#queer necropolitics

[breakingculture]

NYT Serves Trans Kids a Rotten Dish

Coverage of the Skrmetti decision only affirms the transphobia of the paper of record

[cyasca]

Two years into the second intifada, and just months after the election of Ariel Sharon – a right-wing ‘hawk’ on whose behalf he and other ‘gays for Sharon’ enthusiastically campaigned – Shaul Ganon embarked on a mission to expose the suffering of queer Palestinians to the world. As head of the Palestinian Rescue Project at HaAguda, Israel’s oldest and largest gay rights organization, Ganon had worked for several years to provide food, clothing and condoms to Palestinian male sex workers who lived illegally in the slums and parks of Tel Aviv. But in the aftermath of the intifada, letters from HaAguda verifying the queerness of their holders were no longer sufficient to protect his ‘children’, as Ganon calls them. 1 The Israeli police began arresting and deporting Palestinians who had, until then, flown under the radar of the state as harmless queers. In response, Ganon began issuing press releases, contacting Israeli and Western journalists, and circulating transcripts of interviews he had conducted with a few queer Palestinians, who recounted in disturbing detail their stories of suffering and victimization at the hands of Palestinian fathers, brothers, police and other terrorists.

In August 2002 Ganon struck gold when Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-Israeli journalist, wrote an article in the generally liberal – and consistently proIsrael – American magazine, the New Republic, that would become the authoritative text on the suffering of queer Palestinians (Halevi 2002). Cited and recycled in countless popular and journalistic sources, Halevi’s article documents a supposed epidemic of anti-gay violence in Palestinian society. ‘Because the world hasn’t forced the P.A. [Palestinian Authority] to tolerate gays, Palestinian homosexuals are increasingly seeking refuge in the only regional territory that does: Israel. In the last few years,’ Halevi writes, ‘hundreds of gay Palestinians . . . have slipped into Israel . . . beyond the reach of their families and the P.A.’ (Haveli 2002: n.p.). To validate his proclamations about the nature of Palestinian society – and the suffering of queer Palestinians – Halevi, like most journalists after him who would take an interest in the subject, relied primarily on interviews with Shaul Ganon; and he focused, in particular, on the story of one young Palestinian man whom he calls ‘Tayseer’. Before ‘seeking refuge’ in gay-friendly Israel, Tayseer was ‘arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling . . . forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces . . . thrown into a dark cell infested with insects . . . and forced to sit on a Coke bottle’ (Halevi 2002: n.p.). Tayseer’s horrific story was quickly circulated among American, European and Israeli queers, many of whom raised money and successfully lobbied on his behalf for asylum in a European country. His story was also quickly severed from its particular social and historical context and took on significance, not just as the story of one queer Palestinian’s escape from the homophobic backwaters of the Arab/Muslim East into the secular, liberal, gay-friendly West, but as a timeless representation of the suffering of queer Palestinians generally. Indeed, Tayseer would ultimately cease to exist as a noteworthy element of his story, the details of which, however, would continue to be resurrected – without reference, even, to the original journalistic account that made them famous – as a symptom of the ‘pogroms’ faced by queer Palestinians, who are apparently regarded (by Palestinians) as ‘criminals plain and simple’ 2 (Post 2009: n.p.).

In the following years, Shaul Ganon and countless journalists, activists, filmmakers and other queers – various iterations of what Joseph Massad calls the ‘Gay International’ (Massad 2002) – would build on Tayseer’s story to develop and refine a robust corpus of gory representations of queer Palestinian suffering. In magazine and newspaper articles, books, films and even the public relations materials of pro-Israel advocacy groups, they would offer up queer Palestinian horror stories as proof of a widespread campaign of anti-gay violence in the Palestinian territories. To be sure, there are occasional acts of violence against queer Palestinians (perpetrated by other Palestinians), especially those who adopt Western and Israeli practices of visibility and ‘coming out’ but the actual extent and intensity of that violence is vastly overstated by local ‘experts’ and activists such as Shaul Ganon and their Israeli and Western collaborators.

Queer Necropolitics, 2014

[hersaffroneyeballs]