A Word: Linguistic Reclamation through Political Activism in the Case of Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA)

NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY University of Toronto [email protected]

Introduction

ON FEBRUARY 27TH, 2015, after seven years of political outreach geared towards Palestine solidarity in Toronto’s LGBTQ community, the activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) released the following statement announcing its disbandment:

Over the past year […] the deteriorating situation in the Middle East, Canada’s involvement in attempts to suppress the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel[,] and other pressing issues have pulled activist energies in many directions. Most of the original members who came together during QuAIA’s formative years are now working within a variety of fields and organizations within Toronto and internationally, stretching the small group’s resources to continue in its current form. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, 2015, para. 1)

The statement’s emphasis on QuAIA’s “pulled” and “stretch[ed]” organizational focus speaks to the group’s complex identity as an activist project that first formed in a deliberate attempt to combine two seemingly separate political interests: queer solidarity and anti-apartheid activism. QuAIA first formed in Toronto in 2008 in response to a public forum during Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto, in which concerns were raised about “” in Israel. As a portmanteau of pink and whitewashing, the term “pinkwashing” refers to the problematic marketing approach in which individuals, companies, or organizations aim to promote a particular product or initiative by strategically appealing to queer-friendliness.1 When applied to Israel’s state-level policies, pinkwashing refers to the deployment of rights

1 The term “pinkwashing” was originally coined in 1992 by the American grassroots organization Breast Cancer Action, referring to “a company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease” (Brothers 2014, para. 1).

The English Languages: History, Diaspora, Culture, Vol 5, 2019 https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/elhdc/ A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 17

in order to divert international attention away from its alleged violation of human rights in the contested region of Palestine (Jackman and Upadhyay 2014, 195). Over the course of seven years, QuAIA has rendered “Israeli apartheid” and “pinkwashing” household terms by openly criticizing Israel’s co-option of the queer community by touting the world’s largest parade. At the same time, QuAIA’s controversial labelling of an “apartheid” has made the group the subject of international controversy, first because of the group’s expansion of a First World human rights agenda to encompass transnational LGBTQ and anti-colonial concerns (Collins and Talcott 2011, 576), and second because the very basis of the group’s political intervention has relied upon the use of contested terminology.2 Since the group’s inception, QuAIA’s outreach has been transnational and intersectional in its focus. The group has attempted to align Toronto’s LGBTQ community with broader global opposition to Israeli policies concerning the occupation of the West Bank. QuAIA first appeared in Toronto Pride events from 2008 to 2010, holding public forums, discussion panels, and cultural events that challenged Israeli’s alleged pinkwashing by building dialogue and awareness of anti-apartheid movements through queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist approaches. At the Toronto in 2009, QuAIA members displayed various slogans openly denouncing “Israeli apartheid” to onlookers and parade participants; protestors also wore t-shirts with crossed-out swastikas, a contentious but perhaps self-conscious attempt by the group to signal their awareness that challenging the Israeli state might be interpreted as anti-Semitic (O’Toole 2010, para. 2). At the time, Toronto city officials expressed concern that the group’s activities violated the city's anti- policy and warned that a repeat display of the group’s particular brand of outreach and controversial slogans could result in city council rescinding its funding for Gay Pride Week. QuAIA communicated no clear intention of scaling back their initiatives at the 2010 Toronto Pride festival, and as a consequence, members of Toronto City Council and representatives of Toronto’s Jewish community, including B’nai Brith, the oldest Jewish human rights and advocacy group in Canada, succeeded in temporarily censoring the group by revoking its funding. However, this action only resulted in a heated publicity battle between city bureaucrats and intersectional activists from the LGBTQ community, who banded together in support of the group’s right to free speech by arguing that its slogans were not discriminatory or in violation of the city’s policies. Pride Toronto and the city council eventually reversed their decision to ban the words “Israeli Apartheid” on June 23, 2010 and QuAIA returned to the Pride festival, remaining active from 2012 until its disbandment in 2015 (Kouri-Towe 2011, para. 1). Public scrutiny regarding QuAIA’s use of politically charged terminology brings up a series of crucial concerns regarding the relationship between activist outreach, which by its very nature challenges the status quo, and the pejorative history of the group’s chosen political lexicon. Toronto city councillors and other public officials believed it was wrong to align the LGBTQ community, identified by the umbrella term queers, with an anti-apartheid stance by referring to Israeli apartheid. Public officials seemed to imply that the compounding of these

2 QuAIA’s open criticism of Israel’s pinkwashing has invited local scrutiny of the group’s own political oversight, specifically the ways in which queer activists in Canada attempt to monitor, rally against, and “pinkwash” state-level operations halfway across the globe while remaining complicit in Canada’s own “whitewashing” of Indigenous peoples and others (Jackman and Upadhyay 2014, 195). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 18

terms forcibly aligned the work of pro-queer and anti-apartheid groups, despite not all members of the LGBTQ community sharing the belief that Israel was engaging in apartheid policies.3 The word compound in this case carries a dual meaning: first, it refers to an action, to “put together, combine, construct, compose”;4 second, as a noun, a compound describes the site and source of one’s confinement, to “[a] union, combination, or mixture of elements” and even more specifically and evocatively, to “[a] large fenced-in space in a prison, concentration camp, or the like”.5 To be clear, QuAIA is not a grammatical compound (as opposed to a term like anti- apartheid queers), but rather it is an acronym that compounds together two contested terms. On the one hand, QuAIA’s intersectional approach to anti-apartheid politics celebrates the same inclusive tenets as the gay rights movement, signaled by the use of the term queer to foster global solidarity.6 Indeed, on its own, the term queer offers a flexible umbrella term for those who feel they stand outside of societal norms concerning their sexual or gender identities and who also wish to support broader political issues that cross national boundaries. On the other hand, the compounding of these two terms risks alienating members of both movements by forcibly confining two separate groups of people in one context, as the worst compounds often do. The question is: when aligned with a noun like apartheid, which lacks political consensus and yet is rooted in a highly specific historical context (South African apartheid), does the term queer realize new political potential? Or in spite of the term’s reclamation by the LGBTQ community and its recent normative use in Canadian public discourse, has the social and political efficacy of the term queer been compromised by QuAIA’s controversial activism? In this paper, I suggest that QuAIA combines the terms queers and apartheid in order to address not only two political contexts but also two linguistic concerns in tandem, as both queer and apartheid have been historically characterized by pejorative associations and a lack of consensus. Many have already suggested, including Sayers, that while “so many words have otherwise experienced fatal pejoration,” the passage of the term queer from “social action” to a specialist lexicon of critical theory invites renewed attention to both its etymology and potential “future meanings” (Sayers 2005, 16). While theories of linguistic reclamation conclude that terms like queer may be neutralized over time, QuAIA offers a recent example of the LGBTQ

3 The term apartheid has not only been applied to Israel by Western critics but also by other Arabic states. Bayefsky (2001) refers to the use of this label by Arabic states at the Durban World Conference on Racism in 2001. 4 Oxford English Dictionary, “compound (v.),” accessed April 5, 2015, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/37834?rskey=aTxmxB&result=4&isAdvanced=false#eid 5 Oxford English Dictionary, “compound (n.),” accessed April 5, 2015, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/37831?rskey=aTxmxB&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid 6 QuAIA’s focus has been described as an example of “glocalization”, a portmanteau of local and global that seeks to describe the entry of local social relations into broader networks of global processes. QuAIA claimed that its chief purpose in forming was to “work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestine solidarity movements around the world,” adding that “we recognize that exists in Israel, Palestine, and across all borders” (QuAIA, n.d., para. 1-2). Although much of the public’s criticism was geared towards QuAIA’s use of contested terminology, the group’s unwavering dedication to glocal activism may have also contributed to the perceived disconnect between local and global political alliances. A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 19

community’s refusal to neutralize language tied to the gay rights movement, finding new ways to render its terminology flexible, radical, and socially responsive. By first outlining the linguistic journey of the word queer, I explore its adoption in this new political context in order to suggest that the term cannot be fully separated from its pejorative roots; precisely due to its stigmatizing register, the term queer contributes to the shock value of QuAIA’s transnational activism. By examining the interplay between contested political terms in QuAIA’s title, I aim to further complicate, rather than consolidate, the political efficacy of the word queer. Terms like queer and apartheid continue to be inflected by their respective linguistic and social histories while they are continually re-deployed and radicalized for new purposes.

Origins of Queer

Linguists typically tell the origin story of queer by referring to its early appearance in the English language without offering a unanimous account of its initial meaning. The OED defines the adjective queer as: “Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, in appearance or character. Also, of questionable character, suspicious, dubious. Queer fellow, an eccentric person; also used, esp. in Ireland and in nautical contexts, with varying connotations”.7 According to the OED, the first attestations of queer arise in early sixteenth century Scottish, in a 1508 transcription of “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie.” 8 However, Sayers notes how the etymology of queer is merely “tentative”:

Of doubtful origin. Commonly regarded as a. G. quer (MHG. Twer […]) cross, oblique, squint, perverse, wrongheaded; but the date at which the word appears in Sc. is against this, and the prominent sense does not precisely correspond to any of the uses of G. quer. There are few examples prior to 1700. (Sayers 2005, 16)

The “tentative” nature of queer’s etymology is in large part because no one seems to agree on when and where queer was born or on its parents, with its roots deriving from both Old German and Middle Irish. The dominant theory holds that the word is a descendant of the Proto-Indo- European morpheme twerk, which means “to twist, turn, wind, or cut,” and is also likely the root of several other vocabulary staples, including “thwart” and “sarcasm” (Sayers 2005, 16).9 Whichever theory holds the most weight, the word queer emerged early on as “not straight” centuries before “straight” had ever been associated with .

7 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (a.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 8 Flyting was a sixteenth century form of public entertainment in which bards would engage in verbal contests of provocative, often sexual and scatological but highly poetic abuse; royalty would sometimes set them up as court entertainment (Sayers 2005, 16). 9 Twerk led to Old High German’s twerh, which means “oblique,” and then to German, where it morphed to quer and picked up associations of strangeness and eccentricity. A competing theory suggests that queer comes instead from the morpheme keu, which denotes a bow, arch, or curvature. Keu became the Middle Irish cúar, an adjective meaning bent, or a noun denoting a twisted thing or U-like curve. This became quair, or “misaligned,” and finally the Scottish queer (Sayers 2005, 16). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 20

After the word’s curious debut in the sixteenth century in reference to a sexual/scatological style of poetic contest (known as “flyting”), queer began popping up in various places in and across England and Europe in slightly different adjectival forms. Queer first appeared in an American context in the society pages of the LA Times in 1914, describing the “‘drags’ where the ‘queer people’ have a good time” (University of Pittsburgh, n.d., para. 3). The word likely travelled across continents as a loan from Irish English to American English as a result of immigration and global trade. Queer may too have entered colloquial English through Irish sailors pressed by English ships, hence the special shipboard uses of the term, such as Wilfred Granville’s entry in A Dictionary of Sailors’ Slang (1962), which reads: “Queer fella, any merchant seaman who does not conform to the average type. A nautical eccentric”.10 The OED, The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database each show the word queer evolving over the course of several centuries, modifying both concrete and abstract nouns to denote social difference and strangeness; some notable literary examples include reference to “queer Pranks” in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1941), “queer fancy” in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841), and “queer old room” in Henry Smart’s A Race for a Wife (1870).11 With these initial variations of queer as an adjective, queer began to gradually gain secondary definitions and pejorative contexts that altered its definition and form. Partridge (1984) lists a 1937 instance of queer as a colloquialism for homosexual, although the OED has an even earlier example from a U.S. government publication from 1922 (qtd. in Sayers 2005, 17). The University of Pittsburgh’s Keywords Project notes that “[i]f context points to the specific, homosexual sense” of the word queer, then in a contemporary context “the sense of ‘strange, peculiar, odd’ is still present, both inasmuch as the equation of and peculiarity is at stake and inasmuch as the appearance of the word queer may be taken one way or the other” (University of Pittsburgh, n.d., para. 3). Brontsema (2004) organizes the etymology of queer into its sexual and non-sexual senses, noting how “[q]ueer’s original significations did not denote non-normative sexualities, but rather a general non-normativity separable from sexuality” (2). Indeed, it was only in its later history that the sexual sense of queer became the “overriding denotation” (2). While queer initially referred to strange objects, places, experiences, or persons, without sexual connotations, the word eventually became exclusively associated with non-normative sexuality, an association that has persisted to the present, as Christopher Isherwood writes in his novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939): “Men dressed as women?... Do you mean they’re queer?”12 The shift from queer as an adjective to a colloquial noun happened predominantly at the start of the twentieth century, in reference to “a person: homosexual. Hence: of or relating to homosexuals or homosexuality”.13

10 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (a.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 11 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (a.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 12 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (a.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 13 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (n.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 21

Although queer evolved into a chiefly derogatory term and is still to this day “widely considered offensive, esp. when used by heterosexual people,” from the late 1980s onwards it began to be used as a neutral and even positive term, as an act of “self-reference”.14 Although still considered derogatory at present, the term mostly maintains its pejorative meaning when used by heterosexual people. This qualification reminds us that queer’s positive and negative power greatly depends on how its reception, adoption, and usage are framed, a point that is taken up later in this paper in concerning the different perspectives on linguistic reclamation.

A Queer Return and Radical Reforms

During the twentieth century, the word queer seemed to largely disappear from both the mainstream lexicon of gender relations and LGBTQ slang, replaced by more specific terms, like gay and , which have carried their own pejorative meanings and mix of connotations. In contrast to queer’s contemporary usage among queer theorists and self-identified queers, Brontsema (2004, 2) writes that by the early twentieth century, queer as “sexually non- normative” term was restricted “almost exclusively to male homosexual practices.” Far from being synonyms, replacement terms like gay, lesbian, or even fairy carried extremely different in- group connotations.15 Although gay overtook queer as the primary label of self-identification among mainly male homosexuals, the word queer experienced a rebirth in the early 1990s because of a number of factors: the limitations of the terms gay and lesbian as universal categories; the AIDS crisis and subsequent activism; and Queer Nation’s coalition building and impact on the reconceptualization of . The initial spark of queer’s reclamation began earlier than the 1990s AIDS crisis during the in 1969, a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay community in City against a police raid that took place at the in (Beckermann 2010). The Stonewall riots placed a great deal of pressure on the anti-homosexual legal system in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. In large part because of this movement, gay rights groups began to reclaim the word queer and redevelop the community’s political lexicon. Within two years of the Stonewall riots, gay rights groups began to form in most major American cities, as well as in Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Canada saw its equivalent to the Stonewall riots a decade later in 1981 with Operation Soap, a raid by the Toronto police force against four gay bathhouses, leading to a series of protests and demonstrations in response to the court cases that followed (Jackman 2015, 210). People who joined activist organizations during this time had very little in common other than their same- sex attraction; not unlike QuAIA, what brought these groups together was a mutual concern with securing the rights and freedoms of all people who identified within the queer community. Although these early initiatives did not explicitly seek to reclaim a queer lexicon, they did

14 Oxford English Dictionary, “queer (n.),” accessed March 20, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=DFMiUX&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid 15 Note how despite various terms to describe male homosexuality, the term queer connotes a more deviant sexual status: whereas fairies referred to “effeminate, flamboyant males sexually involved with other men,” queers were “more masculine men who were sexually involved with other men and who generally shunned, even detested, the woman-like behavior of fairies” (Brontsema 2004, 3). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 22

establish the legal rights that would enable LGBTQ individuals and groups to speak publicly in the first place. The first instance of publicly reclaiming queer came from Queer Nation, an offshoot of the AIDS activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP). With the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s, LGBTQ rights groups like ’s Health Crisis and ACT-UP (which later became Queer Nation) attempted to broaden the scope of their political activity to address homophobia. Queer Nation was originally formed in 1990 in New York as a discussion group by several ACT-UP activists discontented with homophobia in AIDS activism and the invisibility of gays and within the movement. Describing themselves as queer rather than gay, lesbian, or bisexual, these new activist groups were determined to be confrontational and achieve inclusiveness of all marginalized peoples (Warner 2002, 258). Queer Nation hoped to take the word queer out of the hands of those who were homophobic and used the term in its derogatory sense in order to linguistically disarm homophobic individuals and groups and empower themselves. An anonymous manifesto, distributed as a leaflet at the pride march in 1990, the same year that Queer Nation formed, notes how “queer can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon” (“Queers Read This” 1990, 9). Although Queer Nation eventually split apart due to subgroup tension and differing opinions about how to move forward following the Reagan-Bush era, the efforts of Queer Nation nevertheless gave rise to other groups and other relevant initiatives. Most importantly, the reclamation of queer by Queer Nation struck a chord and the word stuck around. The reclamation of the word queer was meant to challenge and swap out the terms lesbian and gay, which to some seemed both exclusionary in terms of their “restrictive limits of gender and sexuality” and assimilationist in their desire for approval from straight society and “unquestioning acceptance of the status quo” (Brontsema 2004, 4). The organization PFLAG explains the bonding potential of an umbrella term like queer in its article “A Definition of ‘Queer’”:

Back in the 60s and 70s identifying openly […] was a way for people of the LGBT community to create a place for themselves in society, where there otherwise was none. In a period when beatings and arrests were commonplace of openly LGBT people, bonding as a community by identifying specifically as gay, lesbian, bisexual or , in juxtaposition to the ‘oppressors,’ was essential to being taken seriously as a movement. A non-label would have only allowed people in the mainstream culture to dismiss them and/or allow the individual to remain closeted in ambiguity. (PFLAG, n.d. para. 1)

During this time, the term queer was re-introduced to “welcom[e] a multiplicity of sexualities and genders” and suggested “a radical, confrontational challenge” to normalcy, rather than a drive toward it (Brontsema 2004, 4). As the “Queers Read This” (1990, 1) manifesto suggested during this time, “being queer means leading a different sort of life,” one where your very existence is rebellious, your every action is politically charged, and “every time we fuck, we win”. More recently, PFLAG has noted how more LGBT people choose queer as their term of A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 23

identification than ten years ago precisely because those who choose to identify in this way “actually benefit from not choosing a specific label” (para. 2). In emerging academic contexts, queer became the preferred term in the study of issues relating to gender and sexual identity, through the field now known as ; this now well-established field is in large part due to the work of academics, like feminist semiotician Teresa de Lauretis, who was the first to officially coin the phrase “queer theory” at a conference at UC Santa Cruz in 1990, and a year later in print, when she edited an issue of the journal differences and called it “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” (Kaur 2012, 222).16 According to de Lauretis, queer theory “arrived in the effort to avoid all of these [lesbian and gay] fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities, but instead to both transgress and transcend them – or at the very least problematize them” (qtd. in Kaur 2012, 222). De Lauretis was not the first to come up with the ideas involved in queer theory, which stem from feminism and radical movements of colour, postcolonialism, and linguistics, and which queer theorists Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, among others, further synthesized. Nevertheless, de Lauretis’s aim was to address the “continuing failure of representation [and] enduring silence on the specificity of lesbianism in the contemporary ‘gay and lesbian’ discourse” (qtd. in Kaur 2012, 222). Queer theory has grown and changed since then; de Lauretis eventually abandoned the term, feeling it had been co-opted again by the institutions it was supposed to have challenged. Whereas some theorists lamented the domestication of the term queer, Turner (2000 35) supports the flexibility of the term, explaining that queer has achieved the virtue of offering “a relatively novel term that connotes the etymological crossing of boundaries but that refers to nothing in particular.” Halperin (1995, 62) is a little more poetic in his insights, calling queer “an identity without an essence […] it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent […] cannot in principle be delimited in advance.” The sense one gets from these theorists is that the term queer is what you want it to be, so long as it is pushing up against something. In the past decade, following the efforts of Queer Nation, various organizations have sought to reclaim and integrate the word queer into a public lexicon, as a demonstration of the term’s institutional inclusiveness as well as its fluidity. For instance, the organization PFLAG has described queer as both a “non-label” (PFLAG n.d., para. 1) and a catch-all “umbrella term” (para. 3) that circumvents the exclusionary effects of societal language norms by accounting for those who otherwise feel they cannot be categorized or represented linguistically, socially, or politically.17 This is, after all, why the LGBT acronym continues to evolve, with government bodies, school boards, and other public institutions further expanding the terminology to not only refer to the Q as queer but also questioning, with a revised LGBTQQ.18 With the latest

16 Queer linguistics, known also as “lavender linguistics”, has likewise sought to reclaim the word queer, as a field of study interested in how different social spaces impact the way that language is formed (Motschenbacher and Stegu 2013, 523). 17 PFLAG, previously known as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, formed in New York City in 1972 and is the largest American organization for parents, families, friends, and allies of LGBTQ individuals. 18 In Canada and the United States, the LGBTQ acronym has also expanded to LGBTQ2 in order to include the Indigenous term “Two Spirited.” A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 24

expansion of the acronym and the adoption of the term queer elsewhere, including academic and policy circles, queer has become ever politicized within a framework that sees LGBTQ communities now participating in activism beyond exclusively gender-based concerns, as well as normativized in order to make the language of public spaces more inclusive and intelligible. When considering the re-deployment of the term queer alongside a politically contested word like apartheid, the question is: how can queer operate both as a normative and inclusive term, while also clearly performing a politics and shock value as it continues to evolve?

Linguistic Reclamation: Different Possibilities

The reclamation of queer has been both popularly opposed and fiercely supported because of its pejorative history. Although the debate is often summarized according to two opposing positions – those who support the reclamation of a pejorative word like queer and those who oppose it (see figure 1 below) – the stakes of reclaiming and actually making use of the term are much more complex. Brontsema (2004) provides the most recent look at queer as a case study of linguistic reclamation, although she does not limit her article’s scope or its conclusions to the word queer alone.19 According to this study, the debate on whether a term can and should be reclaimed can be summarized according to three perspectives (see figure 2 below):

19 See Justyna A. Robinson’s “A Gay Paper: Why Should Sociolinguistics Bother with Semantics?” (2012) for a similarly in-depth analysis of the semantic variation and change of the adjective gay. A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 25

The first possibility is that a term like queer is inseparable from its pejorative roots and therefore should not continue to be used; those who support this viewpoint claim that using queer or any pejorative term can only be debasing and disrespectful because it repeats the violence that the word had previously carried. However, those who claim that a term like queer will always be insulting and damaging, that “the word itself must be locked away in the attic of a collective linguistic memory,” often refuse to recognize the malleability of language, the “constant change of words – their births, deaths, resurrections, metamorphoses” (Brontsema 2004, 6). This perspective assumes that linguistic meaning can be frozen in time and also assumes that individuals and groups can somehow claim ownership over linguistic meanings in the production and reproduction of language, viewing this process as fixed and continuously stable. However, this perspective fails to see how words can be understood beyond ownership, continuously in circulation, despite known value judgments. The origin story of the term queer has already proven that the term clearly evades stable meanings and persists in spite of known value judgments. The second perspective on reclaiming a pejorative term suggests that the negative connotation can somehow be separated and that certain words can and should be reclaimed in order to empower those to whom the word pertains. According to this perspective, queer can be made neutral and even positive if the term loses its stigma and no longer injures or offends. Proponents of this approach suggest that the only way to conquer the pain and violence associated with language is to work with it rather than ignore or hide from it. Unlike the first perspective that regards linguistic connotations as fixed and permanent, this perspective stresses transferability, either through neutralization or value reversal; to neutralize hate speech is to render it ineffective, to eliminate its pejorative force, and value reversal entails the transformation of a negative value into a positive one.20 Although this approach posits society’s capacity to overcome the injurious power of language, to “take a negative descriptor and turn it into a symbol of pride, alliance, and power within their community” (Tregoning 2009, 174), those who support the reclamation of previously pejorative terms often have no direct experience with them as terms of abuse, such as LGBTQ youth who may have never heard the term queer used against them as a homophobic epithet. Clinton and Higbee (2011, 12) support this concern, cautioning that reclaimed words “present a hazy situation in terms of which people are socially permitted to use the words.” This second perspective thus oversimplifies a much more complex negotiation when reclaiming pejorative words; out-of-group usage of reclaimed words will inevitably look different from in-group reclamation, since the words will carry very different meanings and historical associations for in-group members. QuAIA’s adoption of the term apartheid complicates the second perspective on linguistic reclamation. The group’s founders were criticized for treating the term queer like a self-evident descriptor in public discourse and for believing that a term apartheid could be deployed with the same flexibility as queer, repurposing and detaching the term from its original painful context in South Africa. That being said, I argue that it is precisely because of the pejorative power of these words and their irreconcilable histories that QuAIA chose to align the two concerns under a

20 The goal of value reversal has similarly been at the heart of the contemporary feminist movement to reclaim the word cunt and use it as a term of sexual empowerment (Brontsema 2004, 9). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 26

single label. While in the hands of those against whom language has so often been weaponized, the terms queer and apartheid possess critical potential. In this vein, Brontsema (2004, 6) identifies a third perspective on linguistic reclamation that describes the attempt to reconcile the first two possibilities through “stigma exploitation”. Although no clear definition of stigma exploitation is provided, I understand this term to describe how a reclaimed word can use the same power that rendered it a form of hate speech in order to achieve different social or political ends. According to this perspective, a term like queer may be reclaimed by its original targets, who purposefully retain its stigma as a “confrontational, revolutionary call” (10). In other words, instead of erasing the stigma of the reclaimed word, this approach seeks to highlight it. Proponents of this perspective contend that queer will forever retain its stigma because it consciously chooses it, to remain political, “fighting against those who seek to catch and freeze it, fixing it to an unalterable fate” (11). Butler describes the power and potential of this third perspective in her essay “Critically Queer,” writing that:

If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes, and perhaps also yielded in favor of terms that do political work more effectively. (Butler 1993, 19)

A word like queer cannot be separated fully from its prior connotations and meanings, but rather must remain in flux, productively turning and twisting back on its injurious roots: the direction of this turning and twisting thus becomes dependent on those who choose to reclaim the word, how, in what context, and for what purpose. In this vein, Hall (2013, 636) suggests that one’s identity “emerges in all interactions, even very queer ones, in fleeting and often unpredictable ways. It materializes in the production of difference as well as sameness, anti- normativity as well as normativity, subversion as well as complicity.” The term queer clearly has the capacity to draw lines of connection as well as separation, oscillating between spaces in which certain versions of queer language and identity are normative, subversive, and more explicitly radical. Within this discourse of linguistic reclamation, the impact of QuAIA’s name can be best understood according to a binary between normativization and shock value. On the surface, this distinction may resemble Brontsema’s two options of support or opposition. However, the two outcomes that I suggest, normativization or shock value, reference the political stakes of reclamation on both sides, whether or not social acceptance is achieved. Brontsema’s study ultimately demonstrates the difficulty of assigning a fixed outcome of success or failure in reclaiming certain politically loaded terms; to assign reclamation one of two outcomes, either success or failure, or to deem some words capable of fully departing from their painful historical roots more than others is to drastically reduce the complexity of a word like queer to an “impossibly simple choice between two extremes, when it can rarely fully occupy either” (Brontsema 2004, 16). Far from being limited solely to positive in-group use and negative out- group use, numerous uses of queer must necessarily co-exist; whether competing with each A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 27

other or living together harmoniously, the competing perspectives of queer’s reclamation gesture not only to reclamation in terms of success and failure, but the other “myriad of possibilities it has created” (16).

QuAIA: Compounding the Political

By the time QuAIA formed in 2008, the term queer had already pushed many boundaries and seemed to have become a fairly accepted term within the LGBT acronym. Yet, despite both the normative and fluid significations of the reclaimed word queer, QuAIA’s use of queers together with apartheid appeared to generalize the entire queer community as one unified cultural body – not queer activists or queer Canadians, just queers. The group complicated the word queer much further by compounding it with a political term like apartheid, normally understood in one political context but then newly applied to describe Israel’s occupation of Palestine. According to the OED, the word apartheid means ‘separateness’ in Afrikaans, and refers immediately and specifically to the South African context:

Name given in South Africa to the segregation of the inhabitants of European descent from the non-European (Coloured or mixed, Bantu, Indian, etc.); applied also to any similar movement elsewhere; also, to other forms of racial separation (social, educational, etc.)21

The OED’s definition, which is in no way naïve to the broader political debate at work, makes a distinction between “capital-A” Apartheid in the context of South Africa and the more general “little-a” apartheid as it applies elsewhere. Whereas we have seen the flexible mobilization and political power of a term like queer, reclaimed, neutralized, and re-deployed, there is evidently a stronger sense of protectionism concerning when to use the term apartheid to describe political segregation (just as there is equal, if not greater, backlash when the term genocide is invoked). During QuAIA’s struggles to maintain its public funding and support, resistance to the group was premised largely on the wariness of using politicized language in public spaces. Although Toronto City Manager Joe Pennachetti concluded in his 2011 report on the complaint lodged against the group that the term “Israeli Apartheid” did not violate Toronto’s anti- discrimination policy22, John Tory (later elected as Toronto city mayor) expressed his belief in the contrary following the group’s disbandment: “I believe the city should have found that an organization like that, with the sort of rhetoric and whatnot that it puts forward, is not consistent with the city’s human-rights policy” (qtd. in Hopper 2015, para. 9). In QuAIA’s 2011 Deputation video (created immediately following the group’s decision not to march at Pride), several narrators address the controversy surrounding the alignment of queers with anti-

21 Oxford English Dictionary. “apartheid (n.),” accessed March 30, 2019, https://www-oed- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/9032?redirectedFrom=apartheid#eid 22 Pennachetti stated that the group did not violate the city’s anti-discrimination policy, that “there is no legal precedent” to suggest the phrase “Israeli apartheid” constitutes a or violation of the provincial human rights code (qtd. in Law 2012, para. 11). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 28

apartheid activism, which they deemed was really a matter of language:

The A-word [apartheid]. Some people say our name is upsetting. ‘Can’t you just change it?’ Bishop Tutu, Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, they have all used the term as a description of Israel state policies. Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for ‘separate.’ The Israeli government uses the Hebrew word ‘Hafrada’ – separation – as in ‘Gader hafrada’ – the notorious separation fence. (Albino Squirrel Channel 2011)

Here, QuAIA’s activist position clearly relies upon a dual sense of normativization and shock value, as the video makes simultaneous reference to the group’s use of the term apartheid as “upsetting” while also signaling numerous prominent politicians who have adopted the term to describe and criticize the state of Israel. QuAIA’s assertion that apartheid is a term with applicability beyond the South African context begs the related question: has the group evacuated the term queer of its particularity in the service of a global political movement with its own agenda, so that queers in the context of QuAIA now “refers to nothing [or no one] in particular” (Turner 2000, 35)? This question comes in part from public speculation on whether all members of QuAIA were indeed queer, and furthermore, whether all members of the LGBTQ community were equally critical of Israel’s state policies. David J. Thomas offers one possible answer to this in “The Q Word”:

Queer is no natural category; it is a work of artifice. [. . .] Queer queries itself; it invites inquiry. It problematizes sexuality and the entire peculiar process of sexual labeling, categorizing, classifying, and evaluating. Queer aims to self-destruct. […] Queer is already passing. It becomes a counterforce only when the dominant force declines. (Thomas 1995, 90)

Both queer and apartheid cannot be read separately from their pejorative roots and precisely for this reason, these terms continue to be politically influential in social activism, even if their influence amounts to resistance to the very terms themselves. While QuAIA has undeniably co- opted a term that references a distinctly South African historical event to make its political point, the compounding of these words together shows how now, more than ever, the word queer and its role in the world is “less personal, more political” (Thomas 1995, 90).23 The very adoption of these terms and their interaction within political debate calls their own legitimacy into question and through this uncertainty, the discourse persists, which is really the point of social justice activism in the first place. It is for this reason that QuAIA’s recent disbandment notice has not been read by all journalists and critics as evidence of the group’s failure but rather as proof of how queer language and queer politics persist in a state of contestability, as members of QuAIA move on to other projects and other avenues of queer activism.

23 It should be noted that well before QuAIA formed, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism had been championing the message of queer solidarity with Palestine in San Francisco. In the wake of the ban against QuAIA and its massive media coverage, at least four new groups formed worldwide touting a similar message (Garmon 2010, 8). A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 29

Conclusion

The sense of solidarity among queers in general and queers more specifically affected by apartheid-like policies is not new or exclusive to the Palestinian context, nor is QuAIA the only activist group to ever use the term apartheid to decry human rights violations globally. In his (2010) article “Queers Against Apartheid: From South Africa to Israel,” former QuAIA spokesperson Tim McCaskell relates QuAIA’s political work to his previous solidarity efforts on behalf of Simon Nkoli, a gay anti-apartheid activist in former apartheid-era South Africa. In this editorial, McCaskell claims to be uninterested in making the case for similarities on the ground in apartheid-era South Africa, Palestine, or other contexts, but rather asks what stake queers have in anti-colonial struggles generally and what brings different queer communities together in a global context. As Thomas explains with respect to the reclamation and use of queer, the question of to whom queer applies is certainly “a contested matter,” yet the less disputed but nevertheless equally relevant matter is “who may use the word” (Thomas 1995, 85). Many have interpreted the attempts to censor the Toronto Pride parade, to take out the mentioning of “Israeli Apartheid” or other controversial political alignments, as attempts to render Toronto Pride and the LGBTQ community apolitical, that is, to neutralize the political lexicon of the community, to evacuate any persistent pejorative tones of queer language in the service of a heteronormative framework. One might add that queer in the context of Toronto Pride has become increasingly subsumed into a capitalist queer-friendly framework, given the increasing number of corporate-led floats and investors at the pride parade each year who are happy to display the word queer in its newly donned normative sense. Given the recent disbandment of QuAIA and the increasingly corporatized nature of Toronto Pride, the question remains: has queer really retained its shock value if it now proliferates as a publicly accepted term? Has QuAIA really succeeded in securing a new trajectory for queer activism by combining a normative term with a disputed one? In the end, QuAIA has been stretched in many different directions and has impacted many different communities and contexts both within Pride Toronto and globally in Israel and elsewhere. QuAIA’s recent disbandment notice claims that because members of QuAIA are currently “working within a variety of fields and organizations within Toronto and internationally,” these developments have stretched the small group’s resources too far “to continue in its current form” (Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, 2015). Yet even as the word queer becomes increasingly mobilized and stretched across different activist networks, the fact that QuAIA can no longer be maintained as a single political initiative is indicative of the continued power of queer as a non-label and as representative of a diverse political community. Indeed, the mandate of QuAIA was for a group of Toronto queer-identified individuals to advocate for another group, in spite of the different local contexts; at the same time, the very terms by which queers were able to band together in this unique context eventually caused QuAIA to split apart. QuAIA has thus submitted to the realities of shifting local and geopolitical concerns, as queer activist energies move elsewhere, but with the same spirit and dedication to human rights initiatives that urged queers to align as QuAIA in the first place. A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 30

Consequently, though the term queer continues to signal inclusive-sounding directives inside and outside of the LGBTQ community, the trajectory of the term still remains unclear. As Sara Ahmed concludes in Queer Phenomenology,

The question is not so much finding a queer line but rather asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be. If the object slips away […] if it looks odd, strange, or out of place, what will we do? If we feel oblique, where will we find support? A queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way of inhabiting the world by giving ‘support’ to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place. (Ahmed 2006, 179)

The story of queer and all of its valences continues to be intriguing, for the use of the word has moved from odious to malevolent to politically powerful and problematized, and now, more than ever, is tempered with self-reflexivity and critical potential. What we continue to make of this word’s past and present as critics will in large part determine its future impact and meanings.

A Queer Word NICOLE BIRCH-BAYLEY 31

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