Figurations of Violence and Belonging

Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and BeyondPeter Lang, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009.

ISBN 978-3-03911-564-8 pb.

Sample chapter (preface)

Review in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Review in Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media

Review in Journal of Gender Studies

Review in ReLevant (in Russian)

Violence is often seen as contradictory to belonging, as an obstacle to it, or as a background against which belonging – understood as the creation of ‘safe spaces’ – takes place. Instead, this book offers a more nuanced and critical analysis of the complex relationship between violence and belonging, by exploring the ways sexual, ethnic or national belonging can work through, rather than against, violence. Based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking, queer immigrants in Israel/Palestine, and also in cyberspace, this book is a fascinating, albeit at times disturbing, journey into the world of hate speech and fantasies of torture and sexual abuse; of tormented subjectivities and uncanny homes; of ghostly hauntings from the past and anxieties about the present and future. The author raises daring questions about the responsibilities of national homemaking, the complicity of queerness within violent regimes of colonialism and war, and the ambivalence of immigrant belonging at the intersection of marginality and privilege. Drawing from scholarship on migration, diaspora and critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis and studies on cyberculture, the book skillfully traces the interplay between the different forms of violence – physical and verbal, social and psychic, material and semiotic – and offers novel insights into the analysis of nationalism, on-line sociality and queer migranthood.

Mapping multiple displacements and fraught belongings in uncharted virtual worlds, Adi Kuntsman bravely and creatively opens up new paths to understanding Israeli immigrant queer subjects by figuring with and through the affective dimensions of their political and cultural lives. Utterly convincing and provocative in her assertions regarding the haunted travels, violent histories and discordant discourses of these queers, Kuntsman offers us a work that will be an exemplar for future research in the field. – Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

Deftly traversing numerous overlapping locations of belonging – Russia, Israel, the UK, and cyberspace – Adi Kuntsman has produced a compelling multi-sited ethnography of forms of violence and their constitutive and connective capacities for and between queer subjects. Her eloquent interrogation of Israeli nationalism and anti-Palestinian sentiment in relation to queerness is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on sexuality and nationalism, not to mention, urgently needed in these times. This book is not only intellectually rich but also politically inspiring. – Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times

Working through intersections of Russian and Israeli, Palestinian and Jew, queer and homophobe, home and exile, presents and pasts, recognition and erasure, Adi Kuntsman traces the ghostly but no less wounding acts of violence that are the conditions of belonging in contemporary Israel/Palestine. Inhabiting sites both online and off she shows us the realness of virtual spaces, and the virtualities that haunt the real. Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich, this book eschews any easy reconciliations as Kuntsman insists that violence and belonging must be thought through one another. Not only will this book be of interest to a broad range of students and scholars, but it addresses as well urgent questions with respect to how we might live together in difference and more justly. – Lucy Suchman, Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK

Table of contents

Preface

Prologue: The journey to this book

Introduction: Violence and Belonging

PART I HAUNTED FIGURES

Chapter 1 The Shadow by the Latrine

Chapter 2 The Jewish Victim

PART II BORDER FIGURES

Chapter 3 The Soldier and the Terrorist

Chapter 4 Daughter of Palestine

PART III FLAMING FIGURES

Chapter 5 The Club

Chapter 6 The Flamer

Conclusion: Belonging Through Violence

Bibliography

Index

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