How do you say "come out of the closet" In Arabic? Queer activism and the politics of visibility in Israel-Palestine

GLQ

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 557-576

  Ritchie, Jason ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78449273159     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2010-004     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Alejandro Lugo, "Theorizing Border Inspections", Cultural Dynamics 12 (2000):355;
2. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992), 27.
3. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 18, 27.
4. During eighteen months o feldwork in Israel-Palestine in 2007 and 2008, I conducted unstructured interviews of approximately two hours in duration with Mike Hamel, the chair of HaAguda, and Shaul Ganon, the leader of its Palestinian Rescue Project; Sa'ar Netanel, a prominent activist and openly gay member of the Jerusalem city council; and Rauda Morcos, the former chair of Aswat, a Palestinian lesbian organization based in Haifa. With Haneen Maikey, the chair of Al-Qaws, a queer Palestinian organization based in Jerusalem, I conducted two formal interviews and, as a volunteer for Al-Qaws and regular participant in its meetings and events, had countless informal conversations that have informed my argument here. These interviews are only a few of the many I conducted as part of my dissertation research with a large number of queer Palestinian activists and "ordinary" people in Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank (including a smaller number of queer Israeli Jews).
5. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 161;
6. Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World", Public Culture 14 (2002):361-85.
7. Yossi Klein Halevi, "Tel Aviv Dispatch: Refugee Status", New Republic, August 19, 2002, www.tnr.com/article/refugee-status.
8. An incomplete but revealing list of sources that rely on Halevi's article ranges from the more-balanced Michael Kagan and Anat Ben-Dor, Nowhere to Run: Palestinian Asylum-Seekers in Israel (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Buchman Faculty of Law, 2008), available online at www.law.tau.ac.il/Heb/Uploads/ dbsAttachedFiles/NowheretoRun.pdf, to the neoconservative gay writer James Kirchick's "Queer Theory: The Columbia Professor Who Also Doesn't Think Gay People Exist in the Arab World", New Republic, October 15, 2007, reprinted by Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch, www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4253. Halevi's article is also, for example, heavily cited in an American Zionist organization's anti-Palestinian public relations materials (Stand With Us, "LGBT Rights under the Palestinian Authority" [2007], www.standwithus.org/pdfs/fyers/LGBT-booklet.pdf);
9. the BBC journalist Brian Whitaker's popular book, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006);
10. and an absurd "quiz" about gay rights published in a Chicago gay publication that attempts to demonstrate the hypocrisy of "leftist" gays who support Palestinians (Paul Varnell, "Israel, Palestine, and Gays", Chicago Free Press, August 28, 2002).
11. For some popular examples of Ganon's expertise in action, see Mazal Mualem, "Mechàa àl girosh homoèem filasteeneem lagada" ("Protest against the Deportation of Gay Palestinians to the West Bank"), Haaretz, March 6, 2003;
12. William Goodwin, "Palestine's Oppression of Gays Should Not Be Ignored", Daily Trojan, March 13, 2003;
13. Bret Stephens, "Gay Pride-and Israel's", Jerusalem Post, June 19, 2003;
14. Dan Williams, "Palestinian Gay Runaways Survive in Israeli Streets", Reuters News, September 17, 2003;
15. "Palestinian Gays Flee to Israel", BBC News, October 22, 2003;
16. Dan Baron, "Palestinian Gays Seek Safety in Israel", Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 15, 2004;
17. Eric Beauchemin, "In Limbogay Palestinians", Radio Netherlands, August 3, 2004;
18. Ray Moran, "Ve mà im redifat homoèem filasteeneem bi rashot?" ("And What about the Persecution o Gay Palestiniansin the PA?"), Maariv, July 20, 2006.
19. Although my focus here is on Israel, it is my position, following Étienne Balibar, that Israel is only one extreme illustration of the broader truth that "racism... maintains a necessary relation with nationalism and contributes to constituting it by producing the fictive ethnicity around which it is organized" (Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Race, Class, Nation [London: Verso, 1991], 49).
20. See, e.g., Sherry Lowrance, "Being Palestinian in Israel: Identity, Protest, and Political Exclusion", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 25 (2005):487-99.
21. James Kirchick, "Queers for Palestine?" Advocate, January 28, 2009, www.advocate.com/exclusive-detail-ektid71844.asp.
22. See also Libby Post, "Supporting Israel-It's the Gay Thing to Do", shewired.com, January 12, 2009, www.shewired.com/Article.cfm?ID=21339.
23. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 50. On the normalization of "queerness" in Israel and Zionist uses of the discourse of "tolerance
24. see Alisa Solomon, "Viva La Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights", in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 149-65.
25. The following story offers one concrete example of how queer Israeli liberalism is mobilized so as to justify violence against Palestinians. Back in December 2008 Haneen Maikey translated into Hebrew a series of SMS messages she received from a gay man in Gaza, describing his feelings as Israeli bombs fell around him. The text was then posted on a gay Israeli Web site, and elicited many responses. A number of readers posted sympathetic responses, but most readers either dismissed the piece as unreliable fabricated (pro-Palestinian) "propaganda" or, worse, justifed the imposition of Israeli military violence with reference to the homophobia of Hamas. "Is he aware", asked one respondent, "that his 'enemy' is a humane state that respects gays and grants [gays like himself] more extensive rights than many other countries?" Another reader wondered "why the poor guy is not fighting Hamas... a racist organization whose goal is not only the elimination of Israel and the Jews, but also the murdering of gays." A great number of responses followed a similar "logic." (Translations from Hebrew are my own.)
26. Adi Kuntsman, "The Soldier and the Terrorist: Sexy Nationalism, Queer Violence", Sexualities 11 (2008):162, 161.
27. Although not explicitly "queer", Women in Black (www.womeninblack.org) and Anarchists Against the Wall (www.awalls.org) are among several anti-occupation Israeli organizations whose members include radical queers. And as one critical reviewer for this article pointed out, some queer organizations-for example, Black Laundry and Jerusalem Open House-have challenged the activism of those such as HaAguda. It is, however, telling that, while HaAguda boasts broad name recognition, a substantial budget, and local branches throughout Israel, Black Laundry is a now defunct group that was unknown to the vast majority of queer Israelis and Palestinians, including activists. Two prior directors of Jerusalem Open House, Hagai El-Ad and Noa Sattah, were vocal critics of the occupation, and Open House initiated a "Palestinian" project that evolved into Al-Qaws, the first legally recognized organization for queer Palestinians. As far as I could discern during my feldwork, however, proponents of the view that "gay" issues and "political" issues like racism and the occupation are unrelated seem to have prevailed in the early debate that some Open House activists described to me. Additionally, but not insignificantly, the organization has not adopted a stance on Israeli policies toward Palestinians, and it offers no programming or services directed at Palestinians or speakers of Arabic.
28. Martin F. Manalansan IV, "In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma", GLQ 2 (1995):486.
29. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23.
30. Brown, States of Injury, 27.
31. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality", in Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 215.
32. Among Ganon's most interesting inaccuracies was his proclamation that the Arabic word for lesbian, sahiqiyya, comes "from the word, 'games, ' because she's really just playing games", a broader statement, for Ganon, about "the Arab culture", in which a woman who says "I want" will inevitably be answered with, "What? You don't want. You are a possession of the man. " In fact, sahiqiyya is a derogatory term that comes from the root for "to grind" or "crush", but if pronounced with a contemporary Israeli Hebrew accent, it sounds much like the Hebrew word for "to play." Most of Ganon's "knowledge" about "Arabs", while presented as objective truth, is similarly refracted through the lens of Israeli culture.
33. Raz Yosef, "The National Closet: Gay Israel in Yossi and Jagger", GLQ 11 (2005):286.
34. Massad, "Gay International", 362, 383, 385.
35. Jasbir K. Puar, "Mapping US Homonormativities", Gender, Place, and Culture 13 (2006):68.
36. The American Israeli director Eytan Fox's popular film The Bubble (Israel, 2006) takes this equation to its logical conclusion: the queer Palestinian victim becomes the terrorist.
37. Massad, "Gay International", 381, 385.
38. J. K. Gibson-Graham, "Querying Globalization", in Post-Colonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 244.
39. Janet R. Jakobsen, "Sex + Freedom = Regulation: Why?" Social Text, no. 84-85 (2005):304.
40. A related criticism of identity politics is outlined in Ziv's discussion of a "politics of identification" of the radical Israeli queer activist group Black Laundry. See her essay in this issue.
41. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community", in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, and Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), 236.
42. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
43. Silviano Santiago, "The Wily Homosexual (First-and Necessarily Hasty-Notes)", in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 18.