The Life Doesn't Simply Get Erased. It

To Say That Gender Is Performative Is A Little Different Because For Something To Be Performative Means That It Produces A Series Of Effects. We Act And Walk And Speak And Talk In Ways That Consolidate An Impression Of Being A Man Or Being A Woman.

A Different Kind Of Pleasure Surfaced In The Aftermath, The Pleasure Of Seeing The Towers Fall Time And Again, The Experience Of Being Entranced By The Visual Spectacle, And Then Also The Very Graphic Forms Of Public Mourning For Exemplary Citizens (taking Place At The Same Time As The Refusal To Mourn The Undocumented, The Foreign, Gay And Lesbian Lives Lost There, For Example). I Am Not Sure That The Guilt Over The Pleasure Re-installed The Good Citizen.

If You Speak [ About Violence Against Israelis], You Are In An Unspeakable Place, Have Become A Nazi Or Its Moral Equivalent (if There Is A Moral Equivalent). It Certainly Terrifies, But Perhaps Also It Is A Linguistic Permutation Of State Terrorism, An Assault That Stops One In One's Tracks, And Secures The Continuing Operation Of The Regime And Its Monopoly On Politically Intelligible Speech.

We Have To Be Able Track The Ways In Which Fear, For Instance, Is Monopolised By State And Media Institutions, Ways In Which Fear Is Actually Promoted And Distributed As A Way Of Bolstering The Need For Greater Security And Militarisation.

We Are More Often Than Not Asked, For Instance, To Regard Israel And Palestine As In A Conflict Of This Kind, A Framing That Sets Each Of Them On Equal Footing, And Implicitly Analogies The Political Situation To A Fist Fight, A Soccer Match, Or A Domestic Quarrel. So If, Then, The Only Two Intelligible Political Positions Are "pro-palestinian" Or "pro-israeli," The Presumption Is That One's Position Is Determined By A Sentiment That Wants One Side To Win Over The Other.