Purchase Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique Here

Come join us on the second to last Thursday of every month for Craft and Consciousness Raising!

Every month we will read out loud and discuss an excerpt from a different nonfiction book while we craft in community. Each session will focus on how queerness intersects with different identities and struggles, with an aim of centering collective liberation. The books will be on sale before the event, but if you don’t have a chance to read ahead of time, that is okay too! Bring a project you’re working on, or we have free craft and collage supplies available to use. We look forward to seeing you there!

“In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa’ed Atshan provides a brilliant theorization of an excessive mode of political critique that strives for the high ground yet contributes to the calcification of social justice movements. Through a nuanced ethnography that foregrounds the plurality of queer experience in Israel and Palestine and the enormous complexity of the global Palestinian solidarity movement, Atshan demonstrates how an intellectual stance that combines a conviction of the moral superiority of one’s political judgments with deep suspicion concerning others’ complicity in relations of domination and the likely oppressive consequences of prescriptions for social transformation engenders discursive disenfranchisement, loss of key intellectual distinctions, neglect of pragmatic constraints, demoralization of activists, and the truncation of transnational queer solidarity. This deeply insightful book makes vital contributions to Queer Studies, Middle East Studies, Social Movement Studies, and an understanding of the dynamics of social justice praxis.”–Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University

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.

With this book, 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 Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He is the coauthor of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020).