Queering Occupation
Over the past decade, I have collaborated with Palestinian anticolonial-queer activist groups alQaws: for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society and Pinkwatching Israel. These collaborations have been in the form of research projects, articles, talks, and organizing transnational activist conversations on Palestine liberation and the role of queer politics. My dissertation project emerged from questions and challenges that arose from these collaborations. For my dissertation I developed a methodology of writing with Palestinian anticolonial-queer critique to explore the limits and possibilities of academic labor in relation to anticolonial struggle. My dissertation was inspired by the ways in which Palestinian anticolonial-queer critiques continue to be sidelined and/or instrumentalized by activism and scholarship in European and North American contexts; by hegemonic narratives of Palestinian liberation; and by Israel’s colonial pinkwashing strategy. I was awarded my PhD (cum laude) by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. My dissertation was shortlisted for the NWSA/UIP First Book Award at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 2019. While writing my dissertation, I lived and worked in Palestine for several months working for alQaws. During the PhD, I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and later at the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Parts of the dissertation have been published in Settler Colonial Studies, Radical History Review, The Journal of Palestine Studies, Global Trajectories of Queerness: Same Sex Politics in the Global South (eds. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, co-authored with Haneen Maikey) and Feral Feminisms. I also contributed op-eds to Mondoweiss (co-author Ramzy Kumsieh), OneWorld.org, and Pinkwatching Israel.
Dissertation cover art by Jack Porter