Many people ask me why I am increasingly addressing antisemitism.[1] It is because it has become necessary. I came from Yugoslavia to Vienna in 1989 as an eight-year-old kid and grew up as a migrant. Returning to my home country was out of question because the state disintegrated in a series of armed conflicts in the 1990s, so I became a citizen of Austria in 2002. Speaking about racism as a migrant has given me some symbolical capital in the world of contemporary art over the course of many years. Since 7 October 7 2023, however my statements on war, violence and sexism, which have always been formed from the position of anti-racism and migration, cannot be properly classified any more, precisely because they include a critique of antisemitism and expressions of solidarity with Israel. This mirrors an embodied split of reality, an epistemological caesura between racism and antisemitism in the discourse of contemporary art and theory, which I will discuss in this text. Addressing racism is intuitively considered ‘right’, while addressing antisemitism might be ‘wrong’ (hence the formation of a whole discourse about false accusations of antisemitism). Instead of substantive debates, talking about antisemitism, its very invocation triggers conundrums that are tied back to identity. Addressing anti­semitism means being confronted with questions that are very similar to those that have accompanied my arrival in Vienna over the years. They were never questions that were looking for an answer, but questions that were an expression of irritation directed at the very articulation of migrants: people were puzzled that a migrant was speaking at all. Although in a different way, today, I find myself in a minority position in which nothing less than my inner essence (Who am I actually?; Where do I stand?; Where is my origin and anchoring?; Am I still on the move or have I settled down?) is at stake – due to pressure to take a position against Israel. As a consequence, I want to address the fact that the discussion space in which identity and non-identitarian positions could be negotiated simultaneously seems to have disappeared completely.

The sudden outbreak of transnational euphoria that accompanied the massacre of 7 October has triggered an existential fear for many who have already been turned into minorities in their biographies. My experiences of loss (the loss of a country, a culture, a language, a family, a society, etc.), as well as the long-standing experience of being cut off (i.e. social exclusion in Austria), have turned into a new reality. This is a very contemporary migrant position, and it has everything to do with antisemitism. If a mass movement tries to find out who the Jews are (because you never know exactly), then the correct identification is ultimately irrelevant. The language must change and not call them Jews, but Zionists.[2] From this point on, the interrogation, the panicked agitation, the impossibility of conversation, affects everyone who comes close to the new enemy image, because ultimately everyone can be a Zionist. This is precisely the irrationality and arbitrariness of antisemitism, the search for culprits that constantly confirms scattered suspicions and beliefs that no longer have to correspond to reality at any point. So since 7 October, I have been a Zionist, a racist, an advocate of white supremacy, a white or liberal feminist, I could go on and on with this list. Crucially, it makes no difference what identity or political past I actually have; it remains indeterminate, sinister and threatening, just like my arguments of antisemitism criticism, which are heartless, unsympathetic, cynical and at worst seen as murderous, just like the Israelis themselves. The point I want to make here is that structures of antisemitism affect us all. There are no Jews or Israelis, or Jewish or Israeli represen­tatives of a political establishment, who talk about the aggression of Hamas in order to conceal the oppression of the Palestinians out of malice. The structures of antisemitism, and at the moment especially those that came to light on 7 October and afterwards, affect everyone who speaks about them. This is the authority of antisemitism.

In this text, I would like to try a critical revision of those fields of theory production that in the recent past have fundamentally addressed the problems of identity and identification, but also origin, migration and racialisation, by focusing on affects, desire and sexual politics. I am particularly interested here in the difficult-to-define academic field that has become known as ‘queer theory’ since the 1990s and has developed between the USA and Europe in a back-and-forth process. I myself began a research project in 2010, which I published under the title ‘The Queerness of Memory’. The necessity of introducing a political dimension of memory into queer theory was due to the post-Nazi experience in a restructured Europe after 1989, which asked to look for the legacy of the Cold War. Where could this have found a better place of articulation than in those English-language discourses that promised to liberate me from both the narrowness of German and the familial pressure of authenticity of Serbo-Croatian? Queer theory seemed like a continuation of a practice of ideology critique from a perspective of sexual politics, like a symptomatic reading that sought to interpret the social convulsions, the unformulated stuttering of official politics, as the utterances of a neurotic patient. Psychoanalysis and ideology critique were self-evident components of a new, progressive gender research and an exciting view of sexuality that was able to shake the methodological apparatus of academia because it had recognised the potential of self-analysis in theory and was courageous enough to apply it. At the beginning of the 1990s, the field of queer theory, carried by Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Jose Esteban Munoz and Teresa de Lauretis, among others, emerged as a constantly growing and inspiring academic field, because it drew on experience and understood sexuality as a place of knowledge formation.[3] The impossibility of unifying this academic field can be seen in its understanding of identity. Lee Edelman, for example, writes about the problem of the metaphorical use of sexuality for the purpose of identity formation in his book Homographesis. Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994).[4] When, in a heteronormative society, a complete translation of body and voice into a text is sought, a text that can be read, then a manic search begins for those gestures that can act as signs, as indicators of being gay, to establish sexuality as identity. This psychoanalytically based element of the incipient queer theory – and Edelman’s Homographesis is one of the standard works here – is thus directed against the historical and ongoing persecution of those who are identified as queer by a simple sign. Queer theory’s questioning of identity politics is thus to be understood as creating a critical toolkit against accusation, recrimination and persecution of those who are identified as queer, whose sexuality is assumed to be a placeholder for an inner truth of subjectivity, for their whole person. A crucial strand of queer theory thus shows a proximity between the critique of homophobia and antisemitism by examining the persecutory delusion and fantasy of annihilation common to both. But then something crucial should change, even reverse.

After 9/11, as a phenomenon of the early twenty-first century, a completely opposite approach to identity politics developed within queer theory. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, published in 2007, plays a decisive role here.[5] Queer is repurposed as a term for a double identity – on the one hand, gay men, especially in the US and Israel, have been identified as the new queer nationalists, while on the other, the symbolic figure of the suicide bomber is proposed as the actual, ‘truer’ queer identity that has supposedly been misunderstood in the past.[6] But what is queer about a suicide bomber? Nothing at all.[7] On the one hand, Puar pointed out the double discrimination of queer migrants, i.e. the simultaneity of their experience of homophobia and racism – which is and will remain unquestionably important – but also triggered a wave of apologetics of terrorist violence. This also involved an ideological intervention that promoted identification with terrorists as marginalized resistance fighters. The focus here was not on sexuality, but on the affective state in an individual's supposed struggle for liberation. To achieve this, Puar had to sexualize affect, in other words, that state of euphoria, enthusiasm, and uninhibitedness that is enabling the act of violence became a foundation for thinking about sexuality.[8]

While it makes sense to cite Jasbir Puar as an example of a turn in queer theory, the ideological entanglements of its content lie elsewhere. With Noam Chomsky’s 9–11 – published a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center – anti-imperialist politics on the US left came to the fore, making their own references to the Soviet Union with their antisemitic totalitarian tendencies even more unrecognisable than before.[9] Chomsky’s focus is on US policy as the sole imperial centre, from which he also derives the cause of the September 11 attacks. He sees it exclusively in the military interventions of the USA in the Middle East, thereby failing to recognise the expansionist, imperial movements of the Soviet Union and the formation of several terrorist organisations. The resulting trivialisation of the terrorist act of violence, or worse, the exoticisation of terror as the legitimate resistance of oppressed peoples (entirely in the sense of an anti-imperial glorification of the world revolution with its centre in the Soviet Union) is gradually becoming a characteristic of the committed US left which, in contrast to its own raison d’état, has built up an apparatus of knowledge over several decades in academic and artistic contexts (i.e. wherever possible). On closer inspection, it is often reminiscent of Soviet propaganda but consistently fails to mention this liaison. Antisemitic, anti-imperialist propaganda such as ‘Zionism is racism’ can normalise undisturbed in the US since the 1970s, as can a discourse on an imaginary Western modernism that was cemented by the Cold War.

On the foundation laid by Chomsky, Puar’s sexualisation of the suicide bomber can unfold, because a discursive framework already existed in which the book could become successful. Claims of queer complicity with US imperialism are immediately understood, while sympathy with the populations in the Middle East oppressed by US imperialist foreign policy is secured as a legitimate counter-position outside the mainstream. The methods are decisive here. Chomsky gives the terrorist attack a primordial character – 9/11 becomes something of a primal scene – and although the event is described as a historical turning point because it is supposedly the first time the ‘Empire’ has been attacked, Chomsky paints a timeless picture that is only possible through the repression of the Cold War’s history, the Shoah. This is most evident in the assertion that Europe was never attacked either.[10] Unlike in the immediate aftermath of September 11, when there was no longer a Soviet Union, the difference in the present is that of a real Russian ideological and military violence, which since the Ukraine war has brought the past and the co-existence of several empires back to mind.[11] Antisemitism does not have one origin.

Puar’s book begins at a pivotal moment that illustrates this, namely the public hanging of two Iranian gay men that sparked worldwide protests against homophobia in 2006.[12] The fact that a revolt against homophobia also brought to light racist elements that were directed against the entire Iranian population became the decisive moment to relate sexuality and racism to each other. First of all, there is Puar’s diagnosis of a “racism of the global gay left”.[13] At the same time, Puar is increasingly constructing a globally organised, goal-oriented context out of a loose network of international organisations, which is at times rather based on fear of a sexual supremacy of queer communities (queers becoming more powerful than normal people) than a critique of international politics made by NGOs. In this way, a sexual minority that receives selective support (and is selectively internationally organised) becomes part of the US imperialism that Chomsky had already asserted. Here, too, a timeless image of an orientalised Other is painted that is not anchored in history (Puar merely lists orientalisms of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries), making racism as a mechanism of historically structured inequality disconnected from its materialist foundations. Racism becomes rather a feeling of oppression (oppressed by Israeli and US queers); hence it can become transferable.[14] The focus is therefore not on the emancipatory disclosure of racism and concern for a population affected by racism, but on the use of a politically deflated, race-affirming concept of race as positive hierarchy, which has made Puar’s observations problematic from the outset.

Following this abbreviated analysis of racism and sexuality, Puar constructs the concept of homonationalism, a nationalism practiced decidedly by homosexuals, in continuation of queer theorist Lisa Duggan’s concept of homonormativity.[15] On behalf of homonormativity, judgments are made about legitimate and non-legitimate ‘proximity’ to the nation state, colonialism, imperialism and (crucially) neoliberal capitalism, which has since been elaborated far beyond queer theory. However, even critical arguments on homonationalism revolve around a return of identity politics and attributions of guilt, while performing unsuccessful attempts to escape them. For example, the philosopher Nikita Dhawan discusses homonationalism quite critically in the context of queer decolonisation debates, but adopts the assertion of a “complicity of Western queer politics with neoliberal, imperial discourses”.[16] Her notion of complicity does not leave much space for entangled social positions; it rather suggests moral wrong­doing of a sexual minority, at the moment when it is no longer exclusively a victim of state regulation but also enjoys rights and protection. The question that arises here is why participation or involvement in certain discourses is interpreted exclusively through identitarian perpetrator positions. 

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*, Active Intolerance, installation, 2021/23. Six A0 posters, each 118.2 x 168 cm; 10 fine art prints on Hahnemühle paper. Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com

Exhibition view: Ana Hoffner ex Prvulovic* & Belinda Kazeem-Kami´nski, Kunsthalle Wien, 22 October 2021 – 6 March 2022. Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com

The lack of recognition for those queers who do not fit the image of an oppressed minority—and some Israeli queers belong to this group—is met with both radical resistance and queer bashing in the academic field. And indeed, both Jasbir Puar and many other queer theorists (such as Judith Butler) are subject to antisemitic, racist and homophobic attacks that make no distinction between the need for a well-founded critique of certain theories and the discrediting of an entire field. On the basis of misinformation, distortion of facts and associative, unscientific construction, these positions are made into representatives of queer theory.[17] How should we address the simultaneous tendency to normalise apologetic, identity-political and moralising radicalisations within queer theory on the one hand, and the right-wing populist attack on the academic emancipation of gender and sexuality theories on the other? What can we actually say about sexual norms, violence and gender in a post-7 October present?

Without wishing to defend Puar, I want to suggest that it is worth looking at her arguments that clearly show that the construction of “terrorist assemblages” was also permeated by an inherent contradiction. Puar criticises the exclusive focus on transgression when it comes to definitions of queerness, whereby, as she notes, a freedom from all norms is presented as a precondition for the constitution of queer subjectivity.[18] Here, Puar certainly indicates interest in a position that is critical of normativity but decidedly not oriented towards liberation narratives through transgressive politics. This characterised queer theory of the early 1990s as well. However, I would argue that a problem arises when she argues that heteronormativity is “not tethered to heterosexuals”.[19] Here she suggests herself that the ideal of a transgressive sexual identity can be translated into an abstraction of (hetero)normativity – in other words, social normalisation can be seen as something that allows everyone to participate in it or is accessible to everyone; hence everyone falls under the same criteria of integration into the norm. The assumption of a possibility of participation in all norm-forming processes conceals its origins in a liberal democracy, which aims for this inclusion but can never fully realise it. Ultimately, such a reformulation of what can be considered normative results in a loss of specific positioning. It is only on the basis of this misguided assumption of an arbitrarily transferable sexual identity that Puar (and Dhawan) can create the trope of complicity, because only through idealised sexuality that is seemingly accessible to all for identity formation, positions within biopolitical violence no longer need to be differentiated. In this way, the original critical impetus has ultimately lapsed into a susceptibility to perpetrator/victim reversal. This is also where Puar’s exemplary turning away from queer theorists, who have written about the problematic reversal of positions in the context of sexualised violence, begins.

One such example is queer theorist Lynda Hart.[20] The case history of Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian sex worker who killed several of her rapists and was executed on the electric chair in 2002, is Hart’s central example for the re-evaluation of female aggression, or rather: the consistent refusal to excuse the perpetrators that is being stigmatised as lesbian violence. Wuornos is confronted with a typical patriarchal system of demands: she is supposed to deny her experience as a victim of sexualised violence and symbolically free her rapists from their guilt by confessing herself as a murderer, as a perpetrator. This sacrifice serves to distort the facts by pushing the very act of sexualised violence into the background and stabilises a regime whose most important characteristic is to mark the refusal of reconciliation as aggression. It is thanks to queer theorists like Hart that the transgression of the ideological perpetrator/victim reversal could be elaborated and understood in the context of sexualised violence. Hart, like Lee Edelman, formulated sexual politics in a similar way to a critique of antisemitism: perpetrator/victim reversal is contextualised as a legacy of Christian morality. However, when Puar calls for the suicide bombers to be exonerated by equating them with queer people such as Aileen Wuornos, she falls into the awkward position of demanding that the victims (of the attacks, the massacres, the rapes) deny their experience of violence. This turns the act of violence into an identity linked to violence – terrorism becomes a site of identification. 

It is worth taking a closer look at the connection drawn here between sexuality, life, death and the act of killing. In his essay ‘Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint’, Lee Edelman describes the normative field of identity formation as one in which life, in its distinction from death, has been replaced by a zone of survival, in which a future-oriented struggle for survival takes place through the “ideology of cultural survival”.[21] To this end, everything that disrupts identity formation, and for Edelman this is queerness, must be continuously, overwritten by norms.[22] For according to Edelman, queerness is never suitable to be integrated into identity formation – “To be queer is, in fact, not to be”.[23]  I would add that the struggle for survival represents therefore the acting out of an infantile desire to remain free of guilt or to continuously locate guilt in an outside of oneself. Edelman describes this struggle as a desire to be dominated by a symbolic father, to be taught a lesson (“will-to-be-taught”)[24], that closes off an open future and devotes itself to “reproductive futurism”[25], the creation and longing for educative events. 

From Edelman’s critical perspective on the ideology of cultural survival, I would argue that the suicide bomber (but above all the Hamas fighter) is the identity formation that defends reproductive futurism as a fixed, irreconcilable vision of the future by (consciously) choosing to sacrifice everything and everyone (!) to its own ideology and postulates an excusability of its own actions as the norm. For Hamas’s struggle is repeatedly ideologically anchored as the only possibility for Palestinian liberation and as the only legitimate resistance against Israel. It leaves no room for any identification other than that with Hamas and punishes even the slightest deviation with brutal violence against the civilian population. This violence can therefore only be described as a form of terrorism, because it manifests itself solely as a normative, authoritarian, futuristic practice and can therefore not have the slightest connection to the field of queer theory, which enables a simultaneous critique of homophobia and antisemitism.

Following the massacre of 7 October, it seems as if the mere invocation of the terrorist event has become a sign of a split-off and projected discourse, an invocation whose performative act would have been forbidden to us by both the opponents and some representatives of queer theory themselves. Judith Butler made this explicit by banning the use of the term ‘terrorism’ and concealing from us the implicit denial of the violence inherent in her own speech act.[26] Instead, it would have been necessary to focus on those normative requirements that sexualise political resistance for propaganda and war purposes (almost all left-wing structures are constantly called upon to include and passionately advocate ‘free Palestine’) and therefore urgently need the inclusion of sexual minorities as credible representatives of their struggle.

The non-discursive sexualisation of the suicide bombers as queer has certainly contributed to misjudging the sexualised violence of Hamas as an act of liberation. After an event like 7 October, these preconditioned sexual politics were used to seek a real reason for the violence as an inner truth among all those in whom, despite all the suspicions in the recent past, minimal trust has perhaps been achieved. Large parts of queer communities and queer academic fields are passionate supporters of ‘No pride in occupation’ (now ‘No pride in genocide’) and similar organisations, which made Israeli lesbians and gays complicit in, but rather guilty of, Israeli occupation policy even before 7 October but even more after, because they have gained a certain degree of nation-state rights and can therefore no longer be so easily identified as disadvantaged. Consequently, and this is probably the most tragic part of the massacre, the credibility of Israeli women* as victims of sexualised violence was made impossible. They are to be understood as accomplices, because the Hamas fighters are to be recognised as a marginalised, disadvantaged minority affected by racism, whose potential to be perpetrators or whose actual crime is to be forcefully denied.

However, participation in ‘No pride in occupation’ or similar boycott movements must be authenticated by individual Jewish feminists and queers, so that pressure can be exerted on all Jews to support them. Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, Sarah Schulman and many others repeatedly attribute the cause of the massacre to Israel and transform the war in Gaza into an act of aggression started by Israel, the Zionist, terrorist state. The recurring reference to Israeli occupation policy as the cause of ‘legitimate resistance’ suggests that Israelis themselves are responsible for their destruction and, above all, their rape. This reference once again repeats the most horrific part of homophobic and antisemitic violence: women* who do not conform to ideology are themselves to blame for the violence perpetrated against them. The goal to achieve is that it can be committed with impunity. Arguments starting with “But Israel …” after the rapes of 7 October did not follow a feminist form of critique that excludes the possibility of a perpetrator/victim reversal and ensures the condemnation of sexualised violence, which is why they could not convince as a ‘critique of Israel’, no matter how much they were defended. What emerged here instead is a successful intimidation of women* and queers. Some of them (from the producers of academic discourse to those new jihadists who actively seek proximity to Hamas and other terrorist groups) are, out of their own experience of sexualised violence, dependent on the promise of healing through repetition, in the hope that things will be different next time. To achieve this, they must pay the high price of being apologetic to the perpetrators, finding an excuse for rape and condemning those friends, lovers and colleagues who are not doing the same. Hopefully there will be an environment created in the future in which we can learn more about their actual stories.

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* (born 1980 in Paraćin, Yugoslavia) is an Austrian-Serbian artist, researcher and author. From 2020 to 2025 she was professor for artistic research at the University Mozarteum Salzburg where she co-developed the PhD in the Arts, a transdisciplinary doctoral program for artists. She has received several awards for her politically engaged artistic work. Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*’s work can be located in the fields of contemporary art, art history, cultural studies and critical theory. Recurring themes in her works are queerness, global capitalism, colonialism and the East, forms of flight, early psychoanalysis, and the politics of memory and war. She works with video, photography, installation and performance. Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* has been exhibiting her work both in Austria and internationally since the 2000s. Her monograph Antisemitism, Homophobia and Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Routledge, and Denialism. Antisemitismus und sexualisierte Gewalt aus feministischer Perspektive, which she co-edited with Livia Erdösi and Nora Sternfeld, is forthcoming from Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin.