Toboggan Lodge, Cornell University
JASBIR K. PUAR (Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University; Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University)
This paper situates the intersections of sex, disability, and reproductive politics within the history of homonationalism in Israel/Palestine. I focus specifically on the use of disability—especially as the Israeli state was founded on a narrative of rehabilitating dispersed, traumatized diasporas into bodily health and national wholeness--as part of a biopolitical assemblage of control that instrumentalizes a spectrum of capacities and debilities for the use of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Thus I seek to rearticulate sexual rights and the debates on “pinkwashing” within biopolitical frames by linking them to the slow rise of disability rights platforms in Israel, the convergence of eugenic selective abortion practices on the one hand and the pro-natalist attitudes of the state, supported by its stellar Assisted Reproductive Technology industry, on the other, and the growing population of LGBT parents and families in Israel.
