Coccinellim: A History of the Israeli Transgender Community from the 1950s to the Present Day
Conférence précédée par une rencontre entre la conférencière et les étudiants de 16h30 à 17h30 en salle 5.25.
People who crossed gender boundaries have lived in Israel since its foundation. The first request for a gender affirmation surgery was submitted in 1953 by Rina Nathan and was subsequently turned down by the Israeli Attorney General. The first visible group of sexual and gender dissidents coalesced in the early 1960s in the Tel Aviv commercial sex area, and included mainly teenagers who we would today be called "trans". Following the successful tours in the mid-1960s of the Parisian cabaret Le Carrousel with its famous transgender star "Coccinelle" (Jacqueline Dufresnoy), these Israeli trans pioneers obtained the derogatory term "Coccinellim" – a French-Hebrew blend carrying with it notions of loathing and abjection. This lecture will follow the historical development of transgender life in Israel during eight decades. It will focus in particular on the 1970s and 1980s – a period in which the Israeli gay and lesbian movement underwent a steady growth while the transgender community experienced extreme marginalization and brutalization. The lecture will conclude by assessing the changes that have been taking place in the past two decades, and the challenges that emerged under the right-wing religious government.
Iris Rachamimov is the Head of the Department of History at Tel Aviv. She received her Ph.D. at Columbia University and has been a visiting professor at Stanford and Oxford Universities. She has published extensively on internment camps and on World War I, and has been researching and writing about Israeli queer history especially trans and lesbian history. Until recently – and for many years – she was the only transgender academic in Israeli higher education.
Contacts
- Elisa Carandina - elisa.carandina@inalco.fr
- Fondation Inalco - fondation@inalco.fr
A propos de la Fondation Rothschild - Institut Alain de Rothschild
Présidée par Eric de Rothschild, la Fondation Rothschild - Institut Alain de Rothschild apporte son soutien financier, matériel et moral à une centaine de projets par an dans tous les domaines de l’intérêt général. Dans une société fragilisée par les inégalités, ses multiples actions de mécénat concernent plus particulièrement les secteurs de la culture, de l’éducation, de l’environnement et de la santé. Elle se distingue notamment par sa capacité à agir face à des problématiques sociétales majeures. Ses deux premiers domaines d'intervention sont d'abord la lutte contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme ainsi que la solidarité envers les plus fragiles. Le partenariat avec l’Inalco et la Fondation Inalco constitue pour la Fondation Rothschild - Institut Alain de Rothschild une première occasion de travail avec une institution académique nationale sur l’enjeu de société majeur que constitue l’étude de la parité et du genre.
