Queer Politics of the Gaza Genocide

This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and queer politics of sexuality. While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces, including forced undressing, battery on genitals, sexualized religious slurs, and rape during detention. The use of sexuality as torture modality by empire, aimed at emasculation through flouting of religious values and personal conscience of Muslim victims has precedence in Iraq, Syria, and former Yugoslavia. Feminist and de-colonial readings of wartime sexual torture against Muslim men speak of it as a physical culmination of Orientalist sex tropes of peacetime: Muslim men as homophobic, and thus immune to imperial tenets of emancipatory sexuality. This paper highlights the fluctuating moral emphasis of queer politics by Israeli forces – the dangerous and repressive deployment of queer acts against Palestinian men – and the overall problematization of the savage-civilized binary as thrown into relief by such a discourse.