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Macron and Le Pen Face Off in French Election Pitting Vision of Globalization Against Nationalism Runoff vote comes after establishment parties were knocked out in first round By William Horobin

PARIS—The French headed to the polls Sunday for the deciding round of a presidential election that has sidelined mainstream parties and redrawn French politics as a contest between globalists and nationalists.

After candidates from the parties that long governed France were knocked out in the first round on April 23, the runoff pits Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration National Front, against Emmanuel Macron, a political neophyte who founded his pro-European Union party, En Marche, barely a year ago.

Polls predict Mr. Macron will win the vote with a 20-percentage-point margin, a result that would come as a relief to defenders of the EU after a long streak of advances by nationalist leaders on the continent.

Even if she loses with 40%, however, Ms. Le Pen could still seek to build on her results—expected to be the best for a far-right presidential candidate in modern French history—to become a powerful opposition leader, and further promote her protectionist ideas.

“Marine Le Pen at 40% across France in a presidential election would already be colossal,” said Jérôme Fourquet, an analyst at polling agency IFOP.
Macron vs. Le Pen in the PollsFrench poll respondents have favored Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen sinceFebruary when asked whom they’d favor if the two ended up in a runoff, as they now have.

The two candidates are offering to steer France in polar-opposite directions. Ms. Le Pen pledges to extricate the country from the EU and the euro, shutting borders to immigrants and cheap imports she says harm the domestic economy. Mr. Macron says France should embrace the EU and not fear globalization, vowing unpopular overhauls of labor laws to make the country more competitive. CONTINUE AT SITE

Israel Is Still at War By Prof. Efraim Inbar

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel just celebrated its sixty-ninth anniversary. Its citizens can be proud of its many impressive achievements, and particularly the building of a very strong military that has withstood many tests. Yet acceptance by all its neighbors has not been attained. Israel is still at war.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-still-war/

After several military defeats, the largest and strongest Arab state, Egypt, signed a historic peace treaty with Israel in 1979. The defection of Egypt from the anti-Israel Arab alliance largely neutralized the option of a large-scale conventional attack on Israel, improving Israel’s overall strategic position.

Yet Cairo refrained from developing normal relations with the Jewish state. A “cold peace” evolved, underscoring the countries’ common strategic interests but also the reluctance of Egypt to participate in reconciling the two peoples.

Jordan followed suit in 1994, largely emulating the Egyptian precedent. Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel also reflected common strategic interests – but was commonly referred to by Jordanians as the “King’s peace,” indicating a disinclination for people-to-people interactions with the Jews west of the Jordan River.

The inhibitions in the Arab world against accepting Israel should not be a surprise. Muslims seem to have good theological reasons for rejecting the existence of a Jewish state. Moreover, the education system in the Arab countries has inculcated anti-Semitic messages and hatred toward Israel for decades. Unfortunately, the dissemination of negative images of Jews and Israel has hardly changed in Arab schools and media.

This is also why the euphoria of the 1990s elicited by the “peace process” with the Palestinians, and propagated by the “peace camp”, was unwarranted. Indeed, the peace negotiations failed miserably. The process did, however, allow the Palestinian national movement a foothold in the West Bank and Gaza. As a large part of the Arab world is in deep socio-political crisis and another fears the Iranian threat, it is the Palestinian national movement and the Islamists that carry on the struggle against the Zionists.

The Palestinians are at the forefront of the war on Israel, despite their lack of tanks and airplanes. They use terror, and pay the terrorists captured by Israel as well as their families. The use of force against Jews is applauded, and killed perpetrators are awarded the status of martyrs. They use missiles against Israel’s civilian population. The limits on their firepower are the result of Israeli efforts to cut off their supply of armaments.

The Palestinian national movement denies the historic links of the Jews to the Land of Israel, and particularly Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority (PA) demanded of the UK that it apologize for the 1917 Balfour declaration, which recognized Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. There are endless examples in Palestinian schools and media to sustain the conclusion that the Palestinians are not ready to make peace.

France: Emmanuel Macron, Useful Idiot of Islamism by Yves Mamou

Emmanuel Macron, a “Useful Infidel,” is not a supporter of terrorism or Islamism. It is worse: he does not even see the threat.

Louizi’s article gave names and dates, explaining how Macron’s political movement has largely been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood militants.

Is Macron an open promoter of Islamism in France? It is more politically correct to say that he is a “globalist” and an “open promoter of multiculturalism”. As such, he does not consider Islamism a national threat because the French nation, or, as he has said, French culture, does not really exist.

During the cold war with the Soviet Union, they were called “Useful Idiots”. These people were not members of the Communist Party, but they worked for, spoke in favor of and supported the ideas of Lenin and Stalin. In the 21st century, Communism is finally dead but Islamism has grown and is replacing it as a global threat.

Like Communism, Islamism — or Islamic totalitarianism — has been collecting its “Useful Infidels” the same way Communism collected its Useful Idiots. There is, however, an important difference: under the Soviet Union, Useful Idiots were intellectuals. Now, Useful Infidels are politicians, and one of them may be elected president of France today.

Emmanuel Macron (Image source: European External Action Service)

Emmanuel Macron, Useful Infidel, is not a supporter of terrorism or Islamism. It is worse: he does not even see the threat. In the wake of the gruesome attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, Macron said that French society must assume a “share of responsibility” in the “soil in which jihadism thrives.”

“Someone, on the pretext that he has a beard or a name we could believe is Muslim, is four times less likely to have a job than another who is non-Muslim,” he added. Coming from the direction of Syria and armed with a Kalashnikov and a belt of explosives would, according to him, be a gesture of spite from the long-term unemployed?

Macron comes close to accusing the French of being racists and “Islamophobes”. “We have a share of responsibility,” he warned, “because this totalitarianism feeds on the mistrust that we have allowed to settle in society…. and if tomorrow we do not take care, it will divide them even more “.

Consequently, Macron said, French society “must change and be more open.” More open to what? To Islam, of course.

On April 20, 2017, after an Islamist terrorist killed one police officer and wounded two others in Paris, Macron said: “I am not going to invent an anti-terrorist program in one night”. After two years of continuous terrorist attacks on French territory, the presidential candidate said he had not taken the country’s security problems into account?

Moreover, on April 6, during the presidential campaign, professor Barbara Lefebvre, who has authored books on Islamism, revealed to the audience of the France2 television programL’Emission Politique, the presence on Macron’s campaign team of Mohamed Saou. It was Saou, apparently, a departmental manager of Macron’s political movement, “En Marche” (“Forward”), who promoted on Twitter the classic Islamist statement: “I am not Charlie”.

Sensing a potential scandal, Macron dismissed Saou, but on April 14, invited onto Beur FM, a Muslim French radio station, Macron was caught saying on a “hot mic” (believing himself off the air): “He [Saou] did a couple things a little bit radical. But anyway, Mohamed is a good guy, a very good guy”.

“Very good”, presumably, because Mohamed Saou was working to rally Muslim voters to Macron.

Europe’s Childless Leaders Sleepwalking Us to Disaster by Giulio Meotti

As Europe’s leaders have no children, they seem have no reason to worry about the future of their continent.

“Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument”. — Douglas Murray, The Times.

“‘Finding ourselves’ becomes more important than building a world.” — Joshua Mitchell.

There have never been so many childless politicians leading Europe as today. They are modern, open minded and multicultural and they know that “everything finishes with them”. In the short term, being childless is a relief since it means no spending for families, no sacrifices and that no one complains about the future consequences. As in a research report financed by the European Union: “No kids, no problem!”.

Being a mother or a father, however, means that you have a very real stake in the future of the country you lead. Europe’s most important leaders leave no children behind.

Europe’s most important leaders are all childless: British PM Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron. The list continues with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

As Europe’s leaders have no children, they seem have no reason to worry about the future of their continent. German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski wrote:

“for the childless, thinking in terms of the generations to come loses relevance. Therefore, they behave more and more as if they were the last and see themselves as standing at the end of the chain”.

Living for today: Europe’s most important leaders are all childless, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) and Mark Rutte (right), Prime Minister of the Netherlands. (Image source: Minister-president Rutte/Flickr)

“Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide”, wrote Douglas Murray in The Times. “Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument”. Murray, in his new book, entitled The Strange Death of Europe, called it “an existential civilisational tiredness”.

Angela Merkel made the fatal decision to open the doors of Germany to one million and half migrants to stop the demographic winter of her country. It is not a coincidence that Merkel, who has no children, has been called “the compassionate mother” of migrants. Merkel evidently did not care if the massive influx of these migrants would change German societ

Why this Filipina is fighting for Israel :By Andrew Tobin

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Staff. Sgt. Joana Chris Arpon isn’t Israeli, or even Jewish. Her service in the Israel Defense Forces is personal.

Arpon, 20, is the daughter of Filipino parents who came to Israel to find work. She said she enlisted as a combat soldier because an Israeli army team rescued her grandmother in the aftermath of the 2013 typhoon that devastated the Philippines.

“It was amazing to see the soldiers show up and help people. They saved my grandmother when her house was destroyed,” Arpon said. “I was like, “Whoa, that’s what I want to do.’”

On Tuesday, Israel’s 69th Independence Day, Arpon will be one of 120 soldiers recognized by Israel’s president for distinguished service. Later this year, Arpon and her mother will be granted Israeli citizenship thanks partly to her time in the army.

Born in Israel, Arpon always felt like part of the Jewish state. While many Filipinos live clustered in Israel’s big cities, her mother raised her and her older brother in the small town of Mishmar Hashiva, in central Israel. At their high school in nearby Rishon Lezion, they were the only Filipino students.

Arpon’s mother immigrated to Israel in 1988 to work as a nanny, and stayed to raise her children even after her husband left. The vast majority of the some 31,000 Filipinos who live in Israel are female caregivers.

As a rule, Filipinos are only allowed to live in Israel as temporary workers. But Arpon and her brother are among the hundreds of Filipino children the government has granted permanent residency, along with their immediate family members. After the children serve in the army, their families qualify for citizenship.

Arpon long knew she would follow in the footsteps of her brother, who served as a paramedic and is now a citizen. But it was only recently that she decided she wanted to be a combat soldier. Only about 7 percent of Israeli combat soldiers are women, though that number is growing despite opposition from some Orthodox Jews and others.

In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines with record-breaking force. At least 6,300 people were killed, and tens of thousands lost their homes, including Arpon’s grandmother.

The New, “Moderate” Hamas: Severe Cruelty to Jewish and Arab Prisoners and Their Families Even an anti-Israeli NGO is appalled. P. David Hornik

Hamas is trying to project a new image. At a news conference in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, May 1, it announced a purportedly moderate new document—without indicating in any way that it was abrogating its notoriously anti-Semitic 1988 charter.

The New York Times—at least on the face of it—quickly took the bait. That day its lead headline read: “Hamas Tempers Extreme Stances in Bid for Power”—later revised to “In Palestinian Power Struggle, Hamas Moderates Talk on Israel.”

The article quotes Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum: “The document gives us a chance to connect with the outside world…. We are a pragmatic and civilized movement….”

Yet, elsewhere in the report, even the Times is unable to get too enthused about the new “Document of General Principles and Policies.”

The Times notes that it “reiterates the Hamas leadership’s view that it is open to a Palestinian state along the borders established after the 1967 war, though it does not renounce future claims to Palestinian rule over what is now Israel.” Or in the document’s more emphatic words:

Palestine…extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west…the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do[es] not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do[es] not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

The Times also notes gingerly that the document “does not renounce violence.” Or as the document puts it:

The liberation of Palestine is the duty of the Palestinian people in particular and the duty of the Arab and Islamic Ummah in general…. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.

And the Times says the new document “specifically weakens language from [the] 1988 charter proclaiming Jews as enemies and comparing their views to Nazism.” The new document, however, says: “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”

In other words, no problem with the Jews, as long as their state is destroyed.

And finally, the Times—which, despite all these bows to reality, gave the Doha press conference top billing as if it heralded a major change—acknowledges what all experts confirm: that the new document “does not replace the original charter,” which remains fully in force.

Muslim Terrorists Come for a Cartoonist Who Once Drew Mohammed Appeasement and apologies will not save you. Daniel Greenfield

“Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour”.

That was how it began seven years ago. Everyone Draw Mohammed Day had spread over the internet. And with it came the death threats. Molly Norris, who got it all started, soon had to go into hiding.

The South African cartoonist Zapiro decided to draw Mohammed on a psychiatrist’s couch. “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour,” Mohammed complains. A newspaper on a coffee table in the clouds carries headlines about Everyone Draw Mohammed Day and Jihadist fatwas.

Jonathan Shapiro, the leftist cartoonist behind Zapiro, quickly found out that Mohammed’s followers really don’t have a sense of humor. Threats such as “You’ve got to watch your back” and “This will cost him his life” came pouring in.

Shapiro met with Muslim leaders and tried to establish his bona fides. He hated Israel and the “Islamophobia of the US War on Terror”. Not to mention European Burka bans and the “juvenile Islamophobic Facebook campaign”. He wasn’t one of those wicked Islamophobes. He was a good lefty.

“In South Africa, here Muslims are empowered,” Shapiro complained to the same imaginary psychiatrist in another comic strip “Muslim clerics told me this week they’re all for Freedom of Expression… except for drawing the prophet. Making exceptions for Religious Censorship is hard for a cartoonist.”

Shapiro had missed the point. In Islam, religion is politics and politics is religion. Supporting Islamic empowerment means endorsing theocratic censorship. To mock Mohammed is to undermine the supremacist foundations of Islamist theocracy. And that challenges Islamic power.

The apologies didn’t help. The appeasement didn’t matter. They still wanted him dead.

The Muslim terrorists who plotted to kill Shapiro didn’t care that he would go on to make amends by drawing a deranged Netanyahu brandishing a nuclear missile and compare Israel’s bombing of Hamas Jihadists to Guernica. In Shapiro’s Israel Apartheid Week cartoon, a cartoon Jewish figure who could have sprung from an issue of Der Sturmer, concedes that Israel is an Apartheid state.

The Muslim terrorists in Gitmo were pictured huddled behind the bars of a giant Statue of Liberty wearing Obama’s face. After Orlando, Trump was depicted in a Nazi uniform holding a sign, “Ban Muslims”. Surely those Muslim terrorists wouldn’t come for him. Or would they?

The years passed. Zapiro defended terrorists and smeared those who fought them. But the terrorists came for him anyway.

They did not care that he hated America and Israel. They did not care that he had stood up for the Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Gitmo. They cared only that he had offended Mohammed.

And there could be only one punishment for that crime.

The Left’s Continuing Homage to Communism Why progressives pay no price for clinging to their murderous ideology. Bruce Thornton

The success of Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election has the global left resorting to its usual exaggerations and dire predictions of a fascist resurgence. As happened with the progressive smears of Donald Trump, Le Pen’s similar appeals to patriotism, national identity, and the need to defend the nation’s culture and interests are immediately turned into sinister dog-whistles for the crypto-fascists, racist hordes just waiting for the Great Leader to start the pogroms and fill the gulags.

One hundred days into Trump’s administration, of course, nothing has happened that comes even close to beginning a fascist transformation of America. But the persistent phenomenon of the eternal fascist threat raises old questions about and other failed collectivists political ideologies.

Why is “fascism” or “right-wing” an epithet, but “communist” or “left-wing” isn’t? Why do the media, even those considered conservative, use a phrase like “extreme right” or “hard right,” but seldom use “extreme left” or “hard left”? Why is Le Pen’s National Front regularly described with such epithets, but Communist Parties or radical Green Parties rarely are? And why is there the vaguely honorific cliché “a man of the left,” but not the equivalent “a man of the right”?

In short, how has an ideology whose butcher’s bill is twice as large as fascism’s managed to stay acceptable? How do progressives in America like Bernie Sanders boast of honeymooning in the Soviet Union, but do not pay a political price for admiring a regime that killed more innocents than Hitler? How can a police-state like Cuba, which imprisons and murders and impoverishes its own people, continue to attract starry-eyed European and American progressives who at home loudly proclaim their concern for human rights and freedom and equality? Why are tee-shirts that sport images of mass murderers like Mao or thugs like Che considered chic, while Hitler’s or Mussolini’s likeness is verboten? Why in Europe can you wave the hammer-and-sickle flag of the defunct Soviet Union, but the swastika is forbidden by law? Why can the New York Times write a headline reading, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” when we will never, ever see anywhere a story about fascism “inspiring” Americans?

Or how is it that, as Martin Amis writes,

Everyone knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkutlag and Solovestky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the terror-famine.

And why do there still exist legal Communist Parties in the West, and a superpower like China that still identifies itself as communist, but Nazism is a despised fringe cult that gets attention only because it’s a useful political demon for the left? If murderous tyranny is our standard for condemning and ostracizing Nazism, why isn’t it equally used to judge and proscribe the most murderous tyranny in human history?

The French Illusions That Die Hard Free markets and ‘globalists’ didn’t wreck the French economy. The political class did.By Sohrab Ahmari

A representative of the globalist elite faces a tribune of globalization’s victims. That’s the superficial read on Sunday’s presidential runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in France. The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. Plenty of clues about which path France might take were on display during the May Day holiday.

Start with the France of illusions. An estimated 40,000 red-clad activists snaked their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation in the early afternoon. Hammer-and-sickle flags abounded. So did portraits of beloved mass murderers like Che Guevara. Gangs of masked youth set off firecrackers that boomed like gunshots.
One placard showed Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron side by side, asking: “Plague or Cholera?” A typical slogan was “Neither nation nor boss!”—a double rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s nationalism and Mr. Macron’s free-market liberalism. These sum up the views of supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand who was eliminated, barely, in the first round last month.

The Mélenchonists have a great deal in common with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, which held its own angry rally earlier in the day. Both camps would lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Ms. Le Pen would keep the 35-hour workweek while Mr. Mélenchon would shorten it to 32 hours. Both would boost welfare spending and sever or strain the country’s trade ties in various ways.

The Le Pen-Mélenchon Venn diagram has a large overlapping set, because both camps blame everyone but the French for the country’s malaise.

“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.”

The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. Incremental, haphazard changes have only prolonged the crisis. “So if you’re unemployed it must be because of the market economy.”

Yet it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%.

Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley.

Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy. As of January, this has created a 98% public-debt-to-GDP ratio. CONTINUE AT SITE

Keith Windschuttle A Disaster of the Active Kind

Did you know that our “genocidal history” is even worse than that of Nazi Germany? Come as a surprise, does it? If that it happens to be the case there is a safe assumption to be made: you haven’t been studying at one of our Australian university where mendacity meets mediocrity.

Only the students in the queue awaken me from my complacency. Where do we turn for comfort, they ask, when our reading lists are gibberish about which we can understand only that it is all left-wing? Is there no network, no secret society, no alternative reading list to get us through the next three years? Is there, in a modern university, no “safe space” for conservatives?
—Roger Scruton, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, August 2016

These observations by the English philosopher Roger Scruton at a book signing of his recent work on the dominance of neo-Marxist and postmodernist intellectuals in Western universities, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, describe a situation that is now ubiquitous throughout the English-speaking world. The humanities faculties of our public universities have been so comprehensively captured by the Left that they create an intellectual environment that leaves students of a conservative disposition completely out in the cold.

If anything, Australian students are in an even worse position than those in Britain and the United States. Most finish their degrees today largely ignorant of the great canon of Western literature that once formed the bedrock of academic degrees. Instead, they are indoctrinated in anti-Western theory from the gurus of cultural studies, critical theory, radical feminism, neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and postmodernism.

So it was an heroic decision on the part of healthcare and media entrepreneur Paul Ramsay, who died in 2014, to bequeath a large part of his $3 billion estate to the establishment of a foundation to promote the study of Western civilisation. Chairman of the board of the Paul Ramsay Foundation now administering the fund, John Howard, has explained that Ramsay “became concerned that as a people we had begun to lose sight of the collective impact of culture, history, religion, literature and music, comprising Western civilisation, which had been so important in conditioning the modern Australia. Not least of these was the great Western tradition of liberal democracy.”

The foundation has appointed the expatriate literary scholar Simon Haines as chief executive. Haines takes up the job on May 1 with the aim of establishing new degree programs in Western civilisation at some of our major universities. In an interview in the Higher Education Supplement of the Australian, Haines said the foundation would design the degrees but the universities would be free to manage their own teaching programs.

Unfortunately, none of Australia’s major public universities that would be in the running for the reported $25 million a year funding are fit for the task. They are all dominated by left-wing politics intent on seeing the civilisation created in the West turned upside down. Instead of cultivating the culture, history, religion, literature and music of Western civilisation, their humanities departments and arts degree programs are dedicated to at best belittling and at worst crushing the traditional study of these fields, and replacing them with their own perspectives that profess to liberate the purportedly oppressed minority group victims of Western civilisation. Of course, when the universities apply for the funding they will deny all this, but when those that are successful appoint the teachers and administer the classes, that is what the foundation will get for its money.

As an alumnus of the University of Sydney, last month I received an e-mail newsletter announcing the appointment of a new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Looking at the front-page photograph of the dean standing next to a bicycle, hands in trouser pockets, I couldn’t tell whether this was a man or a woman. When I read the accompanying text, I found this was intended. Here is the newsletter’s description of the new dean’s qualifications:

Annamarie Jagose is internationally known as a scholar in feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies and queer theory. She is the author of four monographs, most recently Orgasmology, which takes orgasm as its scholarly object in order to think queerly about questions of politics and pleasure; practice and subjectivity; agency and ethics.

Professor Jagose was formerly a member of the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and is the former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She lists her research interests as “queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies and everyday life”. She has received recent research grants for projects such as “The individual, the couple, the society: Rethinking relationality in queer social theory” and “Real sex in the cinema: revisiting indexicality, realism and temporality”.