"From the River and Across the Sea": Negotiated Resistance of Bodies and Borders by Queer Palestinians in the Diaspora

This doctoral project will ethnographically investigate the effect that traversing "borderland" spaces of violence has in shaping - and being shaped by - queer Palestinian subjectivities, forms of intimacies/relationalities and resistance(s). This intersectional research, grounded in postcolonial queer and feminist epistemologies, engages queer as a methodological and analytical framework whilst utilising a novel multi-method approach to qualitative data collection. Calling upon the decolonial politics employed in response to settler colonial violence within Palestine, shifting the focus to the diasporic queer Palestinian community in exile within settler colonial states in North America, namely Canada and the United States, to expound on the meaning that spaces and places are assigned by queer Palestinians. The fieldwork will be conducted over two 3-month periods across three research sites in Toronto (ON), Canada and in Chicago (IL) and Columbia (MO), United States, chosen for their prominent Palestinian and queer community or existing links. The research will engage in map-making, semi-structured walking ethnography interviews and photo go-along with 40 queer Palestinian participants. The project aims to elucidate the under-researched processes of 'symbolic violence' within North American settler colonies, that consists of internalised humiliations and legitimations of systemic inequality (e.g. racism, homophobia, orientalism, islamophobia). The queer and racialised body is important in perceiving the demarcation of bodily and social borders, contracting and shifting, as space and spatial practices are reconfigured. Queer positionality is about future imaginings and a critical space to explore the negotiated resistance of queer Palestinians within a settler-colonial context. This research aims to support the community needs of queer Palestinians in exile by highlighting how spatialised inequalities are produced, experienced and resisted.