ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role Palestinian artistic productions play in articulating forms of resistance to the violence of the Zionist sensual regime. It sheds light on the work of several artists: Nadia Awad’s cinematic lens, Alaa Abu Asad’s photography and video art, Tariq Knorn’s performance art, alQaws’s activist/artist musical tracks, and the story of the late dancer Ayman Safiah. Through an engagement with these artists and their work, I unpack the value of a queering aesthesis, which seeks to enunciate a politics of native sense that queers and interrupts the aesthetic-political field of settler colonial encroachment on the native’s being. Such politics, I argue, functions on multiple levels: first, it challenges the Zionist configuration of sex and sense, where the projections of sexual pluralism and moral superiority of Israeli humanist values coalesce. Second, it articulates the native’s bodily ways of doing, being, and enunciating epistemologies for revival and life. In doing so, it grounds the willingness to challenge the native’s own political imaginary as it succumbs to the imperatives of a settler sensual regime bent on instilling the native’s ghurba (exile) from her land, (hi)stories, and desires.
