When the checkpoint becomes a counterpoint

Abstract

This article was born out of a sense of discomfort with the privilege accorded to movement and mobility in critical scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, including critical work on the relationship between language, sexuality and space. It is our contention in this article that stasis can be deployed as a radical practice of defiance, and therefore can be queer too. In order to argue that stillness can be a form of social action carrying the potential of forging a radical politics of dissent, we take as a case in point the checkpoint in the context of Israel/Palestine. Drawing upon Said’s (1984, 1994) notion of the counterpoint and Stroud’s (2018) theorization of linguistic citizenship, we illustrate how the checkpoint can become a bodily, discursive and material counterpoint that activates the irreconcilable tensions between utopia and dystopia in the pursuit of “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (WARNER, 1993, p. xxvi).

Keywords

• Checkpoint
• Counterpoint
• Israel/Palestine
• Movement
• Queer
• Resistance