Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Nationalist movements seek to reinforce affective and material ties between states and diasporas, and tend to perceive feminist, queer, or otherwise non-normative identities as threatening commitment to the nationalist project. For the Jewish diaspora, one technology of normativity is diaspora tourism, most clearly embodied in Taglit-Birthright—free group trips to Israel for diasporic Jews aged 18-27. Birthright has offered LGBTQ trips since 2008. Scholars of gender and nationalism find that feminism and queerness are perceived as antithetical to the nation, and provide women and queers with opportunities for resistance. In the case of the Jewish diaspora, young diasporic Jewish people indicate that they are less interested in and approving of Israel and nationalism in general than ever. They are also more likely than previous generations to be childless, to be feminists or to transgress traditional gender roles, and to share community with non-Jewish people. All of these trends challenge the normative sexual and racial politics of Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, which has historically theorized the diaspora as a space of sexual perversity and gender chaos—a position that animates current Israeli anxieties around intermarriage, same-sex marriage, and demographics. Nonetheless, theories of pinkwashing and homonationalism suggest that feminist and queer movements can be successfully utilized to serve the normative politics of the nation-state. Conceptualizing nationalist movements as adaptive assemblages with a range of technologies at their disposal, I raise the example of LGBTQ Birthright trips as evidence of nationalist movements’ complex and uneven capacities to envelop diasporic challenges to their narratives.