Description
In an age when one can engage in homosexual sex and serve in the military and get married wearing Pride merchandise sold at a multinational corporation (Duggan 2004, Puah 2007) this paper argues that ‘queer’ practices remain political and politicizing. This paper, however, argues that practices of queerness continue to produce subcultures (Halberstam 2005) which are structured by and reproduce non-normativity. By taking as an example the ways in which young Jewish queers in the US and UK engage in the unlearning of Zionism through queer community, this paper argues for 'queer' practices as necessarily politically engaged. Based on nearly three years of ethnographic research, this paper traces the overlap between queer practices amongst young Jewish people in the US and UK and their embrace of anti-Zionist politics. This paper analyzes research participants narratives of becoming anti-Zionist, tracing the ways in which participation in queer spaces precipitated questioning of structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, including the nation-state. This paper concludes by introducing ‘Jewish Diasporism’, a growing movement whose adherents demonstrate the co-constitution of queerness and anti-Zionism amongst Ashkenazi Jewish people in the US and UK.
