Painting the town pink
Description
This thesis attempts to weave together urban studies, postcolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies. It attempts to construct a framework for analyzing urban renewal processes and neoliberalism as part of broader settler-colonial practices. Particularly, the thesis attempts to delineate where queer waves of gentrification fall into the dynamic of gentrification and settler-colonialism's connections to each other. Then, using Tel Aviv as a case study, it attempts to express how settler-colonial processes, in this case, through the displacement of Palestinians, can become imprinted onto the urban politics of a city, particularly through the leveraging of queer-friendliness and the cultivation of a white, Western queer affect that nonetheless relies on paradigms of racial and ethnic authenticity. The first chapter of the thesis attempts to describe the way that gentrification and settler-colonialism have similar outcomes, motives, and logic but distinguishes the two as not coterminous or one and the same. The second chapter describes how queer individuals may become part of the dynamics of gentrification and its colonial attributes and how urban queer space is commonly predicated on the displacement of communities of color along with a white, wealthy performance of queerness. The third and final chapter discusses the role of queer politics and urban politics in perpetuating settler-colonialism in Tel Aviv. Drawing on the role of gay sex tourism and global public relations with regard to LGBT communities in Tel Aviv, the article expresses how Tel Aviv's status as a haven for queer people conceals a logic of displacement and racial segregation throughout the city, connecting queer people in the city to the displacement of the racial other on a background of settler-colonialism in Palestine as a whole.