Zionists love so ask me, “How would you fare in Gaza?” To which I love to respond, “How would I get to Gaza?” This first question, like many transphobic heckles that I have received from Zionists, is an Althusserian hail. According to Althusser (1971), the hail serves to interpolate the individual into the subject, to bring the individual into ideology. The noble identification of “gay friendly” Tel Aviv’s gift to all queers is a hail -- an interpolation of the transgender body into an always already indebted subject position, one enmeshed in a “cycle of debt.” Under the Zionist economy of gratitude, the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West for allowing her to exist. The properly delimited space for the transgender subject within this ideology is essentially one confined to an apoliticized space of pride parades and gay bars, but never the front lines of an anti-imperial or anticolonial project. It is a queer/transphobic assault against those visibly queer bodies who refuse to be properly disciplined neoliberal queer consumers and transgender bodies are often the most visibly queer bodies and hence the ones singled out for attack. As one cannot return the gift to the one who gave it (in this case because the Zionist dis-idenfified from his own queerphobia), The transgender subject is forced to pass it along -- to Palestinians. Hence, the queerphobic Zionist can pass the gift of his racist colonial phobia as well as his queerphobia on to the transgender subject. The projection allows the Zionist to disidentify from the transphobia inherent in his hail. This is particularly important, since it is precisely the violent transphobia -- “what are you?” -- that is an incitement to vulnerability. I am supposed to feel vulnerable, afraid, attacked by this hail, in order that I may pass on that gift of death to the supposedly transphobic Palestinian.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 21:21:50 +0000
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