"In the name of love": mediating militarised masculinities in times of war

This chapter is about the mediation of militarised masculinities at times of war in settler-colonial contexts. Drawing from research on Israel’s latest (2023 –) invasion of Gaza, it thematically analyses Israeli soldiers’ publicly available social media posts to explore how popular culture highlights the gendered/sexed knowledges on which settler-colonial violences thrive. Most of these texts show male combatants brandishing guns in the homes of forcibly displaced Palestinians. In many, they pose with/in Gazan women’s underwear, often posting such images to their dating profiles. In others, gay troops raise LGBTQ+ rainbow flags on top of demolished buildings, stating that they do so “in the name of love”. Through these texts, the paper makes two core arguments. First, it suggests that the posts construct the colonised as sexually ‘other’ to legitimise colonial control. Displaying and ridiculing Palestinian women’s underwear feminises Palestinian bodies as sexually excessive, licentious and out of control. Colonial power is thus in part substantiated through orientalist fantasies about colonised sexualities, producing hyper-nationalistic, violent settler masculinities in the process. Second, the chapter examines pinkwashing in these posts. It suggests that the mediated deployment of LGBTQ+ signifiers demonstrates how the Israeli state mobilises modern sexual codes to transform the systematic destruction of Gaza into paternal acts of care. Gay masculinities here render colonial violence acceptable to local and global audiences on digital platforms. Popular culture thus matters, the paper concludes, because it illuminates the gendered/sexed epistemologies on which ontologies of domination flourish at moments of extreme cruelty in the material world.