Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement.

Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

Author: Sa'ed Atshan

Paperback Published May 2020 296 pages

Read and Recommended by Hendri:

"Queer Palestine and The Empire of Critique offers us what the debate on homonationalism and pinkwashing has lacked: an ethnographic engagement with local Palestinian queer activists in balancing sexual rights activism and the Palestinian liberation struggles. While the idea of pinkwashing and homonationalism helps show how queer rights can be complicit in capitalism and imperialism, Sa'ed Atshan has genuinely invited us to look at the power, potential, and strength of the Palestinian queer movements for the country's freedom, and how the Palestinian liberation intertwines with the queer fight against homophobia. Most importantly, the notion of 'empire of critique' here alludes to how the critique of queer movements by both Western queer academics and fellow activists runs the risk of paralyzing the queer activism itself. For example, Palestinian queer activists are often accused of prioritizing sexual rights over the national liberation, as if both causes cannot support one another. Accessibly written and rich with personal accounts from the Palestinian activists, this book is like an adventure to the familiar yet strange territory: though discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been prominent in media, at the same time, we are barely introduced to vibrant and lively accounts of the queer lives there. And Atshan has successfully provided us with the power of queerness embedded in the struggles for Palestinian freedom."

"This utterly brilliant book will be a classic. Sa'ed Atshan's comprehensive study of queer Palestinian activism provides a rich understanding of the complex intersections of selfhood, activism, and belonging. By demonstrating the limits of binarisms of East/West and self/other through detailed empirical analysis and powerful theoretical interventions, Atshan has given us a landmark work valuable to Middle East studies, queer studies, and anthropology in the broadest sense."—Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine, author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia

"Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is a breath of fresh air! In the academic climate in which 'radical' has become synonymous with crude schisms between West and East, authentic and inauthentic, pure and sellout, this book provides a much-needed nuanced account of Queer Palestine. Sa'ed Atshan carefully historicizes the local terrain and rightly problematizes how US-based scholarship has turned the critique of empire into an empire of critique. This is a brilliant call for academic self-reflection and a brave rejection of so-called radical myths of cultural authenticity."—Gil Z. Hochberg, Columbia University

"Sa'ed Atshan brilliantly weaves together ethnography and personal experience in the most thoughtful, engaging, and emotionally captivating ways. His sophisticated work captures the nexus of a scholar-activist, offering an authoritative account of the challenges and trajectory of the Palestinian LGBTQ movement. A tour de force and a remarkable book for both its theoretical and empirical contributions."—Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University

"This powerful and prophetic book shows that the struggle for justice and freedom against empire and homophobia are indivisible. Sa'ed Atshan's text is a major intellectual force for good."—Cornel West, Harvard University