THE ACTIVIST, THE CRITIC, AND THE DISAPPEARING TEXT The debate over DAM’s song has emblematized a widening gulf between the

work of academics and activists, one that continues to demarcate the theoreti-cal and polititheoreti-cal fault lines around a range of issues such as the honor crime, female genital cutting, queer subjectivities, and queer rights.⁴⁷ In dominant narratives about these issues, activists and academics are positioned as polar

opposites: one has the privilege to write and study and reflect upon social realities and problems; the other lives them, often at a heavy and personal cost. While academics accrue value and accolades and secure their livelihoods in Western academic institutions through their production of studies about such issues, activists continuously face physical, political, and socioeconomic risks for doing and embodying the work that academics produce and dissemi-nate knowledge about. Transnational academics located in US contexts travel between spaces of academia and activism, often usurping knowledge from activist interlocutors and taking up space in conversations about difficult and challenging social issues and political realities. The relationship between the two is thus uneven, structured by global socioeconomic realities that position Western- based academics as privileged in relation to activists located in third- world contexts where their basic rights to freedom, security, and dignity are frequently abrogated. If academics produce theories and texts, activists engage in praxis and do work, and the two are constantly cleaved from one another.

Where one is performative, disengaged, and produced in the ivory towers of academe, the other is immediate, authentic, and informed by material hard-ship and struggle.

Feminists have long inquired into the possibility of overturning these unequal power structures. As Melissa W. Wright explains, “Reckoning with the power dynamics inherent to the production of knowledge continues to represent a challenge for feminist theorists and activists as they negotiate over whose knowledge counts as ‘official’ knowledge, in whose language is this knowledge formed, and who is able to represent this knowledge, have access to it, and reap the rewards of its circulation” (2008, 380). More than anything, the debate over DAM’s song reveals that such reckonings remain ongoing and unresolved. Lurking in them is an implicit but never quite stated question about who has the right to speak on gender violence in Palestine, under what terms, and from what locations. Rather than contest the power structures that impose and reproduce these divisions and distinctions, debates over DAM’s song, and the larger conversations around gender violence they animate and map, have tended to reify the line between subjects and objects of knowledge. They have worked to widen or foreclose, instead of bridge or open up, the possibility of engagements that bring together activist and academic contributions to ending the phenomenon of gender violence. In constraining the terms of the debate to individual actors and questions of positionality and authenticity, the shrinking political space for confronting gender violence is even further limited.

In an article on the broader feminist politics animating the debate over DAM’s song, Rochelle Terman inquires into how “particular characteriza-tions, modes of argumentation, omissions, and framings work to discursively

normalize a paradigm of legitimate or illegitimate positions on the issue of gendered violence in Muslim contexts” (2010, 3). Terman lays bare a feminist analytic field of inquiry structured by a “double bind” between anti- imperialist and postsecular modes of critique. Where one camp (the “anti- imperialists”) curtails analyses of gender violence because of fear of how it might be used to service Islamophobic and imperial goals, the other (the “postsecularists”) focuses on confronting such issues despite the risks associated with these con-testations. Terman seeks a “multidimensional analysis of the main lines of domination facing women in Muslim contexts, including anti- imperialist cri-tique of those political formations that can escape scrutiny precisely because they present themselves as anti- imperial movements” (23). While I am drawn to Terman’s invitation to analysis that weaves together anti- imperialist and antiviolence positions, it ends up inadvertently reasserting the binary of activists versus academics by assigning activists a more privileged position of critique due to the politics of location rather than the substance of their interventions.

What is emphasized in here and in defenses of DAM’s right to produce work that intervenes in the social problem of gender violence is that mem-bers of DAM, like other activists and artists who confront gender violence from within their communities, actually do live in Palestine. Certainly, this fact provides DAM and local Palestinian activists immediate experiences and crucial insights into the dual context of colonial and patriarchal violence and the strategies for confronting this violence from within Palestine in indig-enous and localized ways. Missing from Terman’s analysis, however, is the content of these strategies or the vanished text of DAM’s musical interven-tion, which is the very subject of the debate between the anti- imperialist and postsecular, activist, and academic camps she identifies. To rethink the terms of the debate, then, we would need to consider not only where DAM is located but also what strategies and interventions they reproduce and make possi-ble in their work about the honor crime and how these strategies fit within broader strategies of confronting gender violence.

The controversy over DAM’s video invites us to carefully reflect on and challenge the boundaries of knowledge production between activists and aca-demics on issues like gender violence. It calls on us to think with, through, and beyond the politics of location in ways that bring into view a multiplicity of actors, strategies, and analytics for contestations of gender violence. Accu-sations of complicity, like claims to authenticity, work to foreclose possibilities of collaboration and engagement across real and imagined borders of loca-tion, subjectivity, and positionality. By pitting the academic against the activist other, they eclipse the substance of both the activist interventions and their

academic critics. More importantly, they disappear from view the complexi-ties in which protracted social problems such as gender violence in settler colonial contexts are undoubtedly mired and in which discussion of honor- related violence must be placed. These discursive and political fault lines ren-der impossible future collaborations that have the potential to open up spaces

“where academic agendas and frameworks can be interrogated and recast, and where we can generate new transformative possibilities in the fissures, gaps, absences, and fallibilities of our critical frameworks whose cutting- edge status we may have taken for granted” (Nagar 2014, 110). While Nagar’s invitation is offered to feminist academics located primarily in Western contexts, what would such collaborations look like if taken up by both activists and academ-ics working together to wrestle with the complexities of the phenomenon of gender violence which are disappeared in the liminal, binary, and noxious spaces of the debate? And how might they help us get through the impasses that such debates ultimately leave in their wake?

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