Thank you so much to everyone who has read and subscribed to Horse of a Different Colour thus far. If you are new here, consider subscribing for free below. Every subscription means the world to me. Next week, I will be going on a brief hiatus to accommodate a short holiday and my law school graduation. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about when I get back, please leave it in the comments! To stay connected to Horse of a Different Colour while on hiatus, you can follow me on Twitter @sadie_rw or Instagram @horseofadifferent_colour.
This week, my friends and I learned a new word: “homonationalism”. It was used in reference to Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv. After some research, homonationalism is a term intended to refer to governments exploiting support for LGBTQ+ rights to promote racist and xenophobic policies. Homonationalism is most commonly used to describe right-wing groups who support LGBTQ+ rights and use that support as justification for things like opposing immigration from certain parts of the world.
Our new word was interesting to me, not only because it is new, but because of what it does, not only to those who support LGBTQ+ rights but also to members of the LGBTQ+ community. For those of us who celebrate the strides made in securing equality for our LGBTQ+ friends and family, it posits that our support is performative - we only support LGBTQ+ rights to use them as justification for problematic views. This concept alienates the LGBTQ+ community and uses its fight for equality as a weapon.
The weaponization of identity, particularly identity politics, has been unavoidable over the last ten years as it has swept both the Left and the Right with increasing fervour. We have watched both the Right and the Left leverage the identities of commonly disenfranchised groups to garner support. But the idea of homonationalism weaponizes identity in a slightly different way. This type of identity politics seeks to use not our identities, but instead calls into question our motivations for supporting others. It incepts the divisive idea that I will only help you so long as it aids me in oppressing someone else. But it goes one step further by drawing a somewhat spurious correlation between something good and an entirely separate something terrible.
The context that we learned this term - in opposition to Pride celebrations in Israel, is an excellent example of this. Tel Aviv boasts vibrant Pride celebrations, and Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East where it is safe to be an openly LGBTQ+ person. Support for these rights has been hard-fought amongst Israeli citizens as part of the internal politics that affect daily life in the country. The charge of homonationalism asserts that Pride in Israel is a tool to justify and shadow Palestinian suffering. Logically, however, the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in Israel is pretty removed from the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. The spurious correlation only reaches the apex of plausible causality from the perspective that Israel is inherently in the wrong.
Herein lies the danger of identity politics that play not on our own identities and experiences, but our support for those of others. Just as activists in one area are so often asked why they aren’t vocal about something else, it will always be possible to frame genuine support of a cause as something nefarious. Pinkwashing and other similar phenomena are real things that do take place in the world; the presence of Uighurs at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing 2022 Olympics is perhaps an example of a country distracting from its human rights abuses. To determine whether or not a connection between the good thing - such as support for the LGBTQ+ community, and the wrong thing - human rights abuses, is important in gauging our responses.
This determination is complicated because governments, like people, are not one-dimensional. A country can engage in activities to support certain minority groups without having any connection to other groups experiencing hardship and inequality in that same country. These imbalances are unfortunate and worth addressing, but they are a reality. Before levelling accusations that support for one group is being used as a device to oppress another, it is worthwhile to consider the context and surrounding circumstances. Is support for one community being openly used to justify the oppression of another? Is support for the intersectional part of a community being offered while broader support is denied? If these things are not present, it is worth considering embracing the wins for equality as they come, rather than viewing them as a tool for holding someone else down.