Queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel: articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques

This essay plies potential connections among Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques to advance a comparative analysis of queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. A broad literature in indigenous studies and at its intersections with queer studies now centres the intellectual and political interventions of Indigenous LGBTQ/Two-Spirit people in North America. In turn, after years of organising among Palestinian LGBTQ people in Palestine, Israel, and the diaspora, a broad array of queer critiques of gender and sexuality in Israel/Palestine recently has appeared in social movements and scholarship. This essay compares Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques so as to newly examine the sexualisation of settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. The essay cites an extensive literature on queer settler colonialism in the Americas, and its comparability with queer Palestinian critiques, to illuminate the specificity of queer settler colonialism in Israel. An extended analysis of Eytan Fox's 2006 film The Bubble assists in diagnosing the complicities and investments in settler colonialism that characterise contemporary Israeli LGBTQ politics. The essay concludes by demonstrating how such comparisons deepen knowledge of the relational formation of settler colonialisms, and of their inherently gendered and sexualised formation.