Other Scenes of Speaking: Listening to Palestinian Anticolonial-Queer Critique

Palestinian Queers for BDS first called on the international LGBTQI community to be in solidarity with Palestinians and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in 2010. PQBDS argued that Israel was using gay rights and gay lives to pinkwash state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. Since then, much has been said and written about Israel's pinkwashing campaign and the violence it endorses and engenders. But much remains unsaid about Palestinian anticolonial-queer modes of engagement that persist despite Israel's settler-colonial project. With specific attention to the 2012 Jadaliyya debate between Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi, on the one hand, and Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten, on the other, this article discusses various activist and scholarly responses to Israel's pinkwashing campaign, and particularly how these responses elide Palestinian anticolonial-queer activism in different ways. Ultimately, this article asks: What becomes (in)audible as a Palestinian anticolonial-queer critique?