The Right to Jerusalem: The Danger of Queer Safe Spaces

This paper critically engages with the concept of queer safe spaces in the borderland urban setting of West-Jerusalem. Based on an analysis of the case study of safety within the Israeli queer community, we argue that queer safe spaces offer a specific formation of space and suggest that hegemonic discourses (re)produce power structures into critical arenas, resulting in unsafety for queer individuals. This analysis is grounded in ethnographic accounts of the authors' participation in the Israeli queer community. The discourse of safety, which is central to Israeli culture, and its effect on local queer discourse, are applied here to inform a discussion of personal experiences of queer safe space. Israel, as a place of unsafety, and West-Jerusalem as a borderland space, are used to examine the construction of queer safe space as an embodiment of the unsafety, non-belonging and alienation in West-Jerusalem more generally.