SCA PRESENTS: EREZ LEVON (Queen Mary, Univ. of London), "Sexuality, language and politics: A case study of lesbians and gays in Israel" - MAY 8, 12:30 PM

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Sexuality, language and politics: A case study of lesbians and  gays in Israel
 
Erez Levon  - (Queen Mary, University of London)

TUESDAY, MAY 8

12:30 PM

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis

20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Despite significant legal enfranchisements over the past twenty years, lesbians and gays in Israel remain largely marginalized and excluded from full participation in society. This marginalization can be traced to a perceived incompatibility between gay or lesbian identity, on one hand, and the values that normatively define belonging in Israeli society, on the other. Gays and lesbians in a certain sense exist outside of and in conflict with the dominant discourse of what it means to “be Israeli,” and, as such, a crucial component of the construction and performance of a lesbian or gay subjectivity in Israel involves negotiating this sexual/national tension. In this talk, I investigate some of the ways in which people who identify as both gay/lesbian and Israeli understand the relationship between these two opposing affiliations, and how they use language to construct identities for themselves that attempt to reconcile this conflict. Drawing on a long-term sociolinguistic and ethnographic examination of Israeli lesbian and gay activists, I describe how gays and lesbians in Israel manipulate various aspects of their speech (in terms of both content and form) as a way of accommodating or resisting dominant sexual norms. My goal in doing so is to demonstrate the diversity of experiences and social practices among Israeli lesbians and gays, and to highlight the central role of language in the construction of sexual subjectivity.