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Queer Political Assemblages Presentation
Queer Political Assemblages Presentation
Queer Political Assemblages Presentation
Heterotopia: Contextualising
Mayer’s ‘Out in the Dark’ (2012) in
the Israel-Palestine Conflict
RAJESHWARI GUHA,
Centre for English Studies,
JNU, New Delhi.
Edward Said's ‘The Question of
Palestine’
If we try to juxtapose the ‘x’ in Said’s question, it has
to be a concern that is “uncertain, questionable,
unstable” (Said, 4), and the question of Palestine is
definitely one that fits the bill. There’s a Spivakian
“...despite the pain of war - the IDF is the only army in the Middle East that defends
democratic values. It is the only army that allows gay people the freedom to be who
they are. And so I fully believe in the righteousness of our cause.”
It has always been a part of Israel’s message, a way of using their ‘liberal values’, showcasing their
undying commitment towards liberating the queer community, which in turn, gives them legitimate
grounds to carry on their onslaught.
Out in the Dark (2012), dir. Michael Mayer
The neo-noir film starts off with Nimr, a queer Palestinian
university student, seeking refuge from his homophobic and
traditional West Bank village in the more bustling
metropolitan space of Tel Aviv, where he interns under a
clinical psychology department in a city college. Besides
amping up for a potential scholarship and, consequently, the
prospect of securing state permission to live in Tel Aviv, he
gets a chance to explore his sexuality in gay clubs with the
help of his trans friend Mustafa, who has also fled Palestine.
“Israel’s premise that queer people under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not
have a chance of survival is assuming that all queer people have equal chances in life.”
-Rayyan Dabbous, Scroll.in
In Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia, he talks about the heterogeneity of
the space we live in and how we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites that are
irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault, 3) In the
context of the queer issue at hand, superimposing the general resistance against colonialism
reduces the multiplicity and plurality of the queer existence and the rights needed for sustenance.
Contemporary queer and gender activism indulge themselves in the creation of a utopia – an ideal
world where all is equal, where everyone’s needs are attainable through the same line of action,
notwithstanding one’s ethnicity, social and political environment, and race.
Problematising Intersectionality and
the Monolithic View of Queerness
Massad, J. Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World-
“...supporters of the Gay International’s missionary tasks produced two kinds of
literature on the Muslim world in order to propagate their cause: an academic
literature produced mostly by white male European or American gay scholars
“describing” and “explaining” what they call “homosexuality” in Arab and Muslim
history to the present; and the journalistic accounts of the lives of the so-called
“gays” and (much less so) “lesbians” in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds.”
It stands to reason then that the growing crisis of establishing a safe space for
Palestinian queers is falling victim to the dubious gains of the gay mainstream
surrendering to a single-interest group politic of assimilationism, which suggests and
leads to the exhaustion of the dominant templates of lesbian and gay politics.
(Seidman, 117)
Concluding Arguments
Nimr-Roy-Mustafa’s story gets absorbed by the overarching conflict between the
two states, and the three end up simply as collateral damage with no achievable
resolution. This is feasibly the situation we are inching towards, having very
conveniently merged the queer resistance with the one against Zionism and settler-
colonialism.