A literary, historical and political repositry

In the end, they did not let him in. Maybe it was because I forgot, as we approached the door, to avoid speaking Arabic. Maybe it was because his ID betrayed his Arabness, despite his effort to offset it with a display of gayness. Maybe it was, contrary to both our suspicions, for some other reason entirely. Whatever the case, that moment cast into sharp relief the discursive framework that governs sexuality and race in Israel-Palestine: the entrance to the bar was a sort of checkpoint, like so many others queer Palestinians regularly face, in bars, saunas, parks, Web sites, and other “egalitarian” gay spaces; it was manned by a queer agent of Israeli nationalism, whose job it was to determine who belongs in this gay/Israeli space and who does not.

I read the checkpoint, then, not just as a literal site on the border where agents of the state “inspect . . . what goes in and out” of the nation but as a ubiquitous subjective process wherein citizens and noncitizens alike check themselves — and others — against “the field of signs and practices” in which the nation-state is represented. By drawing attention to, rather than eschewing, the exclusionary practices of the state and the racist discourses of the nation, the metaphor of the checkpoint more effectively captures the experiences of queer Palestinians than the more familiar metaphor of the closet. Moreover, because it so crudely inscribes the violence of the state on the bodies of its national-racial others, any critique of the checkpoint necessarily entails a critique of the state and its violence. The closet, on the other hand, is a subtler, “characteristically ‘postmodern’ [technique] of power,” and the struggle against it — and for the right to “come out” as respectable queer citizens — insulates the state from critique by representing it as a “neutral [arbiter] of injury,” to be appealed to for redress and protection, “rather than . . . [itself] invested with the power to injure.”

How do you say “come out of the closet” in Arabic: queer activism and the politics of visibility in Israel-Palestine – Jason Ritchie

GLQ 16.4, 2010.