Events

In the last decade, gay rights have featured prominently in Israel’s 'Hasbara' efforts to promote and fortify its international image as a liberal democracy through rebranding itself as gay-friendly. These campaigns have been characterised as pinkwashing, meaning the invocation of gay rights in order to divert attention from and justify the occupation and the violation of the rights of Palestinians. Tatour’s talk rethinks the emergence and development of pinkwashing as a political strategy and a colonial technology of racialisation, demonisation and dehumanisation, suggesting it should be understood as rooted in the legacies and present workings of orientalism, liberal racism and the rise of Israel as a liberal settler state. Pinkwashing, she argues, is part of a larger political project of entrenching, normalising and naturalising settler sovereignty and Zionist claims over Palestine. In the talk, Tatour further discusses the ways in which the Palestinian queer movement has responded to, challenged and resisted pinkwashing, homocolonialism and the appropriation of Palestinian queer bodies, queering both the question of Palestine and the politics of decolonisation.