Situated imagination of Zionist borders: the feminist gender nonconforming photography of Yael Meiry

Abstract

How does the history of a nation’s relation to transgender subjects affect their situated imaginings of national territorial borders, collectivity boundaries and gender barriers? This article offers an answer to this question through a close reading of photographs by the artist Yael Meiry. Based on a visual culture analysis of Meiry’s intervention in dominant Zionist historical narrative I argue that by using their photography as an arena of a feminist, gender nonconforming situated imagining, Meiry upturns Zionist normative border-making of territory, collective and gender, demonstrating that they are always interrelated and interconnected. The article focuses on the ways in which Meiry’s situated imagination challenge the imposed normativity of the Zionist mechanisms of bordering as it is embodied in three historical dominant Zionist icons of borders, boundaries, and barriers, which were constructed as a part of the invention of a national tradition: the map, as an icon of Zionist territorial borders; the palm tree, as an icon of Zionist collective boundaries; and the fist, as an icon of the Zionist gender barriers.