Queering the Occupation: Settler Colonial Sexualities in the Era of Homonationalism

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relationship between settler-colonialism, nation building, and the policing of bodies via the white settler-colonial gaze. Overviewing the impact of settler-colonialism on sexuality, I move into a comparative analysis of settler colonialism as it impacted sexualities during Apartheid-era South Africa and those of Palestine under the ongoing Israeli occupation. I discuss the othering of “indigeneity” as opposed to the “modern” configuration of the settlers’ sexualities that happened in what is now North America, and how it reconfigured gayness as whiteness, violently racializing, policing and re-socializing Indigenous. Using the comparative framework, I then transition to Palestine, where the Israeli occupation imposes violence upon, but also utilizes, queer Palestinian bodies to further its ongoing settler-colonial nation-building project through the coercive and imaginative labor of homonationlism and pinkwashing.