Parading for the Future: Queer Temporalities of Pride in an Ordinary Israeli City

The last decade has seen the expansion of pride parades worldwide, in the metropolitan centers, in smaller cities, and even in rural areas. This process involves the formation of activist groups and new political discourses that challenge the notions of where and how pride parades should come to be. This chapter focuses on pride events in one ordinary city in Israel, namely the city of Ashdod, and raises questions regarding queer temporality and space as they are manifest through affective relations and practices. Our spatial analysis of the pride parade unveils activists’ desires to use the parade as means to display proud, strong local presence of LGBT lives, whereas the actual city-space that is allocated for the parade is disconnected from urban life and fenced out. Therefore, the parade operates as a temporal-spatial bubble for several hours and has very little effect on the city and its inhabitants. The participants of the parade, most of whom are young teenagers and kids, symbolize another temporal aspect of the pride parade. On the one hand, participants are perceived as a promise for a different future, a promise of hope and inclusion. On the other hand, their current needs and limitations as youth are sidelined. Spatially, the chapter shows how the metropolitan parade is copied onto the ordinary city in a manner that does not match the local spatial-political arrangement of that city. This raises the question whether ordinary cities in Israel can be sites for developing local LGBT politics, lives and futures that do not depend on the global, metropolitan city.