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This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and... more
This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and ideological similarities between predation TERFism and Zionism, both of which are defined by an "extinction phobia" that confuses oppressor and oppressed, presenting the subordinate party as capable of eliminating the dominant one. This extinction phobia transforms into "right-wing annihilationism" via a dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination; hence the hallmark predation TERF abjection of trans women as rapists of cis women and the Zionist abjection of Palestinians as "savage" and/or "terrorist." These connections can be obscured by the siloization of social justice movement work in the United States, wherein anti-colonial and anti-imperial organizing is often separated from organizing for gender and reproductive justice and sexual freedom. Recognizing the continuities, however-whether historical, material, or ideological-between predation TERFism and Zionism offers useful lessons for understanding not only the power of the contemporary global anti-trans resurgence, but also how we might build solidaristic, anti-colonial movements to defeat it.
A Critical Exchange on the importance of the academic boycott of Israel for political theory and/as political praxis.
This article offers an emancipatory appropriation of Nietzsche’s work, making the case that the founding of the field of queer theory exemplifies and proffers a liberatory Nietzschean praxis of anti-morality. This argument requires... more
This article offers an emancipatory appropriation of Nietzsche’s work, making the case that the founding of the field of queer theory exemplifies and proffers a liberatory Nietzschean praxis of anti-morality. This argument requires reading Nietzsche’s work from the perspective of the oppressed and (re-)reading queer theory as part of the project of critical theory.
This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share,... more
This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share, albeit perhaps unwittingly, a defining resistance to elimination and an enduring commitment to unsettlement. As such, queer politics is and can surely become decolonial praxis, just as decolonization has a clear affinity with dissident queer resistance.
This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of... more
This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of politics, into, in its current guise, a diagnostic of international political relations. Although this transition offers insight into the international scene, I argue that homonationalism also loses its distinctiveness as a political formation in its own right as well as its critical capacity in the process. In particular, I argue that homonationalism becomes incapable of critically
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.
Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously.... more
Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moraliz-ing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totali-tarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject.
This article argues that queer theory is useful for political theory in thinking about US empire and theorizing modes of resistance to it. In particular, it is argued that the work of Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar can be appropriated for... more
This article argues that queer theory is useful for political theory in thinking about US empire and theorizing modes of resistance to it. In particular, it is argued that the work of Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar can be appropriated for political theory and, when combined together into a single political project, help illuminate the temporal and sexual contours of US empire, providing crucial resources for theorizing “terrorism” and understanding it as an act of political resistance.
This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche’s categories of master and slave morality. Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the... more
This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche’s categories of master and slave morality. 
Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than
as surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed.  In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon Gaza by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault.
This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a... more
This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a “queer fear of the feminine.” However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual “orientation,” which is always already presumed to be homosexuality.
In this article I argue that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically... more
In this article I argue that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and
María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically opposed perspectives, both Nietzsche and Anzaldúa articulate the necessity of accepting contradiction and multiplicity as the conditions of political transformation, and offer a new conception of revolution that displaces mere reversal as its dominant meaning. Lugones supplies important tactical strategies for realizing this revolution in her suggestions of playful “world”-travel. Taken together, these three thinkers challenge radical critics to re-think not only the revolutionary project itself, but also their own position with regard to that project, and to the dominant order they seek to overturn.
Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this paper, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third... more
Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor.  In this paper, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third of these, leaving the second in the background.  I argue that this reconstructed feminist analysis must reject the moralism and determinism of the gendered critique, and radicalize the economic critique.  It must also, I suggest, orient itself toward consideration of prostitution as a symptom or function of various masculinities.  In all cases, feminism has considered sex work as a question or problem of women’s agency and sexuality.  Reversing this standard feminist approach offers important new directions for empirical research, and de-naturalizes prostitution as an inevitable feature of human life.  This de-naturalization radicalizes the otherwise traditional policy debate over prostitution by allowing for a more revolutionary critique of the relations of domination which both govern and constitute sex work as a stigmatized, hierarchical, and exploitative practice.
Nietzsche's hyperbolic rhetoric in Ecce Homo has been dismissed as megalomaniacal excess or a sign of his impending madness. By contrast, this essay argues it is essential to Nietzsche's autobiography, which may be more properly read as... more
Nietzsche's hyperbolic rhetoric in Ecce Homo has been dismissed as megalomaniacal excess or a sign of his impending madness. By contrast, this essay argues it is essential to Nietzsche's autobiography, which may be more properly read as the manifesto of his revolutionary corpus. The crucial difference between Ecce Homo and other manifestos, however, is Nietzsche's obsession with the proper performative articulation of himself, rather than his readers. The irretrievably unique character of the revolution he advocates, then, is a movement that, like his Zarathustra, is simultaneously a revolution for "all" and "none", and entirely because it is a revolution/revelation ultimately only of "one".
eds. David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy.  Zed Books.
This chapter offers a critique of Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" essay, taking left Nietzscheanism to task for naturalizing hierarchy and failing to explicitly side with the oppressed. In contrast, I suggest that queer theory's... more
This chapter offers a critique of Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" essay, taking left Nietzscheanism to task for naturalizing hierarchy and failing to explicitly side with the oppressed. In contrast, I suggest that queer theory's appropriation of Nietzsche's critique of morality presents a more liberatory contribution to and basis for a left politics rooted in solidarity with the oppressed and the waywardness of desire.
A critical reading of the Nietzschean politics of the Walt Disney/Pixar film The Incredibles.
https://sites.psu.edu/birthingthenation/gender-panics-zionism-the-right-wing-politics-of-extinction-phobia/ Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in... more
https://sites.psu.edu/birthingthenation/gender-panics-zionism-the-right-wing-politics-of-extinction-phobia/

Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries.
Research Interests:
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/40054 At the 2019 American Political Science Association (APSA) conference, the Foundations of Political Theory section held a members’ meeting to discuss a proposed resolution to endorse the academic... more
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/40054

At the 2019 American Political Science Association (APSA) conference, the Foundations of Political Theory section held a members’ meeting to discuss a proposed resolution to endorse the academic boycott of Israel. This is our account of the meeting, its origins, and its immediate aftermath. We offer it in the hope of furthering the conversation among those who were unable to attend, and to combat false claims that some of the resolution’s opponents spread online.
https://www.bdsmovement.net/news/us-bds-activism-reaches-third-rail

A dispatch/report in the wake of the American Studies Association's historic vote to uphold the academic boycott of Israel.
https://mondoweiss.net/2013/05/means-jewish-justice/

A critique of Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work in the U.S.
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27175/Queers-Resisting-Zionism-On-Authority-and-Accountability-Beyond-Homonationalism A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its... more
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27175/Queers-Resisting-Zionism-On-Authority-and-Accountability-Beyond-Homonationalism

A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"