Abstract

This thesis considers the work of Toronto-based director and former Queers Against Israeli Apartheid activist John Greyson as a case study for thinking through the methods of criticism, rhetorical strategies, and networks of solidarity that inform the contemporary queer Palestine movement. More specifically, it examines Greyson’s 2022 film Photo Booth, an agitprop documentary produced for the purpose of promoting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) initiatives against Israel as an instance of anti-homonationalist criticism. Considering Photo Booth alongside the work of theorists like Jasbir Puar and C. Heike Schotten, I argue for an appraisal of Photo Booth as a heuristic model for anti-imperialist queer solidarity in the present homonationalist moment. I then consider Photo Booth’s often uneasy appropriation of the representational strategies of the earlier New Queer Cinema movement to suggest that the film explores the capacity of queer representational practices to respond to transnational crises under conditions of homonationalist co-optation. More specifically, I argue that what New Queer strategies of parody, pastiche, and irony might be able to offer the queer Palestine movement is a formal language of criticism that is attuned to the discursive construction of popular narratives of the Israeli occupation. Finally, I conclude with some preliminary reflections on the queer Palestine movement, suggesting that it underscores broader concerns about the ambivalent position of queer artistic production, activism, and theory in what Jasbir Puar has called “queer times.”