5 - ‘The Army, It Makes Me Horny’: Untangling the Sexual Logic of Israel’s Settler Colonial Regime

Summary

Chapters V explores the sexual politics of Israel’s colonial regime, serving to undo the all-too-common misconception that sexual violence is “extremely limited” in this context. Emphasising the obfuscation of dynamics of race and coloniality, I start with exploration of hegemonic analyses of conflict-related sexual violence, and the related depiction of Israeli militarism as devoid of sexual violence. I then analyse the eroticisation of the Israeli military and colonial ‘conquest’, and the fetishization of the bodies that undertake it – entangling colonial domination with notions and physiological sensations of erotic pleasure. Finally, I discuss the policing of militarised hierarchies through the logic of sexual violence, trickling from those ‘on top’ to inferior soldiers – by age, gender, and class – to the occupied Palestinian body. I thus argue that sexualised violence pervades the entire structure of Israeli settler colonialism, fusing military activity and colonisation with hetero-masculinised notions of domination, virility, pleasure, and control.