Apr 8, 2024
PANEL 2
Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso (@nasawiyya)
"Queer Threads: Activist Fashion in
Palestine"
Roberto Filippello, University of Amsterdam
In this presentation I sketch the contours
of the formation of an activist fashion scene across Palestine in
the face of material challenges that the infrastructures of the
occupation pose to the production and circulation of clothes. I
theorize the creative practices of Palestinian fashion designers
and image-makers as makeshift acts of collective disidentification
with the ecocidal, racist, and queerphobic Zionist enterprise, and
argue that “queer decolonial fashion practices” offer a model of
creative activism wherein environmental ethics, anti-racism, and
queer claims are fundamentally interconnected. Conjoining Gramscian
analytical categories and queer epistemologies from the South, I
highlight how sartorial praxis and embodiment figure in the
imagination of Palestinian youth. (25 minutes)
“Laboratories of Speculation: Rethinking Jericho,
‘the City of the Moon’”
Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois Chicago (via
Zoom)
Critical queer feminist study has lovingly brought renewed
methodological attention to long-forgotten, once-inhabited sites,
archives, geographies, and histories, which can be newly reanimated
for the service of contemporary collective social life. One such
instance in present-day Palestine has been the international art,
writing, and research residency called el-Atlal (“The Ruins”)
co-founded by Karim Kattan, Victoria Dabdoub, Rebecca Topakian,
Céleste Haller from 2014-2019 in the town of Jericho, the “oldest
city in the world.” Given its historical heritage and complex
station in the local imagination, Jericho is a generative utopian
site for enacting new incubatory spaces for alternative political
and aesthetic possibility in the dystopian here and now. If
Palestine, and the Palestinian people subject to Israeli rule, have
long served as one of the foremost paradigmatic “laboratories” for
the development of late modern settler security states and their
fabrication of new technologies of policing, maiming, and killing
perfected on Palestinians under siege, this talk explores how we
might reimagine an archetypal “Palestine” instead as an
experimental site of decolonial fantasy and creative freedom, one
that also portends the ends of the conjoined US/Israeli settler
security states and their forever wars on terror. (25 minutes)
Art credit:
"Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza.