Dvar Midbar Queery // a local queer art book

Editor’s Note: On Exclusion and Re‑appropriation

People who live outside the binary categories of sex and gender—the system that splits humanity into “masculine” and “feminine” poles—have existed for thousands of years, long before the advent of writing. They appear in cave paintings, figurines, and countless ritual objects from every documented human culture, giving expression—by today’s understanding—to same‑sex, multi‑gender, and non‑gendered relationships.

With the spread of Christianity through the conquests of white European men, sexual and gender identities that lay beyond the binary were pushed to the margins. Yet historical records of non‑binary desire, gender, and relationships also exist in Jewish and Muslim communities in times and places preceding European domination. Starting in the 15th century, during what was later called the “Age of Discovery,” white Europeans exported their binary doctrine worldwide, slicing reality into poles of “good” and “bad,” “strong” and “weak,” “male” and “female,” and doing their utmost to banish, persecute, or erase anything that lived in the spaces between or beyond those categories.

“Queer,” in its literal sense of deviation from the norm, is an English word used mainly as an insult toward homosexuals but also toward anyone marked as sexually and/or gender “other” under this new church‑imposed order. The earliest recorded usage dates to the 16th century, yet only in the 1990s was this slur reclaimed, planted defiantly in public space and charged with new power and meaning.

“Queerness” has no fixed, absolute definition and does not necessarily rest on a specific sexual or gender practice. It describes a broad, profound state of consciousness that is non‑polar, and therefore it is not founded on opposition, provocation, or collision.

Modern Hebrew—remarkable yet notoriously gendered—demands explicit identification of the speaker’s and the addressee’s gender in nearly every grammatical instance. Anything that strays from this binary, even nouns and objects, is barred from discourse for lack of linguistic space. Re‑appropriating Hebrew creates that missing space, allowing full expression for gender identities long pushed to the margins.

This is the first local journal to gather first‑person works that articulate queer life experiences. It is the first anthology here to offer an open, safe arena for creative work in textual and visual media. Through art we bring to light what was silenced, illuminate what was taken—and, in truth, belongs to all of us: an equal, loving place under the sun.