Palestinian anti-colonial feminist and queer activisms: to r/exist in times of Pinkwashing

Supervisor/s: Pablo Pérez Navarro and Manuel Loff

Doctoral Programme: Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Funding: FCT

Departing from a place that highlights the knowledge, discourses, practices and experiences, but also the continued presence of Palestinians in their territory, this work seeks to contribute to the epistemic and physical decolonization of the Global South by attempting to denaturalize and delegitimize various mechanisms of oppression -including those arising from research methodologies- and focusing on alternative possibilities for social transformation.

More specifically, it is through the concepts of "homonationalism" and "pinkwashing" that I seek to understand how Zionist colonialism operates in Palestine and how it functions from a historically situated interrelationship between territory and body, in a game of racial, sexual and gender representations that perpetuate the denial of Palestine and Palestinian belonging as part of the ongoing Nakba.

This historical and critical perspective allows me to engage with the knowledge and practices of activists who, from a position caught between fire, where multiple forms of oppression are simultaneously combated -such as the Israeli settler-colonial project, the patriarchal system that exists within this reality, and the global neoliberal institutions and organizations that contribute to maintaining the political, social, and economic status quo in Palestine- resist Israeli colonial discourses and practices, which present the colonizer as necessary and desirable and Palestinians as victims of their own communities. At the same time, these activists offer autonomous political alternatives within Palestinian society and proposals for the decolonization of Palestine in the present.