Queer Politics of Boycott at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine

In 2012, Palestinian anticolonial-queer activists organized a workshop and conference at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine in Porto Alegre, Brazil, titled “Queer Visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine.” Queer Visions brought different activists together who had been organizing against Israel’s state-sponsored pinkwashing campaign and for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Since 2010, Palestinian queer activism has publicly engaged with the Palestinian Call for BDS and has urged the Palestinian BDS movement and those in solidarity with it to mobilize around Israel’s pinkwashing campaign and work to better understand Zionism’s underlying settler-colonial sexual politics. Taking the WSF: Free Palestine as a crucial moment in queer engagements with the politics of boycott, this essay reflects on the challenges faced by anticolonial-queer activism in the context of Israel/Palestine and the challenges it poses to Zionist settler colonialism and normative understandings of queer politics and Palestinian liberation.