The Jane Hull House Museum hosted a groundbreaking appearance by two Palestinian queer women and feminists ( currently on a multi-city tour ) Feb. 6.
Ghadir Shafei is a feminist activist and member of the Jerusalem-based organization Aswat ( "voices" in Arabic ) and Haneen Maikay is a queer activist and director of al-Qaws ( "rainbow" in Arabic ) , a community based organization that works with LGBTQ Palestinians throughout Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories.
Photos were not permitted due to security reasons.
Addressing a standing room-only audience, Lynette Jackson, associate professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke about the importance of the event in the current context of "the waves of popular uprisings" in Egypt, the "stubborn persistence of the Palestinian imagination," and the need to think about the persecution of queers worldwide.
After a brief spoken-word performance by Tristan Silverman, the women addressed questions posed by Jackson and Laila Farah, associate professor of women's and gender studies at DePaul University. They spoke of how their respective groups had come about because of the need to find spaces where they would be recognized in their multiple identities as Palestinian, queer and feminist. Shafei spoke of having moved to Tel Aviv in an attempt to find a queer community. She was warmly embraced by Israeli friends who nevertheless were uncomfortable with her political identity as a Palestinian woman. The two said that feminist circles were reluctant to fully embrace queers. Both groups came out of the need to establish "safe spaces" for feminist, queer lesbians to find solidarity.
Farah asked about what conditions on the ground were like for those who could not easily access activist meeting spaces. Maikay addressed the problems that arise for women who need and are often denied special passes to leave their areas, and the fact that mobility and education are key factors in attendance. She emphasized that this was one reason al-Qaws did a lot of grassroots outreach.
Jackson raised the issue of "pink-washing," a term used by some commentators on queer issues in the Middle East to describe what they describe as Israel's attempt to "rebrand" itself as a gay haven in the area. Maikay said that this "diverts attention from Israel's institutionalized policies of discrimination" and that soldiers at checkpoints "don't discriminate between gay and straight."
Both women spoke about the particular challenges facing Palestinian women and queers as they sought more gender freedom in a conservative society and their queer identities in a situation where such are relatively invisible. They emphasized that their groups were explicitly political, and that it was impossible not to be so in what Shafei described as "levels of oppression which can shift by the minute and which are an integral part of our struggle." Maikay stressed that while they engaged a nationalist discourse, "we are not a nationalist group, but a human rights group, even as we are aware that we are part of a nationalist struggle."
Maikay was also critical of the concept of "coming out," saying that "the ceremonial notion of coming out is a very Western concept and not suitable for our context." The comment raised questions in the discussion portion of the event. One respondent asked what the troubling of coming out meant when the women were not out enough to have their photos taken, and another, a Lebanese gay man, asked if coming out did not help to counter the conservative idea that there were simply not many queers in the Middle East.
Maikay clarified her point by saying that she had never had to "come out" in a formal way and that her sexuality was known in some contexts and not in others. She explained that the kind of visibility expected of sexual subjects in the west does not have the same cultural relevance in the Middle East where sexuality cannot be separated from political discourse.
Asked about their goals for their movement and if that might include gay marriage, Maikay bluntly said she "did not care for gay marriage," and said they were working to "break sexual and gender hierarchies…and building a very pro-active grassroots movement." Asked what supporters in the United States could do, Shafei said that such discussions were themselves critical. Expanding on what she described as the relentless persecution of Palestinians by Israeli forces, she also encouraged people to visit because "seeing is believing." She pointed out that this current tour became possible after the lesbian writer Sarah Schulman visited the area, saw the discrimination faced by Palestinians, and helped organize the tour so that people in the United States might meet the activists and learn more.
