Virtual Book Event: Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

The departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology, the Queer Studies Minor, and the Global Middle East Studies Minor invite you and your students to a virtual book talk by Dr. Sa’ed Atshan. He will present his book,Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique.Please join us on October 24, 2024, 2:00 – 3:30 PM.

 

 

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia. Sa’ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

 

 

Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. His research is focused on contemporary Palestinian society and politics, global LGBTQ social movements, and Christian minorities in the Middle East. His work is at the intersection of cultural anthropology, peace and conflict studies, the anthropology of policy, humanitarianism, critical development studies, gender and sexuality, human security, social movements, the Middle East and North Africa, modern Germany, religious studies, and Quaker studies. Atshan is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020). He is also the co-author, with Katharina Galor (Judaic Studies, Brown University), of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020). The German translation of The Moral Triangle is entitled Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin: Geschichten einer komplexen Beziehung (De Gruyter, 2021). Atshan and Galor also coedited the volume, Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022). Atshan’s work has appeared or been referenced in media outlets, including The Advocate, Friends Journal, Foreign Affairs, Gay Times,  Harvard Gazette, Huffington Post, Jadaliyya, Jacobin, Jewish Journal,  London Review of Books, Los Angeles Blade, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, NBC, NPR, Open Democracy, Sojourners, Tel Aviv Review of Books,  Truthout, Washington Post, and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, among others. His forthcoming book, Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, is under contract with Stanford University Press in their Anthropology of Policy Series.

 

Zoom meeting id: 777 004 5181 passcode: 952826

 

This event is funded by Scholarly Intersections Grant. 

 

Sponsors: Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, the Queer Studies Minor, and the Global Middle East Studies Minor.