Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine and Beyond

Dr Adi Kuntsman

This talk is based on Dr Kuntsman's new book, Figurations of Violence and Belonging (Peter Lang 2009), which is based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine. The talk will start with one ethnographic moment, the organising against homophobia in early 2000s, and follow the queer immigrants’ claims that the homophobic attacks they experience are similar to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Looking at the affective regimes of pain and fear and at the performativity of violent memories, Dr Kuntsman will raise several theoretical and political questions. Firstly, engaging with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the double as uncanny, she will trace the relations of doubleness and substitution between two figures: the humiliated homosexual and the persecuted Jew. What does it mean, she will ask, that injuries of homophobia are compared to injuries of anti-Semitism? What does it mean that Jewish ‘repatriates’ in Israel claim that they are persecuted ‘just like the Jews’? By doing so, Dr Kuntsman will evaluate the currency of injury in the context of Israel nationalism and its political use of the Holocaust. Secondly, this talk will examine these claims in the broader context of the queer immigrants politics, and more specifically, in the context of their frequent anti-Palestinian stances, including repeated denial of Palestinians’ sexual and national subjecthood. Moving away from the specific ethnographic moment into a broader discussion of violence in queer immigrant politics, Dr Kuntsman will look into various modes of remembering and forgetting that constitute queer immigrants affective attachment to the nation. What is the currency of queer/Jewish injury, she will ask, when it exists alongside the (queer) dehumanisation of the Palestinians, whose lives are constituted as ungrievable (Butler 2004), and whose deaths are not only not commemorated, but at times celebrated joyfully? Dr Kuntsman will conclude by engaging with Paul Gilroy’s (2004) notion of ‘raciology of dehumanisation’ and will offer some thoughts on how the relations between violence, belonging, and queerness can be reimagined.

Bio

Adi Kuntsman is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester. She is the author of Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (Peter Lang, 2009) and the co-editor of Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (with Esperanza Miyake, Raw Nerve Books, 2008). Kuntsman’s research interests include affect and digital cultures; migration and nationalism; queer racisms; and digital m. Currently, Kuntsman is working on a new project on war, dehumanisation and digital media in Israel-Palestine.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

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