Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Focusing on viral images of Israeli soldiers wearing women’s lingerie taken from Gazan homes and performing Jewish prayers in Palestinian mosques, I argue these are performances of sovereignty—gendered and religious transgressions shaped by the Jewish experience in the eastern Mediterranean.

Paper long abstract

Focusing on very widely circulated images of symbolically violent acts by Israeli soldiers, including viral images of Israeli soldiers wearing women’s lingerie and clothing taken from Gazan homes and performing Jewish prayers inside Palestinian mosques, I argue that these practices are not merely instances of individual deviance or cruelty, but performances of sovereignty, gendered and religious transgressions shaped by the Jewish experience in the eastern Mediterranean. This talk examines a volatile formation produced under conditions of seige warfare, territorial enclosure, and asymmetric sovereignty. Historically, Zionism sought to refashion the “diasporic Jew”, stereotyped in Europe as feminized, into a "New Jew", a sovereign, militarized, heterosexual male subject. The current mysoginistic drag performances by Israeli soldiers do not undo this project but radicalize it. The occupation of Palestinian women’s garments and Islamic ritual space becomes a site where the soldier enacts not only military dominance but symbolic jurisdiction over the categories of gender, sexuality, sanctity, and the domestic. These acts stage sovereignty itself as theatrical excess: the power not only to govern but to ‘play’ in these seige spaces, to profane, mock, and reorder moral worlds. These performances index layers of Jewish historical emasculation and its anxious overcompensation, the reappropriation of orientalist fantasies of Muslim spirituality, masculinity, and femininity, and the moral distortions characteristic of prolonged militarization. I further situates these practices within Israel’s contradictory regime, where liberal LGBTQ inclusion and supposed religious freedom is publicly mobilized as a marker of modernity and civilizational supremacy.