From diaspora to nation, from home to dispersion: the Palestinian queer subject

Abstract

In this paper, the tension between inclusion and exclusion of the Palestinian queer subject is considered. We set off from the broad concept of “diaspora” proposed by James Clifford, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997) and from the concept “queer” proposed by João Manuel de Oliveira, in Dicionário Alice (2019), to discuss the double rupture of this subject in relation to its territorial origin and to normative sexuality. From a methodological point of view, we highlight the use of secondary bibliographic sources in a transdisciplinary way –from areas of knowledge as diverse as anthropology, history, urban planning, cultural and post-colonial studies and gender and sexuality studies– to analyze the physical and social rehabilitation of the Jew by the Zionist movement and the new strategies proposed for an instrumental integration of queer subjects within the normative and militarized space of nation-states. This secondary bibliographic sources such as accounts of queer Palestinian subjects –collected from the international press– allowed us to understand that this double rupture is interdependent from the historical formulation of Zionism as a political and ideological project, something that shows itself when the Palestinian queer subject crosses (or tries to cross) to the State of Israel. In this time and space, this subject is incorporated into Western tales of progress and democracy, as queer subject, while at the same time is excluded as Palestinian subject, a racialized and pathological one.