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Reactionary Appropriations of the Critiques of Anti-Muslim Racism and Antisemitism and Feminist Repercussions
Abstract
How are Middle East and transnational feminist scholars and activist to respond when antiracist discourses in all their gendered dimensions are weaponized, fashioned to fit political agendas that are antithetical to liberation and peace? This paper explores the politically reactionary uses of the critiques of anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism in the context of colonial and national projects of rule spanning Turkey, Israel/Palestine, and the US. Here I think about the mobilizations of these discourses to justify rather than critique racial state violence and to silence rather than assist academic and social movement critiques of state violence. I emphasize how those reactionary forces that seek to censor and criminalize progressive critiques of state violence by falsely accusing them of being anti-Muslim or antisemitic are often the very same ones that seek to censor and criminalize feminist and LGBTIQ academic and activist voices. This does not only reveal the hypocrisy of their pseudo-progressive wielding of anti-racist discourses, but also reminds us that racialized state violence and heteropatriarchal violence are co-constitutive. In other words, retrieving our critical antiracist discourses from reactionary weaponization is crucial to Middle East and transnational feminist scholars. In a time of acute escalation of racist violence in Palestine and acute rise of authoritarian state violence in Turkey, and in a time of violent repression of dissenters in academia and beyond in Palestine/Israel, Turkey, United States, and beyond, my hope is that thinking together about different but connected forms of colonialist and nationalist violence and repression might help counter exceptionalism and decontextualization. Decontextualization and exceptionalism are primary mechanisms through which the weaponization of charges of antisemitism in the US and Palestine/Israel as well as the instrumentalization of charges of anti-Muslim racism in Turkey operate. In response, I call for analyzing pseudo-progressive appropriations of our critical discourses, whether it is critics of antisemitism or of anti-Muslim racism, in their historically and geographically situated relationships to power and in their entanglements with projects of rule and violence, including projects of racialized, gendered, and sexualized domination. Doing so, I hope, might help us move away from formulaic assignments of essentialized positions of being oppressed to monolithic categories of people such as “the Muslims” and “the Jews,” and reorient our solidarities with “the oppressed” as actively constituted social, historical, and political subjects.
Discipline
Interdisciplinary
Geographic Area
Africa (Sub-Saharan)
North America
Palestine
Turkey
Sub Area
None