lavender evolutions
Lavender Evolutions Book Club is the love child of the queer, poc collective Lavender Evolutions. Lavender Evolutions creates spaces for healing, community, and celebration for qtbipoc in the DMV. The book club reads books by and for queer people of color with rotating genres each month and usually meets the third Tuesday of the month.
Lavender Evolutions will be meeting Thursday, May 30th, at 7 pm; we will be reading Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan.
About the book:
From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.
With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.
PAST BOOK CLUBS
Mikayla’s Staff Picks:
