We Have To Have A Very Strong

The United States Are Such A Large Place. And There Are Some States And Some Cities Where The Questions Of Gender Or Sexuality Would Not Be Asked, Or Where Scholars Or Academics Are Working In Small Little Corners Of The Universities Trying To Raise These Questions And Being Told That Either That They're Strange Or Not Appropriate Or Being Actively Opposed. There Are Other Places Where There Is Very Active Scholarship Going On. Certainly On Gender.

What Does It Mean Then To Live With One Another? It Can Be Unhappy, It Can Be Wretched, It Can Be Ambivalent, It Can Even Be Full Of Antagonism, But All Of That Can Play Out In The Political Sphere Without Recourse To Expulsion Or Genocide. And That Is Our Obligation, To Stay In The Sphere With Whatever Murderous Rage We Have, Without Acting On It.

Some Israeli Politicians Have Proposed The Transfer Of Palestinians Out Of What Is Currently Called Israel, Either Into The Occupied Territories, Into Jordan Or Out Into Other Arab Lands, With The Idea That There Would Be No Intermixing Of Palestinian And Jewish Israelis Or Palestinian And Jewish Communities. But The Idea Of An Absolute Segregation Is One That I Find Lamentable.

Let Me Say One Thing To Clarify My Position. I Think We Can Take Distance From Norm But I Think We Are Also Mired In Norm, "empêtrés", I Think You Say In French. And I Think The Choices We Can Make Are Only In A Certain Struggle With The Norms Out Of Which We're Constituted.

I Do Know That Some People Believe That I See Gender As A "choice" Rather Than As An Essential And Firmly Fixed Sense Of Self. My View Is Actually Not That. No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives.