The Inevitable Result of Intersectional Gender Studies By Haley Strack
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-inevitable-result-of-intersectional-gender-studies/
Harvard University’s gender and sexuality department will offer a wide range of classes next semester: Gender as Technology; Gender and Sexuality in Korean Pop Culture; Feminism in the Age of Empire; Gender, Race and Poverty in the United States; Decolonization; Love’s Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor; and more. Decolonization is as relevant to feminist theory as the songs of BTS are to Korean gender roles in Harvard’s gender studies department. As George Leef has written, gender studies is “not really an intellectual enterprise, but ideological posturing,” one that “is not about trying to understand the world, but is all about trying to change it in certain ways.”
Gender studies professors have taken the posture of supporting Palestinians since October 7, and opposing Israel since well before October 7. A recent panel held at Rutgers University, and sponsored by its gender studies department, is a good study of how mad the departments have become and a better example of their ideological ends.
The panel, called “Palestine Is a Queer Feminist Struggle against Imperialism,” was led by Maya Mikdashi, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Nadine Naber, an associate professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Mikdashi went viral for complaining that criticizing Hamas’s persecution of LGBTQ Palestinians is a “homophobic” tactic. Naber delivered a word salad against “settler-colonialism,” which is good enough to quote in full:
Any movement committed to a free Palestine must take seriously how the categorical dichotomization of gender and sexuality is made material — is corporealized through violence, punishment, murder, and disappearance, and that the gender binary is foundational to colonization. And also that the gender binary, like all borders, [is] made possible through state violence. . . .
Indeed, the practices of rape and sexual assault that have been well documented during the founding of Israel and continue today are not an exception, or a secondary impact of colonial violence, but are part of the settler-colonial white supremist logic and practices of Israel that conflate colonized women with the land and nature and assume that therefore to dominate the land necessities dominating Palestinian women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities — from 1948 until today.
The pro-Palestinian movement needs to “center around” queer and trans people and women, Naber continued, because they’re “especially vulnerable to colonial violence” and they also “embody exceptionally nuanced wisdom about Zionism because they are living it in all its complexity.” Given that wisdom, pro-Palestinians should turn to queer, trans, female activists for the “analysis to be leading this movement,” she added.
Feminist activists are certainly trying to lead the movement. Florida Atlantic University gender studies professor Nicole Morse focuses on trans studies, gender studies, and queer theory, the Washington Free Beacon reported, and was arrested in October for attending a pro-Hamas rally. On October 12, Morse wrote in the Palm Beach Post that the “root of today’s violence is [a Jewish] history of oppression, which is funded by the U.S. and supported without question by South Florida politicians.” Three weeks after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Barnard College’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies posted a statement arguing that the Palestinian struggle against “settler colonial war, occupation and apartheid” was a feminist issue. On October 13, the University of Minnesota’s gender studies faculty declared their solidarity with the “Palestinian people” after “Hamas fighters brought down border fences and launched an incursion into Israeli territory.” The department heads of Queen’s University unanimously approved a statement on October 18 that said the “structural violence against Palestinians, ongoing for decades, must end” by “ending the siege of Gaza and ensuring freedom of movement as well as the right to return for Palestinians.”
Gender and sexuality professors have long disparaged Israel — in 2021, a group of them announced support for the “Palestine Feminist Collective,” a catch-all feminist organization “committed to Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession.” Departments of gender and sexuality studies have argued that “Palestine Is a Feminist Issue,” one that only the “end of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine and for the Palestinian right to return to their homes” can resolve. Departments at Rutgers University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, University of California Santa Cruz, University of California Irvine, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Illinois, Stony Brook University, Yale University, University of Arizona, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, College of the Holy Cross, Texas Christian University, Bryn Mawr College, University of Texas at Austin, and dozens more, signed the statement.
Feminism is the vehicle by which gender studies departments disguise both their contempt for Israel and their desire to support a complicated social complex that seeks to justify Hamas’s attempt at “armed resistance” against “colonizers.” Professors dare not mention the anti-feminist terrorist regime currently governing Palestinian women — terrorists who use women and children as human shields, sanction the rape and murder of innocent civilians, and oppress female civilians.
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