Performative politics in Israeli queer anti-occupation activism

GLQ

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 537-556

  Ziv, Amalia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78449303123     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2010-003     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Interviews were conducted with six former members, four women and two men. Two points are worth stressing: First, since the interviews took place several months after the group's demise, what the interviewees provide are retrospective assessments of the group's activism and their own experiences within the group. Second, the group's activities were always characterized by a high degree of reflexivity, and many of its members were familiar with contemporary theoretical discourses on gender and sexuality, a knowledge that fed into their activism. Hence, for me, the interviews were not an instrument for collecting raw data but a dialogue in which the interviewees shared with me their insights regarding the group. I should stress, however, that the questions at the center of this essay reflect my own concerns, not necessarily those of the interviewees, and the account I am offering represents neither the self-perception of Black Laundry as a group nor the account that any of the interviewees would have composed individually.
2. Anat Lieber, "Bein 'yachad begàava' le 'ein gàava bakibush': Dilemot shel ezrachut, zehut, vekwiriyut basiach hapolity shel hakehila hahomo-lesbit beyisrael bein hashanim 1996-2003" ("Between 'Together with Pride' and 'No Pride in Occupation': Dilemmas of Citizenship, Identity, and Queerness in the Political Discourse of the Gay and Lesbian Community between 1996-2003") (MA thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006).
3. This point has been made by Aeyal Gross about military service for gay men and by Ruthi Kadish regarding motherhood for lesbians. See Aeyal Gross, "Miniyut, gavriyut, tzavah vèezrachut: Sherut homòim ve lesbiyot betzahal bemishkafayim hashvàatiyim" ("Sexuality, Masculinity, Army, and Citizenship: Gay and Lesbian Military Service in the IDF in a Comparative Perspective"), Plilim 9 (2000):95-183;
4. Ruthi Kadish, "Israeli Lesbians, National Identity, and Motherhood", in Sappho in the Holy Land: Lesbian Existence and Dilemmas in Contemporary Israel, ed. Chava Frankfort-Nachmias and Erella Shadmi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 223-50.
5. For similar arguments concerning the conditions of citizenship in Israeli society, see Nitza Berkovitch, "Ezrachut vèimahaut: Màamadan shel hanashim beyisrael" ("Citizenship and Motherhood: Women's Status in Israel"), in Yisrael: Mechevrah meguyeset lechevrah ezrachit? (Israel: From an Enlisted Society to a Civil Society?), ed. Yoav Peled and Adi Ofir (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute/Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2001), 206-43;
6. Nira Yuval Davis, "The Bearers of the Collective: Women and Religious Legislation in Israel", Feminist Review 11, no. 4 (1980):15-27.
7. Lieber, "Between 'Together with Pride, ' " 102.
8. I employ the term politics of identification to refer to political activism for a cause that is not directly one's own, that is, a struggle to lift the oppression or secure rights or freedoms for a group to which one does not belong-a struggle that nevertheless predicates and grounds itself on a relation of identification with the group for whom one is struggling.
9. Lieber, "Between 'Together with Pride, ' " 69.
10. Land Day is an annual day of protest observed by the Palestinian minority in Israel since 1976. The day is marked by a general strike, marches, and rallies in protest of the ongoing discrimination against the Arab population and most especially against massive governmental confiscation of Arab-owned lands.
11. Sara Helman and Tamar Rapoport", 'Eleh nashim ashkenaziyot, levad, zonot shel aravim, lo màaminot bèelohim, velo ohavot et eretz-yisrael': 'Nashim beshachor' vèitgur haseder hachevraty" (" 'These Are Ashkenazi Women, Alone, Whores to Arabs, Who Don't Believe in God, and Don't Love Israel': Women in Black and the Challenging of the Social Order"), Teoria vebikoret (Theory and Criticism) 10 (1997):175-92.
12. The refusal movement, represented largely by the organization Yesh Gvul (There's a Limit), is a movement of IDF soldiers, either conscripts or reservists, who refuse to serve in the occupied territories and to take part in the oppression of the Palestinian people. In the discourse of the refusal movement, reserve soldiers with an impeccable military record (which equals model masculinity) receive center stage. For example, the Yesh Gvul Web site states: "A notably high ratio of refuseniks are combat officers (ranking from sergeant to major) i.e. soldiers who have served with distinction" (www.yeshgvul.org/index-e.asp [English], www.yeshgvul.org/[Hebrew] [accessed March 29, 2010]).
13. The actual Hebrew expression is ochel batachat, a rather graphic piece of slang, which literally means "someone who eats up the ass."
14. For a description and analysis of some of Queer Nation's performative practices, see Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality", in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 193-229.
15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James and the Art of the Novel", GLQ 1 (1993):11.
16. Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity", 14.
17. Douglas Crimp, "Right On, Girlfriend!" in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 189.
18. Crimp, "Right On, Girlfriend!" 192.
19. Black Laundry's focus on the occupation was a source of much criticism in the local LGBT community. Many argued that the question of the occupation is extraneous to gay and lesbian identity and the politics that flows from it; hence the group's politics were seen as an attempt to introduce "foreign" issues to community events and to enforce an artificial and destructive linkage between genuine and "apolitical" community concerns and unrelated and properly political questions. Such criticisms assume that both the defining core and the contours of lesbian and gay identity are given and indisputable. Yet, in fact, the group's major-and contested- intervention in the sphere of LGBT politics was its attempt to posit a relation to the occupation and Palestinian oppression-as well as to other social oppressions-as central to the definition of queer identity as such.
20. See, for example, Biddy Martin's important critique: "Sexualities without Gender and Other Queer Utopias", in Coming Out of Feminism?, ed. Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal, and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 11-35.
21. Hebrew is a highly gendered language. Verb conjugations are gendered in the first and second person, in both singular and plural, and personal pronouns are gendered in the second person as well. Hence it is nearly impossible (unless through awkward circumlocutions) either to make a personal statement without specifying one's gender or to address others without indicating/assuming their gender. Mixed-gender groups are always reflerred to in the masculine.
22. For this insight I am indebted to Noam Holdengreber.
23. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy", in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 122-23
24. quoted in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002), 118.
25. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 57.
26. Concurrent with the group's formation, there emerged a few other sites of queer counterdiscourse: the annual queer studies conference at Tel Aviv University; "Ann FranQ", a zine for queer-lesbian culture, edited by two Black Laundry members; and the Queerhannah collective, whose first action was an alternative Pride event in 2002.