“Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv”: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude

what are you?? if your not a male or a female, perhaps something in between?? then can you explain to me your ridiculous & ignorant hate against the only country in the Middle-East that someone like you could live a peaceful life, almost without prejudice, having the law on your side, and also having the same rights as a male or female heterosexual??? because darling, someone like you would be strung up by yr pigtails and stoned to death, tortured or imprisoned, in any of those “peace loving” “democratic” non-judgemental” [sic] Muslim countries that surround Israel!!

—YouTube comment directed at me

There is something about anger that is akin to this gift exchange. Once anger is given to you, it is passed along as quickly as possible. … There in the street, as the army fired over our heads, but also at us, the first impulse was to return the gift of death straight back to the original donor, with no lapse in time. But, in that case, you would be killed. So you pass it along, and it just leaps out, somewhere else and at another time. … There were a lot of people who returned to their everyday life unable to control their anger, and exploded into senseless rage at the slightest trifles for months afterwards.

—Alan Klima, The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand

In 2007, the Israeli foreign ministry officially launched a campaign called Brand Israel. With professional corporate PR firms hired to revitalize the apartheid state’s international image, a total of almost $20 million was set aside for Israeli state propaganda in that year alone.¹ This rebranding campaign, which persists today, has consisted of multiple different tactics. The tactic that has received perhaps the most attention, and the one with which I am the most concerned here, is what has been dubbed by Palestine solidarity activists as “pinkwashing” (Schulman 2011). Haneen Maikey, cofounder of the queer Palestinian organization Al Qaws, defines pinkwashing as “the cynical use of gay rights by the Israeli government … in order to divert attention from Israeli … occupation and apartheid, by promoting itself as a progressive country that respects gay rights, and, on the contrary, portraying Palestinian society and Palestinians as homophobic” (Maikey 2013). Jasbir Puar (2007) coined the term “homonationalism” to refer to this process. Since the launch of Brand Israel, there has been a proliferation of activist organizing around pinkwashing. In 2013, much of this activist and academic work culminated in a conference, titled “Homonationalism and Pinkwashing,” held at the City University of New York Graduate Center in April 2013. Both Maikey and Puar were keynote speakers at this conference.

While much of this work so far has focused on the cynical deployment of cisgender queer subjectivities, the question I want to pose, then, is where, in the age of neoliberalism and homonationalism, is the transgender subject relative to colonial economies of gratitude? Ironically, to the extent to which this question is beginning to be addressed within the academy, responses to pinkwashing as it relates to transgender subjectivities and politics have followed the gradual “inclusion” of transgender subjects into homonationalism. During her keynote speech at the conference, Jasbir Puar raised the question of a rise, in recent years, of a trans version of homonationalism, citing the example of U.S. vice president Joseph Biden’s statement that transgender issues are “the civil rights issue of our time.” A question I raised to Puar during the Q&A session, and one that remains an issue, is the question of the incitement to discourse—the “call and response” that Puar describes between pinkwashing and the queer response to pinkwashing. Is this the moment, now, when transgender subjectivities can be discussed in relationship to pinkwashing and homonationalism? Did transgender subjects have to wait to be invoked by Joseph Biden into another wave of homonationalism before we could theorize our relationship to it? This call-and-response is particularly troubling, as it seems to reenact the same narrative as the historical...