Queer urban trauma and its spatial politics: A lesson from social movements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

Abstract

Chinese

Growing attention has been devoted to the political geography of urban social movements but trauma, its urban context and spatial politics, have been significantly neglected. This paper aims to develop the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’ and its aftermath in the sense of urban and spatial activism, through an analysis of two traumatic events for the LGBT community in Israel. It explains how traumatic events taking place within urban contexts affect the spatial politics of LGBT and queer urban activism. Based on geographies of sexualities and queer theory, this paper aims to fill this gap by analysing traumatic events in two Israeli cities: the 2009 shooting of two young queers in a youth club in Tel Aviv, and the 2015 stabbing of a young girl during the Jerusalem Pride Parade. Tel Aviv is considered the liberal centre of Israel and a local ‘gay heaven’, as well as a destination for global gay tourism. Jerusalem on the other hand is usually described with a sense of alienation among LGBT and queer individuals and movements, where every political, spatial, cultural and financial achievement is a struggle. We argue that the politics of trauma are constructed differently in these two urban settings, producing important nuances of urban activism and politics. Through this empirical discussion, we develop the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’, revealing divergent forms of spatial visibility, presence and activity of the queer movements within urban spaces.

Keywords

LGBT activism memorialisation queer urban trauma Tel Aviv and Jerusalem urban social movements

Introduction

This paper develops the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’ and discusses it in relation to recent local movements in two different urban settings in Israel: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Trauma, as we use the term in this paper, is a psychological effect of violence (Pain, 2019). Rachel Pain (2019) defines urban trauma as a chronic collective spatial mode that operates simultaneously on different scales. Our discussion starts from Pain’s definition but extends by providing an alternative framing of trauma and collectives. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which traumatic events that take place within urban contexts affect the spatial politics of LGBT and queer urban movements and activism.¹ Homophobia, driving massive violence and events in which LGBTs have been killed, occurs in urban spaces and generates reaction and public mobilisation by social movements. This kind of perspective on trauma – which combines a political analysis with that of urban social movement theory – to the best of our knowledge has yet to be undertaken. Our discussion of queer urban social movements is situated in the basic understanding that (collective) queer urban trauma has geographies and that these are informed by both queer and political-cultural discourses.

In this paper, we explain how traumatic events involving LGBT individuals that took place in the city influence the spatial politics of LGBT and queer urban activism. We argue that the politics of trauma are constructed differently in distinct urban settings, producing nuances of urban activism and spatial politics. Through the empirical discussion of the aftermath of two traumatic events, we theoretically develop the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’, revealing the divergent forms of spatial visibility, presence and activity of queer movements within urban spaces. Specifically, our discussion is concerned with the spatiality of the traumatic event, its temporality and modes of inclusion of non-LGBT supporters. In other words, by using the term ‘queer urban trauma’ we seek to show how particular urban and socio-cultural contexts lead to different constructions of local social movements and their activisms.

Initially, the discussion of trauma within queer theory (see Cvetkovich, 1995) was focused on the chronic socio-cultural experience of trauma from a personal and psychological perspective, mainly related to the idea that queer trauma has to do with loss and mourning (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003). It is based on the understanding that ‘in the lives of LGB [sic] people, there are repeated, recurrent experiences of trauma and loss that may play a part in some of the social pathologies present in our communities’ (Brown, 2003: 57–58). Brown argues that trauma is embedded in the lived experience and identities of many non-heteronormative people due to homophobia, physical and sexual harassment and violence, and lack of safe spaces. Subsequent discussions of trauma within queer theory were based on the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s (Crimp, 2003, 2004; Cvetkovich, 2003a, 2003b) and were focused on a more collective trauma and its political outcome – the ACT UP movement (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) – even though most of the discussion was still based on the personal stories of survivors and activists.

Our discussion of trauma, however, is not of a personal or psychological nature. Rather, we discuss collective trauma as a mechanism of queer urban movement mobilisation, culture and practices. Thus, we argue that unlike queer (personal) trauma, queer urban trauma and its politics are a particular kind of collective politics that is not limited to the personal or therapeutic realm and motivates social activism. Collective political activism derived by trauma is understood here through the distance from the trauma’s location, the temporalities of commemoration and the relationship between LGBT and heterosexual supporters in commemoration. Emotions such as fear or rage also play a significant role. As noted by Johnston, ‘not a great deal has been written about the emotional spaces and queer activism’ (2017: 3). Traumatic events and their aftermath, which have been neglected in queer geographical scholarship, serve here as the basis for the conceptualisation of ‘queer urban trauma’.

The importance of discussing Israeli queer urban movements through the lenses of traumatic events lies in the fact that most of the existing writings on queer geographies, political and spatial activism, and social movements in particular, is theoretically and empirically grounded in English-speaking countries. The Israeli experience of trauma differs from Western or Asian experiences in several important respects. The first event we will discuss is the Tel Aviv BarNoar youth club shooting in August 2009, in which Nir Katz, a 26-year-old youth instructor, and Liz Trobishi, a 16-year-old member of an LGBT youth group, were both murdered and 14 others were injured. The second traumatic event is the stabbing of 16-year-old Shira Banki in August 2015 during the Jerusalem Pride Parade. Much like other violent events towards LGBT and queer individuals worldwide, such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shephard in Colorado or the mass shooting in Orlando in 2016, these Israeli events were extensively covered by the local media and led to public expressions of solidarity, both within and outside the LGBT community. As we will suggest later, such solidarity and mobilisation of non-LGBT people in post-traumatic activism is significant for the consolidation of queer urban movements.

A discussion on queer urban movements is relevant worldwide. Examples highlighting the importance of this research are the opposition to same-sex marriage in Australia; anti-gay and anti-trans violence in the USA under the Trump administration; protests against gay pride events in Russia and Poland; or hate crimes such as the 2016 massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando. The positive developments and openness and the negative backlash towards LGBT urban communities also highlight our contribution to the theoretical and empirical understanding of the concept of queer urban trauma and the study of LGBT and queer politics and social movements more generally.

In what follows we foreground some major discussions of trauma within geography and specifically queer geography, turning particularly to the literature on urban social movements. The analysis is based on the authors’ ethnographic work in the two research locations as will be elaborated on in the section depicting our positionalities and methodology. Finally, we discuss the geography of queer urban trauma as it is portrayed through the aftermath of the traumatic events and the social movements that were negotiated and constructed in relation to the trauma through three themes: the location of the trauma, the temporality of memorialisation and the relationship between the LGBT community and general society.

From trauma to political movement

Thinking about matters in terms of wounds also prompts ideas about the aftermath of wounds, the treating of the scars that can be left as the trace of a wound, as a further provocation for critical reflection on the representation or memorialisation of the ‘pain’ inherent in wounds. (Philo, 2005: 442)

In his discussion of vulnerability, Philo considers scars to be a metaphor for the memory of a traumatic event and the pain it entails. The aftermath of trauma, as discussed below, has many trajectories; however, we focus on one aspect: the way that urban social movements become carriers of memory and pain, a mode of spatial memory politics and construction that represents the impact of queer urban trauma. In that sense, our investigation of social movements as carriers of queer trauma differs from some former geographical writings that focused on the politics of adjacent concepts such as memory (McKinnon et al., 2016; Massey, 1995; Pile, 2002; Sturken, 1997); violence (Pain, 2014a, 2014b, 2019; Pain and Staeheli, 2014); terrorism and disasters (McKinnon et al., 2017); or queer safe(r) spaces (Doan, 2007; Hartal, 2017; Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2018). However, these concepts are related to the development of an understanding of queer urban trauma and thus are helpful in developing our theoretical framework.

Trauma is a disturbing personal experience, a physical or mental injury. Here, it is referred to not only as a signifier of a physical or a mental injury but also mainly with regard to its collective political-cultural aspects. Furthermore, by discussing the aftermath of public–private events that have long-term social and political impacts, we aim to illustrate the deep links between the personal experience of being queer, the everyday trauma it entails and the consequences of multi-scale traumatic events in public urban spaces for LGBTs. Our attention is focused on the ways in which trauma is mobilised within urban space to construct social movements and their actions in managing and processing traumatic events both personally and collectively. We are not arguing that trauma is relevant for LGBTs only, but that homophobic and violent acts towards LGBTs are influential on the spatio-political construction of queer urban movements in a way that contributes to the understanding and theorising of social movements and particularly to queer politics.

The theoretical perspective will be articulated through the prism of the geography of trauma as well as that of queer trauma. Each prism reveals a distinct, sometimes contradictory, approach to trauma. By this, we aim to articulate the social, geographical and subjective dynamics in which the geography of queer urban trauma is produced by social movements. Our discussion of both prisms is based on the socio-cultural construction of trauma suggested by Jeffrey C Alexander (2012) who explains how collective agency develops or fails to develop in response to the experience of social suffering and thus offers a social theory of collective trauma. Alexander claims that traumas can become collective if they are conceived of as wounds to social identity – a matter of intense political-cultural work: ‘it depends upon speeches, rituals, marches, meetings, plays, movies and storytelling of all kinds … collective traumas are reflections of neither individual suffering nor actual events, but symbolic renderings that reconstruct and imagine them’ (2012: 4). Even more important in Alexander’s (2012) argument is the way that new meaningful causal relationships are developed between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions and actions and the ways in which it illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It also illustrates how members of collectives define their solidary relationships in ways that allow them to share the suffering of others.

The geography of trauma

Examining the subtleties of trauma caused by domestic violence, Pain (2014a, 2014b) argues that the intimate violence that is experienced in private spaces is reflected in the international arena. However, she argues that while collective grief takes diverse forms to give terrorist violence socio-cultural meaning, domestic violence has no public visibility and is treated with collective silence (Pain, 2014a). Pain claims, however, that just like resistance to the socially constructed fears related to crime in public space (Koskela, 1997; Koskela and Pain, 2000), domestic violence can be treated with resistance, framed as a mode of activism that does not draw people to street protests but rather encourages victims to leave aggressive relationships. Here, we build on these assertions on the direct link between private and public to discuss urban social movements and their activism in public space as a by-product of traumatic events that consist of a private mode of queer trauma and may induce new or different forms of trauma or politics.

Two significant concepts related to a geographical discussion of trauma are disaster and memory. McKinnon et al. (2016, 2017) discuss the impact of destruction of material possessions in major disasters, placing memories and the (queer) identities connected to these memories when they are at risk. Thus, they claim, materiality makes sites of memory vulnerable to disaster impacts, enhancing the feeling of marginality for minority groups. For our present purposes, what is important is their claim that ‘memories of disasters and other traumatic events can be enacted in service of the collective memories of communities’ (McKinnon et al., 2016: 1126). Through the remembering of a traumatic event, a collective memory that is not entirely traumatic may be created and a community forged. Thus, memory-making strategies help make marginalised memories visible (David, 2008) and ensure that marginalised groups actively continue to produce new meanings of space and collective memory in the face of disaster.

The desire to construct memory and to be remembered was a central issue in HIV/AIDS activism (Sturken, 1997). The AIDS crisis has not been as central to geographical scholarship as other death events such as wars, disasters or the Holocaust. It nevertheless challenged strategies for remembering the dead, compelling the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration (Hawkins, 1993; Schulman, 2012a). Discussing HIV/AIDS activism, Cvetkovich (2003a, 2003b) suggests that mourning played an essential role for queer urban social movement groups such as ACT-UP. HIV/AIDS activism was central to only a few geographic studies (e.g. Brown, 1997, 2008). Such studies are important to the radical-democratic understanding of sexual citizenship in urban contexts. On the one hand, there is a desire to forget traumatic events and on the other, there is a need to construct a narrative that highlights resilience and makes room for vulnerability (McKinnon et al., 2017).

The political geography of forgetting is perceived as the flipside of social processes in which memory is constructed and as a passive and unnoticed process. Thus, processes of forgetting are also driven by different actors and involve multiple opposing interests (Lee and Yeoh, 2006). These politics of remembering and forgetting empower marginalised groups and endow them with a collective identity and sense of belonging (Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004). In the Israeli case it has been a while since geographers started to study the materiality of commemoration. Azaryahu (1996) studied the ways in which the traumatic event of the assassination of Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin in 1995 affected the urban space of Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. Luz (2008, 2015) studied the role sacred sites play in the formulation of minority identity and the role of collective memory in resistance of minority groups.

Within geographies of sexualities, a different discussion considers the construction of safe(r) spaces (Roestone Collective, 2014) and the reasoning for creating queer safe(r) spaces through LGBT organisation work (Hartal, 2017; Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2018). Since LGBT identity is often linked to past trauma or to the construction of the closet (Brown, 2000), the constitution of queer safe(r) spaces plays a major role in constructing LGBT space (Hanhardt, 2013). The term reflects both the need for shelter and for a cultural place, where LGBT subjects can be their authentic selves, express themselves and feel at home. Hartal (2017) claims that queer safe(r) spaces are based on an affective mode anchored in liberal logics that reflect specific ways in which queer identities are produced. The construction of safe(r) spaces, as a part of a liberal framing, is informed by individualistic notions of LGBT subjects. This frame complicates endeavours to create a notion of community or counter-publics (Warner, 2002). Indeed, LGBT individuals lack a shared safe public space in which together they can share their trauma, cope with its manifestations and turn them into political spaces for activism and social movements (Brown, 2007; Browne and Bakshi, 2013; Misgav, 2015, 2016b; Misgav and Hartal, 2019b).

Trauma, sexuality and urban social movements

The new social movements that arose around the turn of the 1970s ‘crystallised around issues of regaining autonomy and control over identities and cultures’ (Nicholls, 2007: 610). Early scholars, such as urban sociologist Castells (1983), studied gay and lesbian urban social movements in the urban context of San Francisco. Geographical studies (e.g. Brown, 2008; Brown, 2015; Nash, 2015) also tended to focus on movements’ origins, mainly in an Anglo-American context, their urban location and the ways in which they have become global phenomena. These movements travel, geographically and symbolically, to places such as eastern Europe (Binnie and Klesse, 2010, 2013) or the Middle East (Misgav and Hartal, 2019a). They also pay attention to the various political strategies and values the movements adopt and to state–community relationships. Our discussion of queer urban movements in Israel focuses on the politics of urban trauma and highlights the category of sexuality as pivotal to the politics of urban movements as well as the role that social movements play in consolidating modes of activism while processing queer urban trauma. It is also pertinent for the local socio-historical discussion on collective traumas in Israel.

Even in liberal countries in the West LGBT people are at high risk of hate, as shown, for example, in Petra Doan’s (2007) important work on transgendered people in American cities. However, the risk of trauma is not restricted to precarious LGBT minority groups but is a shared experience, or what Judith Butler (2004) calls ‘precarious life’. In fact, trauma and loss are so common in LGBT lives that they appear in the autobiographical narratives of almost all queer people (Brown, 2003). This point was articulated in Preser’s (2017) study of queer Jewish-Israeli migrants in Berlin, Germany. Preser’s ethnography shows how the interplay of sexism, racism, classism, Islamophobia and homophobia fragments migrants’ identities. While the migration stories celebrate and brand the city as a cosmopolitan and queer haven, they also reveal an ambivalent dimension, drawing ambiguous historical baggage and hostility to strangers.

The baggage of queer trauma is manifested in the prevalence of affects such as gay shame (Halperin and Traub, 2009; Munt, 2007; Sedgwick, 1993). Shame is considered a foundation of the LGBT self, internally manifesting the heteronormative power structure. Shame not only reveals the social mechanisms of normalisation and power but also serves as a tool for mobilisation and a political resource for forging a community (Warner, 2002). Heather Love (2007) discusses the price of homophobia and its manifestation in LGBT subjectivities, claiming that LGBT individuals are ‘feeling backwards’. For Love (2007) shame is inherent in homosexuality, that is, shame is essential to LGBT identities, not something from which one can turn away. Like trauma, affects such as shame and failure are embedded within queer autobiographies and life stories (Johnston, 2019; Waitt and Stapel, 2011), enmeshed with and often generating trauma.

Such autobiographies were studied by queer theorists who wrote about the trauma of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the activism that followed, mainly ACT UP (Crimp, 2003, 2004; Cvetkovich, 2003a, 2003b). ACT UP started out in New York in 1987 in order to change American policy towards the AIDS epidemic, and later spread to North America and Europe as well as Israel (Ziv, 2010). Crimp (2003, 2004) used Freud’s definition of melancholia in order to discuss the ways in which queer radical politics emerged from the trauma of loss and mourning and turned into AIDS activism. This politics, argued Crimp, was subsequently displaced by traditional, liberal rights issues such as gay marriage and military service.

Cvetkovich (2003a, 2003b) focused on the stories and autobiographies of lesbian activists. She also argued that for Americans, AIDS achieved the status of ‘national trauma’, alongside the Holocaust, Vietnam War and other national- and world-defining events. Unlike scholars who wrote about large-scale traumas such as the Holocaust (e.g. LaCapra, 1994), Cvetkovich rejected the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholy that leads to the differentiation between ‘working through’ the successful resolution of trauma and ‘acting out’ the repetition of trauma that does not lead to transformation. Following this, she argued that ACT UP suggested that activism’s modes of acting out were a crucial resource for responding to trauma (Cvetkovich, 2003a, 2003b).

Some queer scholarship on trauma links the individual and his/her autobiography to the national level. Jasbir Puar (2007) discusses this back-and-forth movement of queer politics from the body and the personal to the urban and the national. This multi-scalar politics will also be useful for our discussion of queer urban traumas in Israel, as it reveals different practices and nuances of symbolic and spatial politics.

Researchers’ positionality in queer study: A short note on methodology

Grounded in the authors’ ongoing involvement in local LGBT activism in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, this paper is based on our previous ethnographic work (Hartal, 2016, 2017; Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2018; Misgav, 2016b, 2016c; Misgav and Hartal, 2019a). The first author conducted ethnographic work at the Jerusalem Open House (JOH) from 2009 to 2012, including five months of participant observations and ten interviews with leading activists. The second author studied the Tel Aviv Gay Centre from 2009 to 2013 in order to understand how LGBT and queer spatial activism was constructed from within the municipal establishment. The research included 18 in-depth interviews with activists and employees and participant observations on some of the groups active in the centre, and major events outside it.

The study used the reflexive ethnographic methodology, which according to Megoran (2006) has a potential to open new research directions and understandings of the geopolitics of spaces. This research fits into the long tradition of feminist research and ethnography in that it perceives any social research as political in the sense of its determination to expose power relations (Behar, 1995). Through this, our research does not separate academic work from activist work for social change (Johnston, 2017; Misgav, 2015). Moreover, this kind of ethnography has the potential to open up new ways of understanding spatial and queer politics in general, and spatial politics of trauma in particular.

The choice of venues for our ethnographic studies stemmed from personal involvement as insider activists and outsider researchers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In line with previous claims for destabilising the binary between research and activism (Johnston, 2017; Misgav, 2016a), this research works to undermine this dichotomy in two ways. First, both authors used their position as ethnographers to undo the activist–researcher binary while they were in the data collection stages. Second, both remained deeply involved afterwards. This personal-political positionality led to further knowledge and data that were not collected for the purpose of research. As the binary became decoupled, it became clear that we were able to continue learning and collecting data for further understanding LGBT urban activism in Israel. Accordingly, this paper is formally based on our data gathered in ethnographic studies but is also profoundly informed by 10 years of ongoing involvement in LGBT research and activism. In particular, both authors were involved in the aftermath of the traumatic events analysed below, primarily as activists but always also as ethnographers.

Two queer traumas

Both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have vibrant LGBT communities that have been continuously fighting for their rights, gaining legal achievements and enjoying growing municipal acknowledgement. In Tel Aviv, the community has also received a dedicated municipal space – the Gay Centre – and the municipality’s support in the promotion of gay tourism to Tel Aviv and the annual Pride Parade. Unlike Tel Aviv, Jerusalem portrays years-long overt antagonism towards an LGBT presence in public space (Adelman, 2014). Jerusalem is a unique space (Yiftachel, 2016) and, specifically for the Israeli queer community, Jerusalem plays an historical role in the consolidation of the lesbian and transgender community (Rachamimov, 2019).

The two cities share a recent history of violence towards LGBT individuals. In August 2009, a shooting incident at the BarNoar in Tel Aviv – a gay youth centre – killed two people and injured 14. This crime, which has yet to be solved, traumatised the local LGBT community and transformed its discourse. Gross (2015) argued that it enabled politicians from across the spectrum to show their support for the community and created opportunities to speak for gay rights, allowing for ‘the cementing of an unwritten deal that had long been in the works, between Israeli-established homonormative politics and the new Israeli homonationalism. Homonationalism refers to a combination of national inclusion (and exclusion) processes and neoliberal assimilation (homonormativity) processes (Puar, 2007; see also Hartal, 2019). In Israel, homonationalism is considered an organising principle of LGBT politics, symbolising LGBT belonging to the nation and their inclusion in the (imagined) collective. However, in different spaces homonational politics take a distinct form and it cannot be treated as a homogeneous political mode of co-optation into the nation (Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2018).

Organised by the JOH, the annual Jerusalem Pride Parades reveal the complexity of the city’s public political space and its implications for LGBT presence (see Figure 3). Since its inception in 2002, the parade has been seen by many as an affront to the city’s holiness. In 2005, the ultra-Orthodox public mounted a protest against the parade that ended with the stabbing of three marchers by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man. The opposition was not, however, limited to the religious community. In 2006, facing threats, protests and legal actions against the parade, JOH activists held a public rally in a stadium instead of a march. In 2007, when some rabbis decided to oppose the mass demonstrations against the parade, the protests waned and the march took place as planned. In 2008, negotiations between JOH activists and representatives of the ultra-Orthodox community led to a relatively peaceful parade. The following years witnessed smaller-scale demonstrations by the ultra-Orthodox community, until the 2015 stabbing. That summer, 16-year-old Shira Banki was stabbed to death and five other marchers were wounded. It later became known that the stabber, Yishai Schlissel, had just been released from prison, having previously been convicted of the 2005 stabbing incident.

On the national level, changes in Israel’s sexual politics served as the background for the rise of the gay scene and rights on the one hand and violence towards LGBT people on the other. Until the late 1980s, Israel was a conservative place for LGBTs and in many ways excluded them from the public sphere. The turning point was the 1988 amendment of the penal code prohibiting homosexual intercourse, which heralded the Israeli gay legal revolution (Harel, 1999). At this point LGBT subjectivities started to be recognised not only legally but also in the media, in public and even in the Israeli military (Kama, 2011).²

An in-depth analysis of the wider context of memorialisation of trauma in Israel is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is important to say that Israel was founded in 1948 in the shadow of the collective trauma of the holocaust for Jewish citizens and the trauma of the Nakba³ for Palestinian citizens. The Holocaust and the Nakba are ‘foundational pasts’ or ‘chosen traumas’ (Bashir and Goldberg, 2019). Both traumas constitute national identities in which catastrophe and trauma play a focal role and in which the national narrative revolves largely around motifs of victimhood and loss. Moreover, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a reality that produced ‘national trauma’ and vulnerability (Friedman-Peleg and Bilu, 2011; Plotkin-Amrami and Brunner, 2015; Zertal, 2010). Some recent scholars shed light on the connections between these two collective traumas and the ways in which they have become influential on Israeli society (Bashir and Goldberg, 2019; Confino, 2019; Even-Tzur, 2016; Fischer, 2019). Our discussion of queer traumas in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is embedded within the larger framework of the national traumas that characterised Israel.

As a result of the two traumatic events, relationships between state authorities, municipalities, community activism and queer movements in the two cities changed dramatically but in different ways. Even though LGBT-phobia and violence are intrinsic to nationalist, masculinist and militarist Israeli society (Sasson-Levy, 2002), the causes of these atrocities, as well as their aftermath, reveal something about the politics of queer urban trauma beyond the general homonational frame.

Commemoration of trauma

The Tel Aviv incident did not take place during a pride parade but its impact led to a public rally in which the municipality, as well as national politicians, expressed support for the LGBT community (Reuters, 2009). Queer activists assembled spontaneously near the scene and organised a memorial event that lasted several days. Soon after the shooting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Gay Centre for the first time, to offer his condolences (Cohen, 2009). Throughout the following week, the Centre was packed with LGBT community members, some seeking help, others helping survivors cope with the trauma.⁴ A week after the shooting a mass memorial rally took place in Rabin Square, which is considered the ‘national’ square (Hatuka, 2010). President Shimon Peres and several parliament members and ministers, including the Minister of Education, from the ruling Likud party, spoke at that rally, demonstrating what Gross (2015) described as the deal between the (right-wing) government and the (homonormative sections of the) LGBT community to promote Israeli homonationalism.

An annual memorial has been taking place ever since, usually at or near the Gay Centre (Joffre, 2019). In 2013, in memory of Nir Katz and Liz Trobishi, a memory garden of cacti and succulent plants was created. Since 2010, the Jerusalem Pride Parade has occurred at the beginning of August, as part of the BarNoar shooting memorials. That year, the parade route was changed and ended across from the Parliament building, as part of a broader politicisation process experienced by the Israeli LGBT community.

In Jerusalem, the stabbings in 2005 and 2015 were framed as a direct result of the understanding of Jerusalem’s urban space as holy. The stabber was an ultra-Orthodox man and, as we have seen since its inception in 2002, the parade encounters the fierce opposition of Jewish and other religious communities in the city (Hartal, 2016). After the 2005 stabbings, there was no public event designed to cope with the trauma. This might have been because no one died but it might also have been the outcome of the difference in politicisation that we described. In 2015, however, just a few hours after Shira Banki was pronounced dead, three commemoration events took place at Tsiyon Square in Jerusalem, at the Gay Centre in Tel Aviv and in Beersheba (Figure 1). That night in Jerusalem, hundreds of LGBT community members and youth gathered holding candles, condolences by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin were screened and a well-known singer was invited by Banki’s family to perform. In 2016, the Jerusalem Pride Parade theme was dedicated to Banki’s memory (Figure 2) (Zonszein, 2016). This was the first major memorialisation event in Jerusalem following the stabbings. The parade was the city’s largest ever, with approximately 25,000 participants and, for the first time, it attracted positive public support. Netanyahu issued a statement of support but Mayor Nir Barkat kept silent (Pileggi and Wootliff, 2016).

Analysis of these events in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv reveals three major components of the aftermath of queer urban trauma: (1) distance from the place where the trauma occurred; (2) the temporality of the memorialisation; and (3) the relationship between the LGBT community and the wider society.

The spatialities of queer urban trauma

The socio-political geography of commemorating these two traumatic events reveals that the instant activism and memorials were not restricted to where the events took place. Rallies were not necessarily held in the exact place or the same city where the traumatic event happened (Figure 3). The major immediate reactions to both the BarNoar shooting and the parade stabbings were at the Gay Centre in Tel Aviv – the centre for the entire Israeli LGBT community (Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2016; Misgav, 2015, 2016b; Misgav and Hartal, 2019a), reflecting on the national role of the Tel Aviv Municipality, which considers itself the leader of institutionalised support for LGBTs in the country (Figure 3).

The spatial politics of post-traumatic events are based on a sense of place, belonging and emotional geographies. That is, memorials and commemoration processes occur in places where the social movements and the activists feel they belong but also where resources and support are available. The differences between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv stem from the distinct socio-cultural and political contexts of the two cities, as well as from the difference in municipal support (for a comprehensive comparison of the two cities in that regard, see Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2018; Misgav and Hartal, 2019b).

A third reason for this difference is the structure and objectives of local LGBT organisations. The JOH considers itself primarily as a local organisation that serves all LGBTs in Jerusalem (be they secular or religious Jews, and Palestinians; see Misgav, 2016a). It has limited resources, mostly from donations to specific projects. Tel Aviv LGBT organisations, on the other hand, position themselves as serving all LGBTs in Israel, opening branches or supporting local activities and groups throughout the country. They rely mostly on governmental and municipal resources, and the Gay Centre serves as their headquarters, the beating heart of national LGBT activities. In some ways, these urban and socio-political differences are the equivalent of what some geographers define as the differences between the ‘global’ city of Tel Aviv and the ‘holy’ and ‘local’ Jerusalem in terms of political (in)dependence and state–community relations (Alfasi and Fenster, 2005).

The temporalities of queer urban trauma

The temporalities of urban social movements dealing with queer trauma reveal two distinct patterns. The first is immediate, small scale, queerer, radical and fuelled by rage. Following a traumatic event, people gathered, usually holding candles, searching for a place and a community to share the heightened shock and uncertainty triggered by the event. This initial gathering was quite radical, channelling a sense of emergency into local activism. Following Sara Ahmed’s (2004) argument that emotions such as fear, anger and rage matter for politics, and that they show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds, Yael Mishali (2013) looks at the practices of queer protests and activism in Israel and discusses the importance of anger as a political tool. Mishali pays attention to the danger of activism driven out of rage and anger. She notes that adopting anger while excluding other emotions rejected as irrelevant is liable to reproduce divisions between activists, which derive from the repressive ideology they oppose. Mishali calls for reconsideration of the question ‘When does rage spur us to action and when does it blind us to the new repression that is created or stifled in the service of anger?’ (2013: 294).

The initial gathering in each case is not at the exact place where the trauma occurred but nearby (see Figure 3). This proximity attests to activists’ need to hold on to the moment and emblematically ‘stop the passage of time’ and the movement between places – that is, to symbolically remain with the trauma. After the stabbings in Jerusalem, however, such gatherings took place in other cities too, mainly in Tel Aviv’s Gay Centre but also in Haifa and Beersheba, revealing the shared sense of shock and urgency. Conversely, the traumatic events in Tel Aviv did not lead to immediate memorialisation on this scale in other cities.

The subsequent pattern of commemoration is planned and thus based on a process of institutionalisation of the approach of social movements to queer trauma. Occurring sometime after the event, a week and even a year, a structured and orchestrated response was organised, giving the stage to politicians, artists, and community and municipal leaders. This kind of memorialisation was more mainstream, including much larger crowds, and was representative of the different facets of the LGBT community and Israeli society as a whole. This mainstreaming of course limited the rally’s radical potential to serve as a motivation for further LGBT mobilisation or to transform into a political demonstration against state agencies such as the police – even though the police had released the perpetrator from prison enabling him to attack again and failed miserably in its investigation of the BarNoar incident.

This orchestrated mass event pattern is in line with general characteristics of queer urban social movements (Brown, 1997; Brown, 2015; Misgav and Hartal, 2019b; Stein, 2012). Much of the activity is organised and based on a long-term perspective and it takes into account broader considerations such as public opinion and media coverage, working with the municipality and internal LGBT politics.

With slight differences, both patterns are manifested in the two locations. Moreover, both events led to the organisation of a rally in Tel Aviv. However, looking at organised events in the city where the trauma occurred that are aimed at locals, another temporal aspect is apparent: the interval between the initial and organised event in each city. In Tel Aviv, a week passed between the shooting and the grassroots event nearby, and the mass rally in Rabin Square. Yet, following the Jerusalem stabbings, a rally was also organised in Tel Aviv by the municipality and Gay Centre but a year passed before the JOH organised the main commemoration event at the 2016 Pride Parade. The gap reflects the difference in the degree of institutionalisation – Tel Aviv LGBT urban social movements are more institutionalised than the JOH and receive more funding and support from the local establishment, enabling activists to organise in a short time and transform emotions of rage and anger into political actions, in both patterns.

Between the LGBT community and wider society

In both cities, the large-scale public political events organised after the trauma drew many LGBT activists, but also heterosexual political activists and people who usually do not participate in activism. The large organised rally in Tel Aviv and the 2016 Jerusalem Pride Parade drew many who had never been involved in LGBT action or activism in general to protest the hate crimes and police failures. This expressed the public consensus that such actions were not only illegal but also immoral and publicly illegitimate.

A big difference is still apparent between the general public participation in memorialisation and activism in the two cities. In Tel Aviv, the traumatic event took place at a private youth gathering, organised in an LGBT organisational space. The trauma led to nationwide acknowledgement that LGBTs were not safe and that even private spaces needed protection from violence. In reaction, the public joined the mass rally in Rabin Square and supported the LGBT social movements in their call to the authorities to change attitudes towards LGBT rights and promote social tolerance.

In Jerusalem, the trauma happened on the street at a public event that had triggered wide opposition from conservative populations, mostly the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community. This violence did not attract as much support from the heterosexual public for several reasons. First, as mentioned, the JOH did not organise a local mass rally that might have drawn heterosexual support. Second, the fact that the Jerusalem parade marched in the city streets under such opposition seemed to many people in Israel (religious and secular) as an unnecessary provocation, leading to the belief that the LGBT organisation had brought the violence on itself. Its specific location in Jerusalem made it a contested place to hold a pride parade and thus some people who generally supported LGBT rights were reluctant to show solidarity and did not join the memorialisation process. Moreover, the major Jerusalem event was only held a year later, during the next pride parade. This parade was the biggest in the city’s history but this was thanks mainly to marchers from other cities. For locals, it might have been too late, too dangerous or too blunt to march in the year after the murder. Third, the Jerusalem Municipality did not support the LGBT community wholeheartedly as did the Tel Aviv Municipality.

Another difference has to do with the participation of political figures and the identification of the memorialisation site with the nation. In Tel Aviv, the large and inclusive event was held shortly after the murder in the most ‘national’ place: Rabin Square. In Jerusalem, it took a year to bring the non-LGBT public to a big event, which was not supported by the municipality. Both events were seen by politicians as PR opportunities. In Tel Aviv, it was the first time that right-wing politicians spoke at an LGBT event or publicly supported it. It was also the first time that the president, prime minister and relevant ministers, such as the Minister of Education, offered condolences and support to LGBTs and, subsequently, that support became normative and even expected in the Israeli homonational atmosphere. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, during the gathering directly after the stabbings, the prime minister and president did not personally appear in the JOH or at a public event, as in Tel Aviv. Instead, they appeared on a video screen. Hence, while political support was expressed, politicians were hesitant to appear in the Jerusalem public commemoration events.

Conclusion

As already noted by queer geographers, place matters to LGBT politics, queer movements and activism (Brown, 2008; Johnston, 2017; Johnston and Longhurst, 2010). Emotions and emotional spaces are also valuable (Ahmed, 2004; Brown and Pickerill, 2009; Johnston, 2017; Wilkinson, 2009), as they construct the ways culture and space are negotiated by communities and movements. Queer urban trauma is defined here as a spatial construction of the processes and politics of urban social movements following a traumatic event in which LGBT people are harmed because of their identity or participation. Focusing on the Israeli case, in which the ‘national trauma’ is inherent in heritage and politics, we have characterised queer urban trauma by three main components: distance from the place where the trauma occurred and its location; the temporality of the memorialisation and trauma; and mobilisation of non-LGBT supporters. Based on our analysis, we offer some conclusions and suggest some theorisation of queer urban trauma.

First, we argue that (queer) trauma has a geography and this geography is not only personal; it is founded on memories and autobiographies as shown by Cvetkovich (2003a, 2003b) and Crimp (2003, 2004) but it is also collective and political. Since queer urban trauma is collective, it can be used as a tool for social movement mobilisation and can act to achieve community strength and fortitude. Thus, queer urban trauma serves as a tool for LGBT sustainability in the face of violence and helps produce LGBT’s space in the city.

Second, queer urban trauma has to do with loss and mourning, and particularly with the loss of ‘safe(r) space’. We suggest that since reclaiming this space by the community is a political (and thus a spatial) demand, it requires political action. In liberal and ‘global’ Tel Aviv, reclaiming space is a spontaneous and immediate political demand, unlike in the holy and not so liberal space of Jerusalem. Mapping these possibilities can help better understand how queer social movements use urban space as well as help shape movements’ negotiation over space following queer trauma.

Third, the socio-political geography of traumatic events does not have to be based in the place or city where the event itself happened – the immediate and largest-scale reaction to the Jerusalem event happened in the Gay Centre in Tel Aviv –‘the’ centre for Israeli LGBTs, not only from Tel Aviv. What this reveals is that the feeling of belonging is central to commemoration. Not only this but also the location of reaction to trauma symbolically describes queer urban belonging. It would be easier for social movements to hold large-scale commemoration events where the movements have power to produce the events. However, having a memorial event near the traumatic event’s location is still important, even if it takes a longer time to produce it.

Fourth, the spatial politics of post-traumatic events has to do with the sense of place and emotional geographies. It also has much to do with the differences between the socio-cultural and political context of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and with the differences between the local organisations and urban social movements and their relations with local and state authorities and homonational politics. Hartal and Sasson-Levy (2018) have shown that Israeli homonationalism operates in different ways in diverse LGBT spaces. The particular relation with nationalism influences the co-option of the movements and widens or contracts possibilities for cooperation with the state. What was obvious is that politicians wanted to benefit from the commemoration processes, trying to gain larger support. In the Israeli political atmosphere, involvement of the state and its agents always has consequences for LGBT organisations – mainly, the government thinks of itself as an LGBT supporter and uses public events for PR, but when it comes to legislative change and to producing LGBT equality, there is no progress or change in policy.

Fifth, we found two different patterns of reactions to the traumatic events – an immediate, queer and radical one that included mainly community activists and was fuelled by anger and rage, and a later one, more inclusive, less radical that was large scale and structured. This finding is important as it is at the core of our definition of queer urban trauma. Queer social movement mobilisation is dependent on their radicalism and grassroot character, and this also prescribes their spatial and social possibilities for commemoration.

Finally, the spatio-temporal characteristics of the politics of trauma are evident in the ways in which the two patterns of reaction were not only constructed differently in the two cities but also after different time lags from the traumatic events. The issue of temporality is thus focal to understanding social movement practices of commemoration in urban space.

This study sheds some light on Israeli activism following the two traumatic events in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. However, our conceptualisation of queer urban trauma has wider theoretical implications for thinking on traumas and their aftermath in urban settings and for the analysis of urban social movements. Understanding queer urban trauma and its geographies, then, has spatial, temporal and political values. We believe that an in-depth study of the spatial politics and temporalities of traumas and the ways in which they produce political acts offers a better understanding of queer urban movements by promoting ‘gay rights’. Also, queer urban trauma is a socio-cultural and political phenomenon in cities, where LGBT and queer communities have become an integral part of the social and urban ‘puzzle’ on the one hand but are still vulnerable and suffer from physical violence and lack of safer spaces (Doan, 2007) on the other. It is also an important contribution for understanding queer vulnerable geographies (Johnston, 2018) as a means of what Butler (2004) termed ‘precarity’, as an outcome of the reality where ‘those of us who do not live our gender and sexualities in “intelligible” ways risk violence, discrimination, harassment and death’ (Johnston, 2018: 933). Based on the ways queer urban movements and activism are enacted in other socio-cultural and political contexts, and on the reaction of movements to traumatic events, and as a result of the specific and larger Israeli context of collective trauma that this research is based on, further investigation and theorisation from other places and socio-cultural and national contexts is needed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a larger research project that aims to understand queer urban movements in different settings. First and foremost, we would like to thank the participants and activists in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem who helped us collect the data and shared their personal experiences and knowledge with us. Helpful comments from audiences at the IGU meeting in Québec City, August 2018; at the ICCG meeting in Athens, April 2019; and at the 5th European Geographies of Sexualities meeting in Prague, September 2019, helped us to improve this paper, together with comments from the guest editors of the special issue and three anonymous reviewers.

Author note

This paper is based on equal contribution and the author names are listed in alphabetical order.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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