#heike schotten

[eretzyisrael]

By TAMMI ROSSMAN-BENJAMIN

In March 1941, Nazi theorist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg launched the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. Its inaugural conference, “Research in the Struggle against World Jewry,” featured talks by many scholars, including the Institute’s director, historian Wilhelm Grau, who concluded that the only viable solution to the Jewish question was for the Jews to disappear.

Rosenberg’s Institute was one of several established to support the Third Reich’s efforts to provide an empirical basis for their anti-Jewish policies. To that end, the scholars affiliated with these institutes endeavored to put in place a new interdisciplinary field of study that would draw on various academic disciplines to promulgate antisemitic scholarship about the Jews.

According to Alan Steinweis’ book, “Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” this new brand of scholarship, which he dubs “Nazi Jewish Studies,” demonstrates its practitioners’ “cynical manipulation of scientific knowledge, historical events, religious texts, and statistical data” in the service of “justifying the disenfranchisement, expropriation, and removal of Jews from German society.”

Fast forward to August 2023. 

Two academic leaders of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) – San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi and University of Massachusetts Boston Professor Heike Schotten - co-authored an article explaining why they recently established the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ).

Describing ICSZ as “explicitly anti-Zionist” and “strictly committed to abiding by the BDS picket line,” Abdulhadi and Schotten link their new Institute to “the long history of struggle” against efforts “to conflate Zionist politics and ideology with Jews or Jewishness.”  

In October, the Institute will be holding an inaugural conference entitled “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism” to provide academics and activists with tools for delegitimizing the most widely accepted definition of antisemitism, which rightly identifies anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, but is being portrayed by conference organizers as “a tool of and a shield for repressive state power.”

[readingsquotes]

"We must remember that terrorism does not describe an objective reality; it is, like other pieces of language weaponized to murder, an ideological word used by ideological powers, with specific legislative and carceral bodies attached to its use.

C. Heike Schotten, in Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler-Colony, offers us the only definition of terrorism that matters. She writes that the figure of the terrorist:

“…can be understood as the contemporary settler state’s moralized imperial name for the unthinkable indigenous remainder that, in the insistence on remaining, challenges the settler state’s claim to sovereignty, security, and civilizational value. Indeed, indigenous peoples’ continued existence not only challenges settler sovereignty’s claim to legitimacy and ‘first’-ness, but is the harbinger of that sovereignty’s death insofar as they become legible to it as existing.”

Terrorism is the great weapon of the West. It is used only against those who can fit inside its scope, and that is not everyone. It is the indigenous remainder, and those in solidarity with them, in the scope; no one else appears. Land defenders blocking Cop City appear in the scope, protestors fighting police brutality appear in the scope. Terrorism does only what it was designed to do only to those it was designed to target. Terrorism cannot be recuperated. We cannot use or weaponize it for our own purposes. It means nothing to call Israeli or American violence terrorist violence, because terrorism is a one-sided weapon and its bullets belong to the state. The state cannot appear in the scope. In trying to prove that we are not terrorists, or prove that someone else is a terrorist, we reify that the weapon of terrorism ought to exist at all, and that the problem is simply giving it the right target. We reload the weapon ourselves when we do this. Instead, as Schotten argues:

“If the only options are… to side with a futurist, settler, and imperial ‘us’ (whether as avowed advocates of empire or its collaborationist liberal compromisers) or with a queered, ‘savage,’ and ‘terrorist’ other, the choice, I think, is clear: we must choose to stand with the ‘terrorists.'”

This choice must shape our writing. No more conversation between the sword and the neck. No more attempting to prove that the oppressed are the neck and not the sword, to point the sword in a direction that will satisfy its blade. It doesn’t matter. This applies to a multitude of other words whose meanings are situated outside of our control. The language is poisoned already. There is no cure.  "

December 8, 2023

Critique & Essays

Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

[endtimeheadlines]

DAYS OF LOT: College Class to ‘Denaturalize’ Heterosexuality Teaches Students to ‘Disdain Nature’

The University of Massachusetts-Boston is teaching a course in political theory with the expressed aim of denaturalizing heterosexuality, among its other stated goals. The class fulfills a mandatory diversity requirement at the school.  The College Fix reported Wednesday that the advanced political science course, “Queer Political Theory,” according to an online description in the 2017-18 undergraduate catalog, says that its “primary aims are the de-naturalization of (hetero)sexuality and (hetero)normative gender categories, identities, and expression.” The course is taught by Professor C. Heike Schotten, who

has authored several related publications, among them Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony; To Exist is to Resist: Palestine and the Question of Queer Theory; Men, Masculinity, and Male Domination: Rethinking Feminist Analyses of Sex Work; Homonationalism: From Critique to Diagnosis, or, We Are All Homonational Now; and Nietzsche and Emancipatory Politics: Queer Theory as Anti-Morality. READ MORE

[shofar-brasil]

Enquanto qualquer número de analistas e agências estão ocupados investigando "terror islâmico", ao lado nenhum pagar qualquer atenção para o tipo de ataques como aqueles perpetrados por Dylann Roof em Charleston. Isso porque o FBI não está interessado em terrorismo, a menos que ela está ligada ao Islã. Esse discurso tem uma história em os EUA, e os interesses de Israel figurar nessa história.

[orationing]

Heike Schotten and Chris Hedges on double standards in University Censorship on the issue of israeli apartheid

[tenderqweer-blog]

We fully appreciate the importance of self-critique, especially for activist movements. However, we think Puar and Mikdashi lean rather too heavily on the conceptual framework of homonationalism in their analysis of pinkwatching, making it do more work than it can bear. This overreliance on homonationalism obscures specific, politically relevant features of pinkwatching activism that are particular to Palestine and Palestine solidarity work. Moreover, we believe the authors’ self-exemptions from activist struggle pushes their criticisms dangerously close to a rehearsal of academic critique at the expense of contributing to movement building. Finally, the lack of a single example of the kind of work they critique renders their argument impossible to actually assess, leaving us grasping at straws – and, as we shall argue, straw caricatures of ourselves and our movement.

Heike Schotten and Haneen Maikey in "Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority and Accountability Beyond Homonationalsim" 

This is so exciting to read. This is essentially exactly what I want to be studying.