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278 WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2014) © 2014 by Saffo Papantonopou-
lou. All rights reserved.
what are you?? if your not a male or a female, perhaps something in between?? then
can you explain to me your ridiculous & ignorant hate against the only country
in the Middle-East that someone like you could live a peaceful life, almost without
prejudice, having the law on your side, and also having the same rights as a male or
female heterosexual??? because darling, someone like you would be strung up by yr
pigtails and stoned to death, tortured or imprisoned, in any of those “peace loving”
“democratic” non-judgemental” [sic] Muslim countries that surround Israel!!
—YouTube comment directed at me
ere is something about anger that is akin to this gi exchange. Once anger is given
to you, it is passed along as quickly as possible. ... ere in the street, as the army red
over our heads, but also at us, the rst impulse was to return the gi of death straight
back to the original donor, with no lapse in time. But, in that case, you would be killed.
So you pass it along, and it just leaps out, somewhere else and at another time. ...
ere were a lot of people who returned to their everyday life unable to control their
anger, and exploded into senseless rage at the slightest tries for months aerwards.
—Alan Klima, e Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre,
and Exchange with the Dead in ailand
In 2007, the Israeli foreign ministry ocially launched a campaign called
Brand Israel. With professional corporate PR rms hired to revitalize the
apartheid state’s international image, a total of almost $20 million was
set aside for Israeli state propaganda in that year alone.1 is rebranding
campaign, which persists today, has consisted of multiple dierent tac-
tics. e tactic that has received perhaps the most aention, and the one
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv”:
Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments,
and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude
Saffo Papantonopoulou
with which I am the most concerned here, is what has been dubbed by
Palestine solidarity activists as “pinkwashing” (Schulman 2011). Haneen
Maikey, cofounder of the queer Palestinian organization Al Qaws, denes
pinkwashing as “the cynical use of gay rights by the Israeli government ...
in order to divert aention from Israeli ... occupation and apartheid, by
promoting itself as a progressive country that respects gay rights, and, on
the contrary, portraying Palestinian society and Palestinians as homopho-
bic” (Maikey 2013). Jasbir Puar (2007) coined the term “homonational-
ism” to refer to this process. Since the launch of Brand Israel, there has
been a proliferation of activist organizing around pinkwashing. In 2013,
much of this activist and academic work culminated in a conference, titled
“Homonationalism and Pinkwashing,” held at the City University of New
York Graduate Center in April 2013. Both Maikey and Puar were keynote
speakers at this conference.
While much of this work so far has focused on the cynical deploy-
ment of cisgender queer subjectivities, the question I want to pose, then,
is where, in the age of neoliberalism and homonationalism, is the transgender
subject relative to colonial economies of gratitude? Ironically, to the extent
to which this question is beginning to be addressed within the academy,
responses to pinkwashing as it relates to transgender subjectivities and
politics have followed the gradual “inclusion” of transgender subjects
into homonationalism. During her keynote speech at the conference, Jas-
bir Puar raised the question of a rise, in recent years, of a trans version
of homonationalism, citing the example of U.S. vice president Joseph
Biden’s statement that transgender issues are “the civil rights issue of our
time.” A question I raised to Puar during the Q&A session, and one that
remains an issue, is the question of the incitement to discoursethe “call
and response” that Puar describes between pinkwashing and the queer
response to pinkwashing. Is this the moment, now, when transgender sub-
jectivities can be discussed in relationship to pinkwashing and homona-
tionalism? Did transgender subjects have to wait to be invoked by Joseph
Biden into another wave of homonationalism before we could theorize
our relationship to it? is call-and-response is particularly troubling, as it
seems to reenact the same narrative as the historical development of trans
theory within the Western academy“First there was women’s studies,
then queer studies, then trans studies” gets replaced by “First there was
colonial feminism, then there was pinkwashing/homonationalism, then
there was trans-homonationalism.”2 is call-and-response is troubling in
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 279
another way. During her keynote speech, Haneen Maikey critiqued activ-
ists who took part in the rst ocial U.S. LGBT delegation to Palestine
(many of whom, including Jasbir Puar and Sarah Schulman, were in the
audience) for their complicity in the “tension between LGBT solidarity
with Palestine and the focus on ... Palestinian queer lives” (Maikey 2013).
Is an aempt to narrate transgender experiences of pinkwashing complicit
in this same dynamic? Although not much can be done about the histori-
cal context of this essay, it is my hope, however, that through deploying an
autoethnographic approach the present essay may indirectly address some
of these questions.
In his ethnography of death and political violence in ailand, Alan Klima
paraphrases Marcel Mauss in arguing that “the giver [of the gi] has a hold
over the receiver because the thing given away always contains within it
a bit of the giver, the ‘spirit of the gi’” (Klima 2002, 240). He ties this
to neoliberalism and U.S. military “aid” to the ai dictatorship: “Devel-
opment loans, aid grants, military aid, machine guns, ... ‘advisors,’ spies,
counterinsurgency expertise, .. . American anthropologists ... these
gis the military rulers were more than happy to receive. ... Every ai
connected through this gi economy to the juntas was, in turn, connected
to the U.S. gi” (58). Klima connects this to the “gi of death” given by the
ai military to protesters during the 1992 Black May massacre, as quoted
above. He goes on to elaborate on Derrida’s critique of Mauss: “e idea
of a pure gi between people seems ... impossible to conceive. ... In the
way that Jacques Derrida writes of the impossible language of giving, once
the recognition of the gi event occurs, the gi is annulled, most of all by
its noble identication. Once a gi has been identied as such it cannot help
but enter the circle of debt in which it ceases to truly be a gi, freely given”
(246; emphasis mine). Rather than focus, as Derrida does, on the impos-
sibility of a “pure gi” (which Klima argues is besides the point, for all gis
exist in this cycle of debt), I want to focus on the politics of this “noble
identication.” When does a gi get called a gi and why? In other words,
how does transgender “safety” become a gi given by the West/Israel?
In the YouTube comment quoted at the beginning of this essay, the
absent Palestinian becomes a site onto which queerphobic Zionists may
project their queerphobic fantasies. ese projections accomplish several
things. ey allow the queerphobic Zionist to live out his own queerpho-
bic fantasy while simultaneously deploying a pretext of caring about queer
280 Saffo Papantonopoulou
people, in order to posit himself as the savior of victimized queers. ey
also posit the West as a point of origin for queerness. Zionists love to ask
me, “How would you fare in Gaza?” to which I love to respond, “How
would I get to Gaza?” is rst question, like many transphobic heckles
that I have received from Zionists, is an Althusserian hail. According to
Althusser (1971), the hail serves to interpolate the individual into the
subject, to bring the individual into ideology. e noble identication of
“gay friendly” Tel Aviv’s gi to all queers is a hailan interpolation of the
transgender body into an always already indebted subject position, one
enmeshed in a “cycle of debt.” Under the Zionist economy of gratitude,
the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West
for allowing her to exist. e properly delimited space for the transgender
subject within this ideology is essentially one conned to an apoliticized
space of pride parades and gay bars, but never the front lines of an anti-
imperial or anticolonial project. It is a queer/transphobic assault against
those visibly queer bodies who refuse to be properly disciplined neolib-
eral queer consumersand transgender bodies are oen the most visibly
queer bodies and hence the ones singled out for aack. As one cannot
return the gi to the one who gave it (in this case because the Zionist dis-
identied from his own queerphobia), the transgender subject is forced to
pass it alongto Palestinians. Hence, the queerphobic Zionist can pass
the gi of his racist colonial phobia as well as his queerphobia on to the
transgender subject. e projection allows the Zionist to disidentify from
the transphobia inherent in his hail. is is particularly important, since
it is precisely the violent transphobia“what are you?”that is an incite-
ment to vulnerability. I am supposed to feel vulnerable, afraid, aacked by
this hail, in order that I may pass on that gi of death to the supposedly
transphobic Palestinian.
Economies of gratitude (Hochschild and Machung 1989) are market-
places where material capital is exchanged with aective/moral capital.
e fact that the Israeli state has provided a multimillion-dollar market for
professional corporate PR companies to discursively project Israel onto a
moral high ground over Palestinians demonstrates that economies of grat-
itude are very much material realities. e Zionist economy of gratitude
and its incitement to vulnerability are actually a reformulation of an older
dialectic of Jewish suering/Jewish virility inherent to Zionismwhat
I term the Sabra-Holocaust dialectic. Zionism has historically uctuated
between deploying notions of universal, transhistorical Jewish suer-
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 281
ing and trauma, and the muscular, masculine virility of the Sabra (Shalit
1994). Zionism has depended on deploying a narrative of victimization
from the Holocaust to suicide bombingin order to legitimate its colonial
violence against Palestinians. is leads to the almost laughable situation
of Israel projecting itself as victim as it rains down white phosphorus over
the Gaza Strip.
e Zionist victim narrative is consistent with Wendy Brown’s (1993)
reading of Nietzsche’s (unfortunately named) notion of “slave morality”:
Israel, according to Zionist self-fashioning, embodies Nietzsche’s notion
of the “triumph of the weak as weak.” But furthermore, while Jewish and
Israeli trauma is mobilized into a colonial narrative, Palestinian trauma is
simply not allowed to exist, as Palestinians are, within the Zionist narra-
tive, senseless terrorists without history or subjectivity. e deployment of
vulnerability in Israel works as a mimesis to tell Israelis, “Remember that
you are vulnerable,” while it works to tell Palestinians, “Remember that
you are less than human.” is mobilization of trauma is projected back
in time, turning Jewish history into a “morbidly selective ‘tracing the dots’
from pogrom to pogrom” (Shohat 2006, 213). is is counterposed to the
rupture provided by the virility of the Sabraonly the Israeli nation-state
and its militaristic dreams of security can save Jews from this history of
endless suering. We can read the shi deployed by Brand Israel as a refor-
mulation of the Sabra-Holocaust dialectic. According to a 2005 article in
the Jewish Daily Forward, the “new approach to Israeli image control” was
to cultivate an image of Israel as a place “where there are cool, hip people,”
without mentioning “the conict” (Popper 2005). In other words, military
prowess would be replaced by chic, neoliberal capital. Sabra virility has
given way to market virility, and queers are caught between a dialectic of
“gay friendly” Tel Aviv and the specter of a pervasive, global queerphobia.
Transgender pinkwashing and the Holocaust-Sabra dialectic are
both emblematic of what Wendy Brown (1993) termed the politics of
“wounded aachments.” Brown identies the production of an “incite-
ment to resentment” through a “renaturalization of capitalism that can
be said to have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s.” Brown
ascribes this to the growth of “class resentment without ... class analysis”
that has typied the dematerialization of identity politics. is process is at
work more generally, since, using Nietzsche’s concept of resentment, class
resentment “like all resentments, retains the real or imagined holdings
of its reviled subject.” In other words, the wounded subject holds on to
282 Saffo Papantonopoulou
the very violent structures that produced it in the rst place. Brown turns
away from Foucault, reading Nietzsche’s “diagnosis of the culture of
modernity as the triumph of ‘slave morality’” as explaining how liberal-
ism has brought about this proliferation of resentment. What she leaves
out, however, are the various ways in which these proliferated resentments
can become organized and directed by an aective economy such as Brand
Israel. In other words, economies of gratitude and incitements to vulner-
ability seek to align “proper” ways of expressing one’s righteous indigna-
tion and trauma in the service of capital and the state.
One of the sites of tension with members of the U.S. LGBT delegation to
Palestine that Maikey referenced during her keynote was a conict over
the question of activists being “out” in Palestine. Part of Maikey’s point
was that the “coming-out narrative” is a Western narrative, and one needs
to be aware of one’s privilege in such a context. I agree; however, I would
counterpose the point that the coming-out narrative is also a cisgender
narrative. What does it mean for a transgender person to not be “out”?
“Out”ness is a complicated question for transgender subjects. It is not sim-
ply a maer of whom one sleeps with or forms relationships with, but a
maer of one’s both intimate and public relationship with one’s own body.
And it is a question of gender ontology. In order to address this question,
I wish to switch tone, toward the personal/autoethnographicfocusing
on my own “coming out” as transgender. As I hope will be apparent, this
is necessary in order to outline some of the specicities of the transgender
subject and its relation to pinkwashing.
My own personal relationship with transgender pinkwashing is perhaps
best exemplied by a former friendlet me refer to him as Xwhose
own articulation of a transgender identity was foundational to my even-
tual “coming out” as transgender. I met X in the early 2000s. X’s fear for
his family in Israel, as well as his pain and frustration of having had to ght
so much to assert his right to be a manontologically, not referentially
coalesced to produce the rst version of pinkwashing I ever encountered.
Long before I learned the term “pinkwashing” or had a political vocabu-
lary to respond to it, he told me stories about queer and trans Palestinians
“eeing” to Tel Aviv and Jerusalemconsolidating many fears around the
phobogenic object of the Palestinian. X would oen deploy the trauma
that he had experiencedboth as a trans person and as someone with
family in Israelto silence any articulation of a transgender politics that
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 283
is anticapitalist, antimilitarist, or anti-Zionist. I am particularly struck, for
instance, by an argument we once had over Amanda Simpson, the rst
transgender presidential appointee in the United States and former proj-
ect designer for U.S. military contractor Raytheon. X insinuated that any
trans person who articulated a politics critical of transgender celebrations
of people such as Simpson were privileged and did not understand what
it is to struggle to nd employment as a trans person. is deployment
perfectly represents Brown’s notion of “class resentment without class
analysis,” as the exclusive focus of X’s political project was always based
around responding to present painthrough, for instance, a precise and
transcendent denition of gender terminology, and the ever-elusive search
for “safety”and resenting those who advocated a more systemic trans-
formative politics as inherently privileged.
Having rst learned of the term “transgender” from X, as well as a
series of encounters with mostly binary-identied trans men (trans men
who identify solidly within the gender binary, as men), I began a dicult
process of interrogating my own relationship to my body and what gender
meant to me. Having felt that the subject position of the “transgender,”
which, by that time in the early 2000s metropolitan United States had
already become rmly entrenched as a discourse, did not seem to com-
pletely t with me, I felt ambivalent. Further contributing to my ambiv-
alence was my, at that time, total commitment to a certain tyrannical
articulation of identity politics that was (and remains) so popular among
college-educated rst world radicals: not recognizing my own sense of
gendered embodiment as something legible within the currently existing
articulations of gender, I did not wish to “appropriate” another. Since then,
my relationship to gender has shied. I did not so much “come out” as
transgender as “come into” a transgender subject positionone I felt had
already been prearticulated.
Transgender people, in general, are placed in an impossible bind. On
the one hand, the need to exert a stable gender identity in response to the
violent hegemony and apparent naturalization of assigned-at-birth gender
means that the transgender subject must produce an illusion of coherent
gender. On the other hand, this is impossible, as gender is always a mime-
sis. Oen exotied within queer theory and queer spaces as examples of
the incoherence of heteronormative gender roles, we are frequently forced
to speak out of both sides of our mouths when it comes to questions of
gender essentialism: “yes, but ... no.” While it is the case that gender is
284 Saffo Papantonopoulou
always mimesis, the struggle for the transgender woman is to be a woman
ontologically, not referentiallyto say, “is is not drag; this is not a parody.”
e politicization of the transgender subject’s present pain rather than
future liberation forecloses the question: What does transgender exist in
reference to? is foreclosure easily leads to liberal concepts of justice and
equality. As Brown (1993) argues, claims to inclusion, which have origi-
nated from far more liberatory intentions, are “tethered to a formulation
of justice, which, ironically, reinscribes a bourgeois idea as its measure”;
(394) the transgender woman seeks an “equal chance” at being included in
the stable category of “woman,” and transgender politics becomes deeply
tied to a proliferation of precisely dened signiersas if we can some-
how signify our way toward liberation. e tragic result of this contradic-
tion, in combination with the renaturalization of capitalism within identity
politics, is that the transgender subject must form a wounded aachment
to the very terms of gender that oppress her in the rst place. It is this fear
of illegibility, the need to exist in spaces where one’s relationship to gender
is legible, even as one grapples with the intangibility of genderthe c-
tion of gender essentialism that trans people are forced to take onthat
makes our need for intangible things such as “safety” and “security” so eas-
ily co-optable. e incitement to vulnerability (“what are you?”) serves to
remind us of that.
e contradiction between being and becoming is one that we live inti-
matelyhow else can one explain the process of transition, of becoming
what one already isand yet we cannot, for fear of becoming a parody,
identify it as such. Piled on top of that, the struggle for the nonbinary
transgender woman is to establish the ontological foundation of her wom-
anhood before she can nd the space to aord a playfulness within that
femininity“No, this is not drag; ... but yes, it is drag.” In order to deal
with this tension, I felt the need to produce an ever-increasing string of
qualiers in order to delicately navigate the world of rst world “radical”
queer politics. From genderqueer butch trans men who are booms, to
binary-identied trans women who enjoy drag, there has been an endless
and explosive proliferation of queer and transgender subject positions,
held together by a matrix of (neo)liberal multiculturalismsometimes in
the guise of anticapitalism. What we have is an innitely expanding fractal
of politicized identities, each one produced in a state of resentment against
another. Part of what motivates this process is that, within the logic of neo-
liberal politicized identity, if one cannot name one’s pain, then one’s pain
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 285
is not politicizable. is creates a further proliferation of subjectivities and
resentments.
By now, the reader may have noticed that at certain moments, I unavoid-
ably slip between signiers such as “gay,” “queer,” and “trans” in discussing
these discourses. is is somewhat unavoidable, since in many of these
discoursesparticularly pinkwashing discourses deployed by queerpho-
bic Zioniststhere is not just a conation of “gay” and “trans” but also
the assumption that the illegible “someone like me” (“what are you?”)
can be legible/“safe” only within the connes of a social formation called
“LGBT” or “gay,” located in the West/Israel. e heckles I have received,
as with most transphobic aacks, do not fall neatly along the lines of self-
identication. Transgender people, aer all, are oen singled out for vio-
lence simply for being the most visibly queer bodies, regardless of how we
identify. But this fear of illegibility is also something internalized by trans-
gender peoplethe notion that we can only really travel in spaces that
have a certain a priori reading of gender. is wounded aachment to the
gender binary, and the ction of a transcendent (and trans-arming) gen-
der essentialism, lend themselves easily to imperialist cooptation. When
the transgender subject reads (cisnormative) homonationalist narratives,
even when we are not specically hailed as trans subjects within them, the
assumption is that it is only within those limited “gay friendly” spaces that
we may nd an even smaller subset of trans-iendly subspaces. I want to
turn now toward a critical reading of three dierent texts that speak about
gayness in transitboth the transit of gay migrants and the transit of gay
signierswith the understanding that the transgender subject, although
not always specically referenced, is implicated within this. Although the
three texts have very dierent politicsMarxist, homonationalist, and
anticolonialwhat they have in common is a certain linguistic aachment
to gay signiers.
Drawing from Foucault, Gay Marxist historian John D’Emilio, in his
1983 article “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” correctly notes that “gay” and
“lesbian,” as identity formations, “are a product of history” whose “emer-
gence is associated with the relations of capitalism” (102). is emergence
is, of course, clustered around large cities. However, D’Emilio still essen-
tializes gayness, equating gay liberation in a typical Marxist teleological
fashion, with the rise of capitalism and the move toward a liberatory uto-
pia. “Capitalism has created the material conditions for homosexual desire
286 Saffo Papantonopoulou
to express itself as a central component of some individuals’ lives,” he
argues, and outlines his vision for a utopic gay socialist future: “Now, our
political movements are ... creating the ideological conditions that make
it easier for people to make that choice” (109).
D’Emilio’s historicism is useful, although his teleology is not. What we
can take from a critical reading of this, however, is that holding on to an
aachment to the subject position of “gay” or “lesbian” in the fashion that
D’Emilio does (even while recognizing it as socially constructed), can be
colonial. D’Emilio’s gay socialist futurity has a temporality that marches to
the same drum as manifest destiny. is seler futurity is the same prac-
tice as Marxist colonialismfor instance, consider the Soviet discourse
around Chechens: “lumpen proletariats” who needed to go through all the
proper stages of capitalist displacement and alienation in order to reach
the telos of proletarian subjectivity necessary for socialism. Part of the
problem here is that the subject of the proletariat contains within it the
capitalist displacement that was necessary for the production of the pro-
letariathence, a kind of jealous gaze is directed toward those who are
seen as having not yet experienced this alienation, especially indigenous
peoples who have not been fully assimilated into capitalism. I want to
make a controversial claim here, in not viewing Marxism and late twen-
tieth-century identity politics as dialectically antithetical, but rather read-
ing certain dogmatic strains of Marxism as a form of proletarian identity
politics. Within this universalized proletarian subject is another kind of
wounded aachment. e proletariat subject position contains within it
the very rupture of displacement that produced the proletariat class and
the heteropatriarchy necessary to sustain capitalist production.
A similar kind of aachment to displacement is at play in liberal gay
humanitarian narratives. In 2005, the tellingly named studio Aer Stone-
wall Productions released a lm titled Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the
Developing World. Featuring interviews with various LGBT activists from
dierent countries outside the West, spliced up and lumped together hap-
hazardly, the lm delivers the following overarching messages: that it is
not safe to be queer in the “developing world,” that what queer spaces do
exist in the “developing world” are to be found in certain metropolises
Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Calcua, Rio de Janeiroand that these sites trace
their genealogy to the Stonewall riots. Furthermore, according to the lm,
queerness/gayness and sometimes transness (when it is acknowledged)
were invented in the West. Epistemic breaking points such as the Stone-
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 287
wall riots and canonized locales such as San Francisco and Greenwich Vil-
lage are the originating points of this innovation against the backdrop of
a timeless, pervasive heterosexism. is cosmopolitan gayness/queerness
then “spreads” from the metropole to the periphery, forming a web from
city to city. is coincides with Jack Halberstam’s (excruciatingly white)
analysis in his book In a Queer Time and Place: the idea of “metronorma-
tivity,” that “the rural is made to function as a closet for urban sexualities
in most accounts of rural queer migration” and that “the metronormative
narrative maps a story of migration onto the coming-out narrative” (2005,
36–37). We can extend Halberstam’s analysis further and see the ways that
the closet/rural/(post)colony as well as out/urban/metropole get col-
lapsed onto each otherthe queer is always pulled closer to the heart of
capital.
e overarching savior narrative occurs towards the end of the lm,
when each interviewee, in clips spliced together, tells his or her story of
emigrating to the West. Aer a particularly heart-wrenching story of Ashraf
Zanati’s departure from Egypt, the narrator comments that “Ashraf Zanati
le Egypt. Ashraf had become part of a planetary minority.” Although
the lm purports to care about the status of queers in the “developing
world,” it actually forms a wounded aachment that fetishizes displace-
ment and bifurcates the queer from his or her society. is narration of
non-Western countries as inherently unsafe for queer subjects produces
the very displacement it describes, in a manner similar to the ways nine-
teenth-century colonial archaeology laid the foundations for Zionism and
the dispossession of Arab Jews. Writing about the European “discovery”
and destruction of the Cairo Genizaa building that had housed pieces of
paper documenting centuries of Jewish Egyptian historyShohat (2006)
shows us that the discursive/ archival dislocation of Egyptian Jews by the
forces of European/Ashkenazi colonialism anticipated the later disloca-
tion of Egyptian Jews. is dislocation would form part of the backbone
of Zionist historiography’s production of a “morbidly selective ‘tracing the
dots’ from pogrom to pogrom.” e fetishization of queer displacement,
as projected by Dangerous Living, performs a similar historical ip to the
one Shohat documents: “If at the time of the ‘Geniza discovery’ Egyptian
Jews were still seen as part of the colonized Arab world, with the parti-
tion of Palestine, Arab-Jews, in a historical shi, suddenly became simply
‘Jews’” (Shohat 2006, 205). rough various colonial practices, there was
a discursive bifurcation between the “Arab” and the “Jew”; in the case of
288 Saffo Papantonopoulou
Dangerous Living there is a similar bifurcation between the “Egyptian” and
the “Queer.”
Joseph Massad (2002, 2007) coined the term “gay international” to
refer to the colonial politics that are intrinsic to projects such as Danger-
ous Living. However, Massad falls into a similar trap, although for opposite
reasons. Massad’s writing is excellently critiqued in a blog post by Samir
Taha (2013). Taha argues:
Massad’s whole thesis is premised on a vast and unbridgeable (except
through an imperializing act) divide between the “West” and the “non-
West,” one in which the West is always positively dened as possessing
certain epistemic categories, primary among them the category sexual-
ity with everything that it contains from homophobia and heteronor-
mativity to gay politics and queer resistance, while the non-West is also
always contrastively and negatively dened as lacking both the catego-
ries and the need for the politics they contain and generate. e divide
can be summed up in one statement: the West has sexuality, the non-
West does not.
Massad even goes so far as to aack queer Arab activists for being inher-
ently “complicit” in imperialism by their very act of forming sexual identi-
cation. He goes even further and blames their “complicity” for acts of
queerphobic violence they later experienced! I would hate to see what
Massad would have to say about transgender subjectivitiesthankfully
he has not yet seen t to write about them/us. While Dangerous Living,
consistent with the Zionist economy of gratitude and narratives of queer
and trans Palestinians “eeing” to Israel, posits queerness as a gi given by
the West to the non-West, Massad actually makes a similar argument
just reversing the value judgment. e signier “gay” still belongs to the
West. e noble identication becomes an ignoble identication. is is
the same kind of wounded aachment as transphobic second-wave femi-
nism, which reied/reacted to the gender binary by reversing the value
judgment without questioning the formation of the binary itself.
It is undeniably true that many queer, trans, and LGBT people from
the third world migratefor numerous reasonscloser to the heart of
neocolonial capital (along with their straight/cisgender neighbors), just
as it is undeniably true that signiers such as “gay,” “queer,” and “trans,”
as English words, have histories that originate in the West. e problem
here is not with the “truth” of these statements, but with their interpola-
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 289
tion into discoursethe way these movements are narrated politically. In
order to avoid the pitfalls of Massad, for instance, it is important to draw a
distinction between the politics of Dangerous Living and the individual life
narratives of the people interviewed in the lm. What Dangerous Living,
Joseph Massad, and John D’Emilio have in common is a certain linguistic
aachment: they all fall for the deterministic trap of reading a signier as
aached to its point of origin. is is precisely what Foucault criticizes in
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1977). Allow me to use one moment
in Dangerous Living as an example of a dierent reading. Alyssa Sasot, a
transgender woman from the Philippines, recounts the story of how she
came to identify as transgender: “e term ‘transgender’ ... well, thanks
to the Internet. I learned it when I was in fourth year high school. I put
like ‘gays who look like women’ [into the search engine] and, it says ‘trans-
gendered.’ . . . Oh!” We must leave room for a kind of transcendence of
subjectivities such as “transgender” if we are to avoid the reductionist
pitfalls of Massad. ere is, at least for an instant (the “Oh!” moment), a
transcendence whereby the term “transgender” literally exists outside of
geography or even history, within the intimate subjectivity of Sasot and
others. “Transgender,” at this moment, is neither a benevolent gi from
the West nor an assimilation of Western cultural imperialism. And yet it is
precisely the openness of this momentthe opposite of the unbridgable-
ness of Massad’s gap between West and non-Westthat allows a vulner-
ability to imperialist co-optation, as the lm aempts to credit the West
for this subjectivity production.
Wendy Brown’s words ring just as true today as they did twenty years ago
when they were wrien. While Brown did not explore what, exactly, mobi-
lizes wounded aachments, what we have seen since 1993 is an increase in
the deployment of wounded aachments by neoliberalism and neocolo-
nialism. e Zionist economy of gratitude, as part of a multibillion-dollar
propaganda industry, is an economy in a very literal sense. Pinkwashing
deploys preexisting tropes of Jewish victimization inherent to Zionism, in
an aempt to hail the transgender subject into a debt of gratitude toward
neoliberalism. is narrative deploys vulnerability as economic capital,
and its historical rise coincides with a tactical and discursive shi by radi-
cal and progressive politics within the West. is shi has been a move
toward hyperindividualized projects of semiotic and representational
interventions into existing systems. is is encapsulated in the assump-
290 Saffo Papantonopoulou
tion that through beer (media) representation, and precisely dened
terminologies, transgender people and other oppressed people may nd
liberation.
e renaturalization of capitalism within late twentieth-century iden-
tity politics is both a product of and produced by the reframing of both
temporality and the individual’s relation to the collective within purport-
edly liberatory political projects. No longer part of a mass movement that
aims toward liberation of the collective in historical time, we are instead
relegated to a totality of atomized individuals, each struggling to survive.
e struggles for survival are very much real, but the ways in which they
have been politicizedeven more, the ways in which survival within the
existing system has become the political projectreect an internaliza-
tion of Margaret atcher’s infamous quip “ere is no alternative.” We are
oen grappling with subjectivities that have been produced by disciplin-
ary regimes in order not to survive. Liberation will mean the ceasing-to-be
of many of these disciplined subjectivities. And there are few things more
terrifying than calling for the death of one’s own subject position.
But this may be the point where it makes sense to part from Brown, as
Brown parts from Nietzsche. Aer all, Brown does not account for move-
mentssuch as, say, the Black Panther Party, to name one examplethat
politicized identity as part of a liberatory project, avoiding both liberal
co-optation and crude Marxist reductionism. Rather than focus further
on Brown’s notion of wounds and traumas, it may be useful to reevalu-
ate Fanon’s notion of catharsis in the twenty-rst century. What might we
imagine a transgender catharsis could look like? To Fanon, catharsis hap-
pens as part of decolonial struggle, which is, in his words, “an agenda for
total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand
.. . or a gentleman’s agreement.” Fanon species that decolonial struggle
“is an historical process” (1963, 2). Liberation, catharsis, and healing from
trauma will not happen on the level of a matrix of individuals, or a more
precise regime of signication, and no theoretical intervention (even on
the part of this text) will bring it into being. Again, we cannot signify our
way toward liberation as something that happens in historical time; we
cannot make a priori promises of safety or security. ere is unfortunately
no predicting what, exactly, a historical unraveling of a violent system may
bring about. But we can, at the very least, prepare ourselves, by critically
examining what sort of political tropes we reproduce in aempting to
name our pain. Demanding liberation in historical time, through a collec-
“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv” 291
tive struggle that places more weight on the material than on the semiotic
or symbolic, while simultaneously allowing geocultural cross-pollination
of ideas and signiers without a historically deterministic search for “ori-
gins” (Foucault 1977), may allow us to break out of cycles of debt and
gratitude. But this change will not happen through theoretical interven-
tion alone; it must happen through a structural and material transforma-
tion of the world we live in.
Acknowledgments
It is not without a sense of irony that, in an essay on economies of gratitude,
I would like to acknowledge four friends, without whose love and support
I would not have been able to write this essay. I would like to dedicate this
essay to Skanda Kadirgamar, Amirah Mizrahi, Krys Méndez Ramirez, and
Samir Taha. I will forever owe them a debt of gratitude.
Saffo Papantonopoulou is a transgender activist who has been involved in the BDS move-
ment since 2009. She is pursuing a PhD in anthropology and Middle East studies at
the University of Arizona, where her research is focused on Islamophobia, neoliberal-
ism, queer resistance, and Ottoman historical memory in Greece.
Notes
1. As a point of clarication, contrary to how it is oen construed, the use of the
term “apartheid” is not to invoke a comparison with South Africa (although
there are many similarities), but rather to apply a term with a legal denition
(see Millard 2012).
2. I would call it “transnationalism,” but that word is unfortunately already
taken.
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