This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

Kevin Paul is a busy guy. As if being queer, a philosophy/cultural studies double major, and Canadian weren’t taxing enough, he’s taken on responsibilities as treasurer of Queer McGill, McGill University’s premier LGBTQ student organization and one of the most active campus queer groups in North America.

QM just launched a campaign in response to the latest development in the North American queer-on-queer Israel-Palestine proxy powerfeud, and after reading through some of the responses to my Michael Lucas piece from early March I thought pulling in a different (if aligned) voice could help to move an important conversation forward. That, or rob another few hours of sleep from the seething old hawk-queens who flamed up the comments section three weeks ago, assuming they aren’t otherwise up too late beating off to pictures of cruise-missile-charred Libyan children (or whatever it is that miserable old neocon ghouls do for fun) for it to make any difference.

Paul was kind enough to spare me an hour of Skype time earlier this week. After establishing that Montreal was indeed in the same time zone as Washington D.C., and that, on account of some barbaric Frankish custom, he could drink legally in Quebec as a 20-year-old, we got down to queer political brass tacks. For those of you reading aloud, Paul’s parts should be inflected with a careful, alert, charmingly twinky tenor. Mine should kind of sound like a broken subwoofer with a BA in philosophy.

(Fair warning to our loyal trolls: at least some of this reads like an overcaffeinated, overliterate humanities-major circle jerk because, well, it involves two overcaffeinated, overliterate humanities majors and a webcam. Take issue with anything laid out here, but trust that I’ve already internalized criticisms in the vein of “Gee, these guys need to get out of the campus coffeehouse more often!” Some habits just die hard, even if they cost tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to cultivate and render one structurally unemployable.)

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Andrew F, TNG: Chances are if someone’s reading this in print, they’re already up to speed on the Michael Lucas flap. Especially for the sake of our our American audience: talk a little bit about this other incident with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, and how that catalyzed Queer McGill to action.

Kevin Paul: We had initially heard about the incident in New York, and were planning a response. Soon after in Toronto, the Mayor Rob Ford threatened to withhold all funding from Toronto Pride 2011 if the organizers allowed Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march. We saw both of these events as the same type of censorship of this particular issue in queer communities, and it catalyzed us further to respond.

TNG: What has this response looked like for Queer McGill?

KP: We’ve responded by taking the concrete step of a new policy against global state oppression: we’re boycotting commercial and institutional entities that fund, directly or indirectly, state regimes that violate international law and human rights standards. On a symbolic level we want this to make the point that these are LGBT issues, these are queer issues, and we should be standing in solidarity with other oppressed groups rather than trying to silence certain political conversations in queer communities.

TNG:  Understood. Before we go on, a warning to you and our readers: shit’s only going to get wonkier from here.

This kind of neoconservative hegemonization of gay politics – to stand in line with Israel, to stand in line with this crazy imperial agenda more broadly in the name of a certain interpretation of “Western” or “Enlightenment values” – has been a really troubling development in the past ten years or so. I wonder if it’s the case that the difference here is between what we could call a “gay politics” and a “queer politics.” Which is to say: It’s probably inarguably the case that Israel is the state in the Middle East with the most people that North American and European townhouse-dwelling, dog-owning, gym-frequenting gay men are going to identify with, because it’s the state that has the most guys who live that kind of life. Compare the Michael Lucas brand (NSFW): this polished, professional, gay yuppie sensibility marketed to a certain class demographic. Against that, there’s the kind of queer expression that Judith Butler has talked about so forcefully: this kind of interstitial mode of sexual resistance that isn’t reducible to what you and I as North Americans are encouraged to think of as being “gay.” So, I wonder, in light of that distinction, when you talk about the occupation of Palestine as a queer issue, what do you mean?

KP:  Built into the concept of ‘queer’ is the crossing of traditional boundaries between identities – and that can encompass national, ethnic, and cultural groups, as well as genders and sexual identities – and so I think a queer politics does lend itself more to solidarity across those kinds of boundaries. So when I say that this particular issue is a queer issue, I mean that in the sense that any instance of oppression or marginalization which mirrors the oppression and marginalization that queer people face should be treated as a queer issue, because doing so will allow otherwise narrow movements of resistance to unite – and form broader, stronger coalitions against all forms of oppression.

And yet I don’t think that a “gay” politics should necessarily preclude the same kinds of solidarity. It may be more difficult, in that a politics linked to a stricter identity like “gay” or “lesbian” makes it more difficult to see a shared struggle across the boundaries that these categories help enforce, but I think that this is something that even a “gay” or “LGBT” politics should be trying to combat, alongside a “queer” politics.

TNG: There’s this issue of what’s been called the “pinkwashing” of the Israel question. It’s common knowledge, in the wake of Wikileaks, and also in the kinds of conversations that go on in the left blogosphere, that a strategic marketing point for the state of Israel is to present itself as a multicultural, gay-friendly bulwark against the benighted Muslim hordes. I’m wondering – and this might go beyond what QM has done so far – if can you talk about the kinds of queer modes that go in a place like Palestine, or in Palestinian culture, and how those differ from the Israeli expression?

KP: I personally wouldn’t want to comment. I’ve not been to the region, and I don’t know that much about queer life in Palestine, but  I’d imagine it would be difficult to affirm these kinds of more Western identities like “gay” and “lesbian” given that tradition and culture.

TNG: Can it be the case that, as queer people living the lives that we do, we have commitments to self-determination and anti-imperialism that override the kinds of identity politics-sympathies that we’re used to in domestic matters? So that, even if it is the case of a state like Iran in which there is regular anti-gay state-sanctioned and other kinds of violence, we can still make meaningful, powerful, consistent critiques of military intervention or what have you, because we’re not going to be blackmailed or “pinkmailed” as it were by the fact that there are people there who also happen to like dick that are being strung up from construction equipment (NSFW), or whatever?

KP:  Yeah, I mean, first of all, regarding the “pinkwashing” issue, it’s important not to mythologize Israel or any Western country as a place where homophobia, transphobia, etc. have been totally abolished. So in order to continue to struggle at once for queer self-determination in a place like the United States, and for queer self-determination in Arab countries, we need to widen our scope of political resistance to other forms of oppression and marginalization, such as the imperial policies of Israel. Otherwise it becomes too easy to say that because a select group within the queer community, as in gay, able-bodied, cisgendered males has certain protections, this or that nation is a beacon of freedom for all queer people.

I do also want to point out that this question isn’t targeting the Israel-Palestine question specifically. We want to target all state regimes that systematically oppress any group of people.

TNG: That broader emphasis seems important, yeah, and I wanted to ask about it. What other countries, what other kinds of oppression are you targeting in other theatres?

KP: Our policy deliberately does not target solely the Israel-Palestine issue, because Israel is only one of many oppressive state regimes. Often in queer politics it’s popular to single out Israel as a target for resistance, and to single out the Palestinian people as a cause, or site of solidarity. We really wanted to make this policy as broad as possible, while keeping it effective and feasible, and therefore built it on criteria based on the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, for example, the government in Uganda, which criminalizes homosexuality, would also fall under this policy.

At the same time as we resist the censorship of the Israeli-Palestine question in queer communities, we want to resist the way in which queer politics often singles out this one issue, with respect to international oppression.

TNG: There is the fact, as you just pointed out, that Israel-Palestine – for being a place that’s just one more bloody little geographical backwater – has this huge world-historical importance attached to it. For mythological reasons, religious ones, ideological ones, etc. Why do you think Israel-Palestine looms so large in the political imaginations of the kinds of people who, for instance, got involved in the row in New York? Why is it something that – and this is total theoryspeak, but I have a copy of Laclau and Mouffe in my backpack right now and you can’t stop me– “exceeds the bounds of its own literality?” It becomes something much more than just this one, localized struggle, something more metonymical.

KP:  Part of the reason may be that it’s unique among these kinds of conflicts andsystems of international state oppression in that it can come to represent a larger conflict between “the West” and “the Arab World.” With the support of the United States, Israel is an essentially Western power occupying a non-Western people. So it’s more than just what it is on the ground, because it can stand in for a larger conflict, and a larger system of oppression perpetrated by Western forces in many other theaters. It has a symbolic nature which other conflicts might not.

TNG:  I have a piece pulled up written by one of David Horowitz’ terrible neocon harpies, Phyllis Chesler, entitled “Israeli Apartheid Week: Political Theatre at its Worst.” The kind of thinking laid out here is symptomatic  of something that Michael Lucas brought to a head – that is, the aestheticization of the Israeli-Palestine issue, the framing of a political question as a matter of “taste”. For someone of Chesler’s persuasion, this becomes a matter of trendy, rowdy hipsters with daddy issues and keffiyehs waving Palestinian flags on the quad or whatever public park had a decent vintage clothing store near it.

As young people, as queer people interested in solidarity, who have a passion not welcome in formal democratic liberalism – how do we refute that charge, that we’re all just temperamental college rebels who are going to grow up and get behind the Empire someday, when we need the money? Because that’s a serious criticism that gets leveled again and again and again, and it’s a way that the Right delegitimizes student activism broadly.

KP: I’m deliberately not wearing a keffiyeh for this interview.

Yeah, I’ve definitely heard that charge leveled against leftist student activism in general. I think a concrete way of weakening it is to move beyond the boundaries of the campus, to form meaningful bonds with outside groups, other queer groups, other resistance movements locally, that show we’re not just college kids following a recent political trend. To form bonds that will endure beyond these few years, to disprove the myth that we’re rebels only while waiting for some job in a bank.

I think also, beyond that, we ourselves are complicit in that charge by actually giving up these struggles at some point in our lives. We have the responsibility to deviate from that expected political path, and in so doing resist the conservative narrative imposed on us.

TNG: Presumably not everyone reading these words necessarily goes to a school with a strong solidarity movement, or is in school at all – what are the kinds of things everyday queers can do to get involved with this issue and others like it?

KP: Specifically with the issue of Israel-Palestine, the boycott/divestment movement is international –operating in cities around the world, it’s not at all limited to a campus organization, making it pretty easy to get involved with. Beyond that there are easy ways in day-to-day life where you can be active rather than apathetic in relation to these issues just by starting discussion, starting debate, starting movements if there isn’t one to join, and at the same time pushing the boundaries beyond this one issue that takes up so much space in queer and campus organizing.

TNG: A final issue that’s been rattling around my head: in a place like Washington DC, where the people with money and the influence on Capitol Hill and K Street, the people with the sociology of power, who know what it’s like to take a lobbyist to dinner and use the right silverware and so on – those people, in the main, that are of the white, able-bodied, cisgendered, townhouse-owning, upwardly mobile professional set – do you think the same kind of lack of attunement that makes it so hard for people of that class to pick up on what Butler talks about as non-standard modes of queer resistance in a place like Palestine, has other consequences? I wonder how that influences domestic gay politics in a place like the US or Canda?

I think there’s something to be said for the idea that there’s a resonance between the way queer Palestinians live their lives, and how working-class white Midwesterners do, or poor urban blacks or latinos, or the other people that fall outside the sociological spectrum of white upper-middle-classhood. Maybe there’s a blind spot here that ends up having repercussions not just abroad?

KP: Yeah, I think the term “blind spot” might be perfect. The construction of a political movement around rigid identities like “gay”, “lesbian”, or even “LGBT” can create a blindness to groups that fall outside of those categories, that are marginalized by the categories that the dominant political movements then enforce, and a blindness to other fields of difference and unequal power relations. And that plays out both at the international level, and domestically. For example, the movement to repeal DADT was largely ignorant of the racial and class disparities in military recruitment and service. It definitely resonates with the way in which a gay, pro-Israel politics ignores both the queer people in Israel left out of the mythic, gay-friendly state, and queer Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

TNG: With that I think I’ll let you get back to your paper writing. Good luck.

KP: It was a pleasure.

 

 

 

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