Mick Hartley

An exhausting, and depressing, history of feminist antisemitism, from Kara Jesella at Quillette:

 Jasbir K. Puar’s 2005 essay, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” celebrated the Palestinian female suicide bomber, whose “dispersion of the boundaries of bodies forces a completely chaotic challenge to normative conventions of gender, sexuality, and race, disobeying normative conventions of ‘appropriate’ bodily practices and the sanctity of the able body.” These “queer corporealities,” we were informed, undermine the liberal Western tradition because “suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational or accept the demarcation of the irrational.” They are the apotheosis of what queer had always tried to be: not so much about sexual identity, but about “resistant bodily practices” and deviance itself—this time, across international boundaries.

The ideal feminist persona had shifted from the educated working woman to the young radical to the lesbian woman of color, and now, to the queer Palestinian terrorist. Meanwhile, Puar and others—including queer activist Sarah Schulman—would denigrate Israel’s “admittedly stellar” treatment of gays and lesbians as “pinkwashing,” a means of distracting the world from its treatment of Palestinians. Feminism’s ongoing antipathy towards truth in favor of exhilaratingly counterintuitive theory, and a new set of desired effects and conclusions, had reached its apogee in attitudes towards Israel. […]

This kind of feminism is not necessarily by, about, or even sympathetic to women. It favors what feminist postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “strategic essentialism,” or the tactical deployment of identity while maintaining suspicion about identity categories. It promotes the suppression of speech over dialogue with its support of BDS. It flourishes in Cultural Studies, American Studies, and other “Studies” fields with a myopic approach to intellectual topics. “No U.S. Aid for Genocide!” a Gender Studies professor I had once been on a panel with posted a week after the October 7th massacre. “Stand on the right side of history.” It is clear that feminists no longer understand history—certainly not the history of Israel or Jews or the Zionist feminists who spent years working for peace—nor do they care. Today’s feminist theory is art pretending to be history, brilliantly referencing and riffing on older feminisms, and offering blueprints for a new and supposedly better world—a world in which, as in many leftist iterations past, the destruction of Israel is a foregone conclusion.

Or, lost up the creek of US postmodern intellectual life without a paddle.