https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5084-5680
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Abstract
How do lesbian and bisexual, cisgender and transgender (LBT) women talk about sex? This paper looks at constructions of sexual discourse and the production of sexual subjectivity from the perspective of LBT women in the Israeli periphery, asking how they construct their lives as sexual subjects. Applying Sara Ahmed’s ‘orientations’ concept, we argue that the periphery serves as an LGBTphobic context that impacts sexual discourses and constructs LBT sexual subjectivities. We conceptualize LBT women’s sexual subjectivity as distinct and anchored in spatiality, and frame it as oriented sexual subjectivity. This particular subjectivity reveals an intertwined movement between silence and discourse, urban and rural, oriented to the space inhabited by LBT women. Oriented sexual subjectivity is constructed particularly through an alignment of LBT women’s discourse on sex and sexual practices with the heteronormative spaces in which they live. Based on 61 interviews with LBT women in the Israeli periphery, we show how sex is discussed only in relation to violent experiences or while talking about urban experiences in Tel Aviv. This discursive framework reveals how in the periphery, like a palimpsest, sex is cartographically hidden in deep layers of meaning rather than discussed in the open, and how LBT sexual subjectivity is oriented.
Acknowledgments
Thanks goes to Rachel Levi-Herz and to Brandon William Epstein for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to the issue editors, Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Valerie De Craene for their advice and guidance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The term LBT was not used by the participants, rather, it is a term we use to refer to lesbians, bisexual and transgender women.
2 We deploy the term sex to refer to sexual activity. Sexuality is deployed as a loose term that widely refers to subjectivity and to personal identification and interest.
3 In using the term ‘periphery’ we do not accept its epistemology. Rather, we use it as a descriptive term and acknowledge its queer potential (Hartal Citation2015). Such a perspective views the periphery not as a straight space, but rather as one whose ontological and epistemological remoteness can produce a nuanced power relation with hetero- and homonormativity, interlacing discourses on sex and imageries of rural and urban spaces.
4 The development towns are 28 state-planned small towns directly associated with ‘the periphery’ and with deprivation. Most of their original residents have been settled there by the government upon emigrating from Islamic countries, the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia.
5 Here, ‘vanilla’ means plain or conventional.
6 ‘Sub’ refers to the person who takes the submissive role in a BDSM relationship.
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Notes on contributors
Gilly Hartal
Gilly Hartal is a senior lecturer at the Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University. Her research and teaching interests include geographies of sexualities and gender, queer theory, qualitative methodologies and specifically the production of spatial belonging through discourses of inclusion and exclusion along national, ethnic, gendered, class and sexual trajectories. Her current research focuses on political subjectivities of lesbian, bisexual and transgender women outside urban centres in Israel.
Sari Geiger
Sari Geiger is a graduate student in the Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University. Her thesis concerns teenage girl’s feminist subjectivity through a geographical theoretical perspective. Her research interests focus on feminist discourses and subjectivities in times of transition throughout women’s lives. Sari received a scholarship for academic excellence from the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University (2020).