Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
American Studies
Reader 1
Lara Deeb
Reader 2
David Seitz
Reader 3
Michelle Decker
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2024 Melia Oliver
Abstract
In this thesis, I employ a queer analytic to uncover how Israel weaponizes claims to feminist and gay-friendly modernity—referred to as pink- and purple washing, respectively—as forms of propaganda to justify their occupation of Palestine. Pink- and purplewasing narratives rely on racist and Orientalist conceptions of Palestinian “barbarism” which Israel reproduces in order to bolster their settler colonial project. I analyze pink- and purplewashing propaganda as symptoms of larger homo- and femonationalist formations which stem from and further reinforce settler colonialism. I address allegations of “weaponized rape” during and after the events of October 7th and argue that this form of misinformation is made legible by contemporary conditions of femonationalism combined with long-standing colonial characterizations of Indigenous men as dangerous. I analyze Zionism as a project of whiteness and expose the specific racialized gendering that pink- and purplewashing necessitate. Finally, I argue that a connected reading of both pink- and purplewashing exposes the shared precarity of these projects, illuminating sites for coalitional resistance to colonialism.
Recommended Citation
Oliver, Melia, "Rainbow-Washing the Occupation: A Critical Examination of Israeli Claims to Feminist and Gay-Friendly Modernity" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2390.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2390
Included in
American Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
