Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine 

The imposition of acceptable and inacceptable gender and sexual norms have always been central to the European colonial project. For four hundred years, European colonialism has imposed its heteronormative regimes of gender and sexuality at home and onto the rest of the world. Furthermore, it has sought to erase pre-existing ways of being and living together that were different from its own violent impositions. Part of that project was to erase differently lived experiences of gender and sexual pleasure, including gender experiences outside the binary of male-female and, for instance, same-sex eroticism. In our present times, however, Europe and North-America claim to be bastions of sexual and gender freedom, and use this discourse to legitimate their ongoing imperial and militarist projects. Inside Belgium and The Netherlands, for instance, a discourse of gay tolerance is used to bolster racist anti-Muslim imaginaries and political agendas. Discussions on gender and sexuality therefore cannot be separated from debates on racial and colonial violence.

In this lecture, Haneen Maikey and Mikki Stelder will look at how the instrumentalization of gay rights plays out in the context of Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestine. The Israeli government uses its limited and exclusionary gay rights achievements and existing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments to divert attention away from its ongoing occupation of Palestine. Palestinian activists have called this Israel’s pinkwashing campaign. In this lecture we will address how the Israeli state mobilizes gender and sexuality within the context of occupation. What can a queer and feminist perspective bring to our understanding of settler-colonialism, not just in the context of Palestine, but also in light of Belgium’s own colonial past? And, what are the implications for transnational and internationalist feminist and queer solidarities with Palestine?

Key topics to be discussed: the concept and practice of settler-colonialism in relation to gender and sexuality, by introducing phenomena such as Israeli pinkwashing, homonationalism and the multidirectional struggle against oppression by feminist and queer Palestinian activist in Occupied Palestine.

This event is free, but registration is required via: https://bit.ly/3HvF8dv