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A Queer Word: Linguistic Reclamation Through Political Activism in the Case of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (Quaia)

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A Queer Word: Linguistic Reclamation Through Political Activism in the Case of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (Quaia) A Queer Word: Linguistic Reclamation through Political Activism in the Case of Queers 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 “pinkwashing” 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 gay 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 gay pride 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 Pride Parade 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-discrimination 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 homophobia 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.
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