.
In Bourdieu’s terms, even acts of resistance emerge from historically structured dispositions that are "regulated improvisations"[12] carried out within a field whose very parameters are shaped by domination. Resistance, as shown by Naila and the Uprising, bears the traces of conquest. The past is not simply remembered; it is embodied. It shapes what can be said, what can be heard, and what will be silenced.
In tracing these regimes of language, labor, and resistance, it becomes clear that domination today is less often enforced through overt violence than through the slow, intimate, and insidious reshaping of what bodies can say, what suffering can mean, and what futures can be imagined. The analysis of this essay relied on a reconstitution of what words mean, how they wound, and how they become instruments of naturalizing inequality, binding oppressed and oppressor, majority and minority, criminal and victim within the same enclosed field of power. As Bourdieu teaches, just as institutions reproduce domination, so too do bodies and minds themselves, as they are shaped to misrecognize violence with order and dispossession as destiny.
[1] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Pages 123-124
[2] Natasha Iskander, “Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond,” in Body: HOW DEFINITIONS OF SKILL CAUSE INJURY (Princeton University Press, 2021), 184–215.
[3] Ibid Page 200-206
[4] Iskander, “Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond.” Page 190
[5] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Page 17
[6] Heba Gowayed, “Becoming a Refugee,” in Refuge (Princeton University Press eBooks, 2022), 17–40, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691235127.
[7] Heba Gowayed, “Becoming a Refugee,” Refuge. Page 20
[8] Heba Gowayed, “German Credentialization,” in Refuge (Princeton University Press eBooks, 2022), 85–110, \
[9] The list is long, for a compressive list, see
Cooper, Tova. The Autobiography of Citizenship : Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education. 1st ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813570167.
[10] Naila and the Uprising (Just Vision, 2017), https://justvision.org/nailaandtheuprising/watch.
[11] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Pages 72-87
[12] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Pages 79