Introduction: Israelis, Palestinians, queers: Points of departure

GLQ

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 493-516

  Hochberg, Gil Z ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 78449290875     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2010-001     Document Type: Review

References (80)

1. All quotations from the memorial service are taken from Atila Shomplavi, "The Killer's Shots Hurt Us All", in the online edition of the Israeli evening paper Yediot Acharonot (in Hebrew), August 8, 2009, www.ynet.co.il/articles/1, 7340, L-3758894, 00.html. All translations from sources not in English throughout the introduction are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2. For an extended account that traces the nationalization of the discourse of gay rights and the assimilation of the gay rights movement in Israel, see Alisa Solomon's fine essay "Viva la Diva: Post Zionism and Gay Rights", 5in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 149-65.
3. Itsik Dror, interview, H a-ir, August 14, 2009. Ha-ir is a popular weekly newspaper published in Tel Aviv.
4. For the historical background behind the emergence of "queer" in U. S. academic and gay rights activist circles, see Michael Warner's introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii-xxxi.
5. On the medieval origins of the Arabic terms for lesbianism (sahq, sihaq, and sihaqa), see Sahar Amer, "Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women", Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009):215-36.
6. See Hala Kamal, "Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic", Women's Studies Quarterly 36 (2008):254-68. While most Arabic-speaking queers reject the term shaz, some do embrace the term and see its reclamation as an important act of political self-empowerment, similar to that performed by reclaiming the derogatory term queer. For more on this point, see the roundtable discussion in this issue. Kamal notes that while Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) refers to the Arab versions and translations of gays, lesbians, and transvestites, "it does not tackle 'queer' as term or identity nor does [it] address the forms of existence (or absence) of its cultural equivalent in the Arab World or the Arabic language" (267n5). This avoidance on Massad's part, I believe, is significant, as it reflects his failure to confront the political challenges presented by the term queer in its rejection of naturalized (sexual) identity categorizations, a political potential perhaps stored also in the reclaiming of the Arabic term Shaz (irregular, deviant, pervert, abnormal).
7. For critical reformulations of Said's project, see James Clifford, "On Orientalism", in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988);
8. Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography", Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990):383-408;
9. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993);
10. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994);
11. Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
12. For accounts attuned to the multidirectional character of cultural influence, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
13. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996);
14. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
15. See, for example, Paola Bacchetta, "When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers", Social Text, no. 61 (1999):141-66;
16. Peter A. Jackson, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand (Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1999);
17. Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
18. Ruth Vanita, Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2001);
19. Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
20. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
21. See, for example, Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);
22. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
23. See, for example, Hema Chari, "Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities: Elaboration of Postcolonial Masculinity and Homoerotic Desire", in Post-Colonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 277-304;
24. and Samir Dayal, "By Way of an Afterword", in Hawley, Post-Colonial, Queer, 305-327.
25. Larry Knopp and Michael Brown, "Queer Diffusions", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (2003):409-24;
26. Natalie Oswin, "Decentering Queer Globalization: Diffusion and the 'Global Gay", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006):784.
27. Oswin, "Decentering Queer Globalization", 785.
28. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Routledge, 1979).
29. See Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (New York: Tauris, 1992);
30. Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
31. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 1999);
32. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2008).
33. The framework of "cultural wars" became particularly prevalent after September 11.
34. Other groups of queer activists in support of Palestine include Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, a queer, Toronto Palestine solidarity collective, and the American collective Feygelech (Queer Jews) for a Free Palestine. Queer activist groups that fight the Israeli occupation of Palestine and operate from within Israel and Palestine are discussed at length in several of the essays included in this special issue.
35. Available online at QUIT! Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, www.quitpalestine.org/about/index.htm (accessed March 19, 2010).
36. Libby Post, "Supporting Israel-It's the Gay Thing to Do", January 12, 2009, www.shewired.com/Article.cfm?ID=21339.
37. James Kirchick, "Queers for Palestine?" Advocate, January 28, 2009, www.advocate.com/exclusive-detail-ektid71844.asp.
38. For a similar argument, see Paul Varnell, "Israel, Palestine, and Gays", Independent Gay Forum, August 28, 2002, www.inde gayforum.org/news/show/27154.html. See also the recently published LGBT booklet entitled "LGBT Rights under the Palestinian Authority: Know the Facts", by Stand-WithUs, an international gay coalition in support of Israel.
39. The booklet informs us that "while the Palestinian government officials and families destroy the lives of gay Palestinians, Israel is a sanctuary to the LGBT Community" (www.standwithus.com/pdfs/flyers/LGBT- booklet.pdf [accessed July 8, 2010]).
40. See Joost R. Hiltermann, "The Women's Movement during the Uprising", Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 3 (1991):48-57;
41. Julie M. Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
42. Elise G. Young, Keepers of the History: Women and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press, 1992);
43. Annelies Moors, Women, Property, and Islam: Palestinian Experiences, 1920-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
44. Rabab Abdulhadi, "The Palestinian Women's Autonomous Movement: Emergence, Dynamics, and Challenges", Gender and Society 12 (1998):649-73;
45. Suha Sabbagh, ed., Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002);
46. Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and Its "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
47. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 9.
48. David Eng, "Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian Studies", Social Text, nos. 52-53 (1997):31-52;
49. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
50. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002);
51. Anjali Arondekar, "Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities or How Race Matters Outside the U. S.", Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7 (2005):236-50;
52. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005);
53. Neville Wallace Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007);
54. Josephine Ho, "Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers?" GLQ 14 (2008):457-79;
55. Zanele Muholi, "Mapping Our Histories: A Visual History of Black Lesbians in Post-Apartheid South Africa", www.zanelemuholi.com/ZM%20moh- final-230609.pdf (accessed March 19, 2010).
56. For Mugabe's words, see "Mugabe Attack on Gays Outrageous", City Press (Johannesburg), August 6, 1996;
57. for Ahmadinejad's comments, see "Iran President in NY Campus Row", BBC News, September 25, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7010962.stm.
58. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), 180.
59. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 183. Elaborating on these comments by Fanon, Lee Edelman points out that homosexuality in Fanon's analysis takes the place of homophobia in a homophobic act of displacement: "Homophobia allows a certain fgural logic to the pseudo algebraic 'proof' that asserts: where it is 'given' that white racism equals castration and 'given' that homosexuality equals castration, then it is proper to conclude that white racism equals (or expresses though displacement) homosexuality, and by the same token... homosexuality equals white racism."
60. See Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55.
61. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 161.
62. In a recent interview with Ernesto Pagano, Massad reiterates the same idea by claiming that the difference between "Western" homosexuality and the desire for same-sex sex within the Arab world is that "one is an identity that seeks social community and political rights, while the other is one of many forms of sexual intimacy that seeks corporeal pleasure."
63. See "The West and the Orientalism of Sexuality", Reset DOC: Dialogues on Civilizations, December 14, 2009, www.resetdoc.org/EN/Massad- interviewgay php
64. Both Massad and Fanon focus on male homosexuals to the complete exclusion of women. This is particularly disturbing, as it is hard to imagine that the impact of Western sexual confgurations on colonial societies has had the same effect across all social sectors and across the historical gender divisions within the traditional ("precolonized") societies. Unless we are to be convinced that gender differentiations did not exist in the Arab world before the colonial period, it would be hard to accept the idea that the alleged imposition of the Western hetero/homo binary on Arab society has resulted in equally negative effects on both Arab men who participate in malemale sexual contacts and Arab women who have sex with other women. If the first are said to have lost a great deal of freedom ("they are forced to limit their sexual aim and object of choice"), the question remains whether the same can be said about women whose social ease of mobility and freedom of making various sexual "object choices" was never so great to begin with.
65. Joseph Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World", Public Culture 14 (2002):384.
66. Massad, "The West and the Orientalism of Sexuality."
67. Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire", 374, 372.
68. Kathleen Peratis, "For Gay Palestinians, Tel Aviv Is Mecca", Jewish Daily Forward, February 24, 2006, www.forward.com/articles/1125/.
69. Haneen Maikey, "Rainbow over Palestine", Guardian, March 10, 2008, www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/10/rainbowoverpalestine.
70. Neville Wallace Hoad, "Between the White Man's Burden and the White Man's Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern Africa", GLQ 5 (1999):561.
71. Hoad, "Between the White Man's Burden and the White Man's Disease", 567.
72. Maikey, "Rainbow over Palestine."
73. Morten Berthelsen, in conversation with Haneen Maikey, "Stop Using Palestinian Gays to Whitewash Israel's Image", Ha'aretz, October 1, 2009, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1118197.html.
74. The press release posted by Outrage! describes the attacks as taking place "by an angry, shouting mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican priests, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop The War Coalition, offcials from the demonstration organizers, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign" (OutRage! press release, May 15, 2004, www.outraged.org.uk/).
75. James Kirchick, "Queers for Palestine?" Advocate, January 28, 2009, www.advocate.com/News/Daily-News/2009/01/28/Queers-for-Palestine-/.
76. Justifying the use of the signs, Peter Tatchell, a spokesperson at OutRage! argued that no provocation was meant by the organization and that the message conveyed by the signs was simple, clear, and just. All it says, he argued, is "freedom for Palestine must be freedom for all Palestinians-straight and gay" (www.petertatchell.net/international/ palestine.htm [accessed July 8, 2010]).
77. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 17.
78. James Kirchick, "Queers for Palestine?"
79. Examples of this state policy are numerous and are reflected not only in rhetorical gestures but also in how the Israeli foreign ministry has financially subsidized many Israeli LGBT events as long as they have a nationalist agenda and international visibility. See www.ipride-tlv.org/.
80. Press release published by B'Tselem, the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, December 27, 2009, at www.btselem.org/English/Press-Releases/20091227.asp.