The Currency of Victimhood in Uncanny Homes: Queer Immigrants' Claims for Home and Belonging Through Anti-Homophobic Organising

Abstract

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking queer immigrants in Israel and, in particular, on their organising against homophobia. The paper follows the queer immigrants’ claims that the homophobic attacks they experience are similar to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Engaging with Freud's notion of the double as uncanny, I trace the relations of doubleness and substitution between two figures: the humiliated homosexual and the persecuted Jew. What does it mean, I ask, that injuries of homophobia are compared to injuries of anti-Semitism? What does it mean that Jewish immigrants in Israel claim that they are persecuted ‘just like the Jews'? Throughout the paper I explore questions of migration and sexuality, as well as issues of Israeli nationalism and the currency of victimhood in claims for national belonging.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.