Pinkwashed

Abstract

Claims regarding “gay rights” have acquired a prominent role in debates over Israel's occupation of Palestine. This often takes the form of “pinkwashing,” a term denoting the use of gay rights discourse to justify the imposition of colonial rule. This article analyzes the pornographic film Men of Israel to explore how pinkwashing reflects colonialism's depoliticizing and exclusionary logics. Men of Israel shows how pinkwashing is far more than a justificatory practice. It also legitimates, reproduces and appropriates colonial narratives to justify an alliance between supporters of gay rights and the “pro-gay” Israeli state. It simultaneously excludes a racial category of people called “Palestinians,” which includes gay Palestinians, from the rights accorded to gay men in Israel. In an era of “gay rights as human rights,” such deployments of “gay rights” highlight the necessity of directing critical scrutiny to the alliances and exclusions implicated by a particular articulation of rights.

Keywords:

• Palestine
• homonationalism
• pinkwashing
• gay rights
• colonialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Claire Rasmussen, Heidi Shepler, Julia Pompetti, Clayton Colmon, Reid Smith, Justin Deleon, Erin Baugher, John McMahon and two anonymous reviewers for offering invaluable suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. Special thanks are due to Winard Britt for extensive assistance with proofreading.

Notes on contributor

Brett Remkus Britt is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware. His current research focuses on normative contestation regarding sexuality as a human rights issue in global politics, along with how radical democratic theory can inform studies of normative change at the global level.

Notes

1 I note that “Palestine” is a contested term. When referring to the occupation of Palestine, I am usually referring more specifically to Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, though I also note the contested nature of boundaries throughout Israel and Palestine.

2 This does not mean that formal sovereignty marks the end of colonization. Struggles over political and territorial autonomy are integral to the so called “postcolonial” context.

3 I wish to acknowledge significant activist work on this issue, much of which cannot be included here. Examples include Puar (2010), Schulman (2011), Meronek (2012) and Samuel (2013).

4 Such assumptions are particularly prominent within scholarship on norms and human rights. This scholarship often presupposes that liberal human rights norms are inherently inclusive or takes their emancipatory content at face value. See, inter alia, Keck and Sikkink (1998), Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999) and Brysk (2013).

5 This is not necessarily a “negative” aspect of rights, as it allows disempowered groups to successfully achieve their political goals (Lefort 1986).

6 Laclau and Mouffe (2001, 130) call this a “chain of equivalence,” which they describe as a “logic of the simplification of political space.” This allows the formulation of political alliances between groups whose goals seemingly have nothing to do with each other.

7 Feminist scholarship has been particularly adept at showing how rights discourse often collaborates with, rather than critiques, the categories of neoliberalism and colonialism (e.g. Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Fraser 2013). Similarly, gay rights groups have often reproduced neoliberal relations of domination through political alliances forged to promote their political agenda (Duggan 2002; Puar 2007). Ultimately, invocation of rights language often fails at “transforming the activity through which suffering is produced,” due to the alliances forged in pursuit of rights (Brown 1995, 7). Of course this is not a recent argument, and has its foundations in Marx ([1844] 1978).

8 These literatures, as well as my work, are heavily indebted to postcolonial and women of color feminisms. See, inter alia, Collins (2005), hooks (2000) and Mohanty, Russo, and Torres (1991).

9 This does not mean that gay rights discourse can only be used in support of colonialism. Many contemporary articulations of gay rights also situate it within an anticolonial critique (e.g. Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie 2005; Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi 2009).

10 My analysis thus relies on intertextual methods. Weldes (2003) discusses this framework's relevance to international relations.

11 Notably, the latter two cities were also founded within settler colonial projects. The visibility of gay capital in these places was made possible by the displacement of indigenous inhabitants, as in Palestine.

12 In historical colonial projects, this role was often served by white heterosexual women (see McClintock 1995; Stoler 2002). The possibility for gay men to assume this role marks a remarkable transformation of the relationship between sexuality and colonialism (Morgensen 2011).

13 This contrasts with forms of colonialism that rely on a minimal presence from colonizers and the continuing presence of indigenous peoples (e.g. Stoler 2002 contra Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995).

14 This ties the film to the longer history of liberal thought, which used masculinity to determine who possessed political agency and who was a rights bearing subject. Conversely, femininity was a criterion for assessing who did not possess these attributes (MacKinnon 1989; Pateman 1998).

15 The language of “women's rights” is used here with a similar aim. Mohanty (2003) and Shohat (2006), among many others, argue that women's rights have a longstanding role in justifying colonial rule. Pinkwashing is thus situated within a much longer history of linkages between gender/sexuality and colonization.

16 Smith (2005) makes a similar argument in the context of indigenous Americans.

17 Such arguments are increasingly common, and include interventions by prominent scholars of queer theory and LGBT politics (e.g. Faderman 2011).

18 Such exclusions are not simply problems in the deployment of rights. Pateman (1998) and Mills (1999) argue that racism and sexism are integral to the conceptual schema which informs debate about rights today.

19 Palestine is, of course, not the only context where “gay rights” encounter colonial practices (e.g. Alexander 2005; Cheney 2012).

20 Deployment of rights outside the colonial context can create similar difficulties. Scholars such as Towns (2010) have argued that norms in international relations (including those regarding rights) have power precisely because of the hierarchical relations they establish.