The past two decades have witnessed seismic shifts in the global histories of sex, gender, and sexuality. Where once even histories of alternative formations of sex and gender assumed heterosexuality and the dual gender model to be relative norms across human societies, scholars, particularly of Indigenous people in North America and the Global South have published a range of works pointing to the historical contingencies of these constellations and their imbrications with capitalist imperialism.

At the same time, the past decades have witnessed the effervescence of the critical study of settler colonialism. We now understand the elimination of native populations and replacement of them by others who deem themselves the envoys of “civilizational” progress as a process that yokes together societies as ostensibly and geographically different as the United States, Israel, and Australia. We also understand settler colonialism as an active project adopted even within ostensibly non-settler nation states, such as the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the early twentieth-century Egyptian occupation of Sudan.

Yet, as many have pointed out, these two burgeoning literatures have often failed to speak with each other or to fully metabolize each other’s insights. Thus, as Leila Farsakh, Rhoda Kanaaneh, and Sherene Seikaly have suggested, scholars of settler colonialism have not devoted enough attention “to the disciplining of gender and sexuality inherent to colonialism and nationalism,” while queer studies scholars have often failed to be “attuned to how sexuality can take shape as a colonial category co-constituted through multilayered structures of oppression.”

This panel aims to speak to this oversight in exploring a range of queer and feminist imbrications and struggles against settler colonialism across the twentieth-century world. Dani Joslyn and Jecca Namakkal interrogate the close ties between ostensibly countercultural or even radical “hippie” and anarchist movements and settler colonialism in North America. Both look at how sexual freedom for settlers could become a justification for the eradication or expulsion of indigenous people.

In parallel, Lucia Sorbera and Rabab Abdulhadi’s papers both look at the relationship between feminism, Zionism, and Palestinian liberation across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Sorbera finds an answer to the question of how and when Palestine became a feminist issue, in the Egyptian women’s movement of the 1930s. Meanwhile, Abdulhadi looks at the normalization of sexual and gender violence in both Israeli foreign policy and propaganda, and specifically interrogates how Israeli settler colonialism instrumentalizes gender and sexuality to maintain control over Palestinians.

Together, our panels investigate the complex relationships between queer and feminist movements and settler colonial states: their roles as opponents to and unwitting or even outspoken advocates of the eradication and displacement of indigenous people.