Social Science Research Council

“The Logic of the Checkpoint:  Queer Palestinians, the Israeli State, and the Politics of Passing”

My dissertation research explores the crucial and sometimes incongruous roles of sexuality and race in the efforts of the Israeli state to construct and police the (real and imagined) boundaries that contain its citizens and exclude its “others.”  Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with queer Palestinians who live in or travel to Israel, my research will focus in particular on their experiences at the “checkpoint,” a literal site on the border where agents of the state check what goes in and out of the nation, and a ubiquitous subjective process wherein citizens and non-citizens alike check themselves against discourses about who does and does not belong.  Simultaneously embraced (as homosexuals) and rejected (as Palestinians) by the “modern” liberal-democratic but avowedly ethnonationalist state, queer Palestinians experience the literal checkpoint and countless everyday checkpoints in ways that call into question what it means to be “Israeli,” “Palestinian,” and “queer,” and they experience the state of Israel—and the conflict more broadly—with a profound sense of ambivalence that challenges assumptions about the territoriality of nationalism, the nature of liberalism and democratic citizenship, and the inevitability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash of mutually exclusive nationalisms.  While grounded in the local context of Israel-Palestine, my research will interrogate, not only how we think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the perceived conflict between “the West” and “the Arab World.”  At a moment when the exclusion of Arabs and the inclusion of (some) queers have both emerged as important elements in the ideological toolkits of nationalism, the experiences of queer Palestinians in Israel offer a revealing lens onto the contradictions of liberal-democratic nationalism and the ways in which those contradictions create opportunities for various actors both to resist and to reproduce its governing logic.