Sexuality, Nationalism and the Politics of Identity in Israel

Dr. Erez Levon

Despite significant legal enfranchisements over the past 20 years, lesbians and gays in Israel remain largely marginalized and excluded from full participation in society. This marginalization can be traced to a perceived incompatibility between gay or lesbian identity, on one hand, and the values that normatively define belonging in Israeli society, on the other. Gays and lesbians in a certain sense exist outside of and in conflict with the dominant discourse of what it means to “be Israeli,” and, as such, a crucial component of the construction and performance of a lesbian or gay subjectivity in Israel involves negotiating this sexual/national tension.

In this talk, Dr Levron investigates some of the various ways in which people who identify as both gay/lesbian and Israeli understand the relationship between these two opposing affiliations, and how they use language to construct identities for themselves that attempt to reconcile this conflict. Data is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, where Dr Levon spent 12 months observing various gay/lesbian activist associations ranging across the Israeli political spectrum, including everything from a centrist political lobby to a queer anarchist group. Linguistic analyses reveals significant differences in how members of the different groups conceive of and construct their sexual subjectivities through language. These differences among groups correspond to the groups’ distinct positions within Israeli politics more generally, highlighting the ways in which individual sexual subjectivities in Israel are the result of a complex interplay of sexual and other national and cultural identifications. Dr Levron argues that this result underscores the fact that sexuality is never an isolated social phenomenon, and propose an integrated approach that unites the study of sexuality with the study of nations and nationalism more broadly.

Bio

Dr. Levon is a Lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London.  He received his PhD in Linguistics from New York University in 2008 (PhD dissertation: “National Discord: Language, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in Israel”).  His primary interest is the relationship between language and society, or the ways in which people use language to do social work. His current research focuses on the ways in which gay men and lesbians in Israel use language to negotiate between their own socio-sexual identifications and the politics of gender, sexuality and conceptions of national identity in Israel. Some of his recent articles include: “Définitions et méthodes d’approche des minorités sexuelles,” in Laithier, S. & V. Vilmain (eds.) L’Histoire des Minorités est-elle une Histoire Marginale? (2008); “Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity,” Language in Society 36 (2007); “Hearing gay: Prosody, interpretation and the affective judgments of men’s speech,” American Speech 81 (2006); and “Mosaic identity and style: Phonological variation among Reform American Jews,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (2006).

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk