The Possibilities and Pains of Queering BDS

• In Event: Feminist, Queer and Jewish Responses to Zionism

Abstract

In Sinews of the Nation, Dan Lainer-­Vos argues that transnational fundraising mechanisms are organizational tools that can be used to attach dispersed groups to the nation. In fact, fundraising was, and remains, the primary organizational tool that situated American Jews as supporters (and in some cases, members) of Israeli nationalism. In this light, it makes sense that after many years, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) has emerged as the principal non-violent strategy against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As the movement gains in popularity in the United States, the efficacy of boycott is continually debated, even by its practitioners. Starting with the call for BDS in the mid-2000s by groups broadly affiliated with the Palestinian civil society, the contemporary movement marks the connections between nationalist territorial expansion, colonial economies, consumer goods, academic institutions and cultural formations.
As the State of Israel embarked on the Brand Israel campaign in the early half of the 2000s, it saw financial and PR value in advertising itself as the "gay mecca of the Middle East." This campaign involved, amongst other tactics, inviting gay and lesbian US residents to identify Israel as the "only nation in the Middle East" to treat its gay and lesbian citizens with legal equality. Named "pinkwashing" by Palestinian solidarity activists, this campaign saw gay rights as a barometer for human rights more broadly. As a response, an emerging network of queer Palestinian solidarity activism has called for Western queers to participate in BDS.
This paper argues that the State of Israel's use of gay rights is not only used to justify the occupation of Palestine, but is also an outgrowth of a longstanding affiliation between gay identity and capitalist success.Beyond BDS, this paper will take up the historical reasons boycott has become the foundational tactic for gay (and nominally, lesbian) politics. Starting with the Coors boycott in the 1970s, to contemporary boycotts of Barilla, Chik­-fil-­a, and Stoli, boycotts have become the principal organizing strategy for gay consumer ­liberalism. In this context, this paper will examine boycott as a political tactic that has a genealogy in gay and lesbian US history, and nevertheless has the potential to disrupt the capitalist imaginary that sees gay and lesbian US residents as "canaries in the economic coal mine." In so doing, it will trace the emergence of boycott campaigns as a phenomena uniquely suited to the contemporary geopolitical moment. Why is boycott – which historically, but not exclusively, was in the domain of the economic – an appropriate response to Zionism and/or the State of Israel? What are the political precursors to thinking about boycott as a response to state violence? How can boycott - which as a tactic has often consolidated the relationships between gayness, whiteness, and capital - work as a part of queer anti-occupation politics?

Author

• Tallie Ben Daniel, University of California, Davis (CA)