Enormous and Demanding Contradiction: June Jordan, Refugeehood, and the Gendered Racial State

• In Event: Jewish Feminisms, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine

Abstract

Our next paper will consider the meaning and impact of June Jordan’s formulation of refugeehood in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly as it was routed through Palestine. In a series of writings that bridge the end of the Cold War, the First Intifada, and the end of apartheid rule in South Africa, Jordan envisions relational practices of sanctuary at once at odds with Israeli narratives of state-authorized forms of security, resolutely committed to combating antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism, and based in a substantive critique of the patriarchal structure of the racial state.

Presenter

• Keith Feldman, University of California, Berkeley