What therefore discourse has joined together: sexuality, performativity and everyday use of public spaces

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores lesbian intimacy and the conditions for being public. It traces the performative effects of coupledom and argues that intimacy is understood, performed and experienced against the backdrop and in response to prevailing discourses of tolerance which regulate the public sphere. Employing Wendy Brown’s discussion of liberal tolerance and Eve Sedgwick’s concept of periperformativity, the paper addresses the performative effects of doing lesbian intimacy in the Israeli context. Instead of reading the public sphere through a somewhat polarized interpretative mode of heteronormative vs. antinormative, oppressive vs. liberating or abstract vs. lived, the paper traces the labor of love and the doing of kinship under the toll of becoming worthy of tolerance.