PERFORMATIVE POLITICS IN ISRAELI QUEER ANTI-OCCUPATION ACTIVISM

Abstract

The essay discusses the Israeli queer activist group Black Laundry that emerged in 2001 following the outbreak of the second Intifada. The analysis underscores Black Laundry's move away from the assimilationist politics of the LGBT community in Israel with its narrow understanding of identity politics in terms of group interests, for which the group substituted a “politics of identification” rooted in a marginalized sexual and gendered positioning. Focusing on the group's practices, and reading them for their political and theoretical implications, the essay examines the relation of performative practices to a politics of identification and inquires into the links between political performativity and the performative construction of identity. More broadly, it interrogates how sexual and gender dissidence translates into identification across national and ethnic divides. Finally, the group's insistence on linking queer and feminist issues with the struggle against the occupation, together with its emphasis on bodily practices and utterances, is shown to have far-reaching implications for the very understanding of political agency.

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