THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL, BUT FOR WHOM?
-by Nour Shantout
“‘No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk.’”
When my head of department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte) called me on February 21st, 2025, to let me know that the rectorate retracted their decision to keep my teaching assignment, ‘The Personal Is Political, but for Whom?’— after a series of emails and a meeting in which I was informed that they would keep the course despite the pressure to cancel it—, I was walking my friend’s dog, Kubik. When I called her back a few minutes later, she was taking her sister to the physiotherapist and had to go out. The call was between things; I was uncomfortable, and she was too. It is not easy to bring such news. I wrote about this day in my journal but did not write a statement this time. The discomfort translates into my pages in sentences like ‘Probably you were wondering why you did not receive your contract.’
The rectorate suggested putting my seminar under the name of my head of department, so from the first look on the university website, it would look like it is her course, but my name will be there ‘somewhere’; ‘smaller’ in the description of the course, she also made it clear that in practice she would not participate in the preparation of this course, it will be entirely my work and teaching materials but under her name, she would be the host and I would be the central guest (this is not a metaphor). Maybe they thought having a German White name for the seminar would weave the suspicions that such a course title can carry if a person like me teaches it, especially that I come from a difficult geopolitical zone. After all, my first name screams migrant of colour, and it does not have a gender. And my first name, together with my last name, screams: an enemy of empire. They also decided not to give me a contract like they did when I was teaching the course ‘Feminist and Indigenous Methodologies’ in 2023-2024, but this time I would be paid per invoice.
They retracted their decision to hire me with a contract —that gives me some rights as an academic worker, which institutions ignore anyways when it comes to Palestine— after months of pressure by Zionists and their supporters to cancel this course (since October 2024), even though no information about the seminar was published on the university website to date. Apparently, ‘someone’ was threatening and pressuring the Vice-Rector for Diversity again. I was not informed who was behind this. I could only guess that it is the same people who monitor my social media account, report me to the police, and troll me for speaking out against the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza—the people who baselessly claim that the posts I share about and against settler colonial violence are criminal.[1] The rectorate suggested this alternative instead of cancelling. I refused immediately and expressed how it is problematic —and sarcastic— to erase my name from a course called ‘The Personal Is Political, but for Whom?’, it is disrespectful and humiliating. It aims to dehumanize me and erase me as a person from a course about the personal.
After I hung up wishing her a nice weekend, I thought I might have exaggerated when I used the term ‘dehumanization’ in such a context. I felt that I did not think it through; this is an academic issue after all, and they were polite in the process. But when I read Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (2025) by Mohammed El-Kurd, he confirmed that what I let slip was right. Dehumanization happens everywhere and in different forms, and it is not limited to Hollywood movies and genocidal political statements, he writes: ‘When I speak of dehumanization, I am referring to a phenomenon more implicit, yet far more pernicious and institutionalized, a practice perfected by our politest murderers. When I speak of dehumanization, I am referring to the West’s refusal to look us in the eye.’ (p.14)
Due to numerous cancellations and censorship, one becomes an expert on how to archive and tell a story, reclaiming one’s right to speak while protecting oneself from potential legal accusations because of the text itself. It is an art we, the cancelled, are forced to master. But I wonder if all my written statements are a waste of time. I am starting to question their effectiveness in their linearity and preciseness. Why do we write in the time of the genocide? How? And for Whom? Who is our reader? Why do we write in the colonizer’s language? What if this way of writing makes us lose focus on more useful actions and our liberation struggle? I thought I had to have a forensic approach to speak truth to power and be heard by people not interested in listening; but I was singing at the mill (Arabic proverb). I used to write in this way to keep a record. Hoping that writing forensically will hold people accountable because ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ in Omar El Akkad’s words.
However, I am not seeing a result, after all, the laws don’t apply to us. Palestine is an exception, as one of my lawyers said, and many of our allies who have more (institutional) power than us —the scapegoated artists and academics— do not want to lose their jobs (I was told this so many times in the last months as if I take joy in my dismissal). Their solidarity is performative and not active. Even my colleagues, who are on the right side of history, and I consider some of them as comrades, continued their institutional life as usual. They show films about Palestine, invite White scholars to speak about Palestine, but little they do on a practical level to actively protest institutional discrimination in their own university, or prevent another one from happening in the future. Institutional life goes on.
One can speak about Palestine in Austria, but the focus must first be on the coloniser’s feelings, as they are regarded as superior. The speaker should not be Palestinian or Arab and is expected to talk about Palestinians as ‘others’, centring the conversation on their pain because, under the violence of academia, this is the only space where colonised people are allowed to exist. The colonised other is silenced, and when they do speak, their voice is seen as a threat. A Palestinian comrade once told me that at a reading circle about Palestine in Vienna, people spoke of Palestinians as if they were aliens, prompting her to leave the room. It is alarming that, in Austria, very few public, academic lectures on Palestine have been permitted on university premises since October 7th, 2023, and I have observed that most of these have been delivered by White scholars.
So, this time, after receiving the phone call, I wrote about everything I felt and did that day instead of writing a statement. How sceptical I was about the amount of medication Kubik —who is 15 years old— is taking. When I was lying down on the lounger, I noticed that the woman next to me and I had identical bathrobes in ochre —my favourite colour— and we joked about it. I wrote about the laughter, the scent of clementine, the trees around me, the forest, how everything looks perfect. How life is tenderly and unbearably beautiful in the women’s sauna in Vienna while the world is burning. How most of these women probably don’t care that Palestinian people are being burned to death, bombed, and starved in Gaza. How I am wasting my time defending myself in front of Austrians and Germans who think that their dark past gives them moral authority, and I must remain focused on the struggle. But my feelings do not matter here, what should be central is the genocide in Gaza, and that we all should do more to stop it, and censorship forces us to focus on ridiculous issues such as Instagram stories that hurt the feelings of our oppressors. These details of my day are neither political nor directly relevant to the issue of censorship per se, but every aspect of my life in the belly of the empire is influenced by a heaviness stirred by the political, by immense grief and anger.
My basket contained the book Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler, which was part of my teaching materials for the course. When I first read the Parables, I found them frightening. It is terrifying when a dystopian autofictional novel, first published in 1993 and set in 2024, becomes so close to reality. However, I began to see them as a learning opportunity to craft new tools that are necessary to dismantle colonial systems of oppression. The story follows Lauren Olamina through her journals — a young woman with “hyperempathy” who experiences the pain of others as her own while navigating a collapsing society. Lauren’s journal echoes the voices of the women of Gaza, Congo and Sudan.
When I took my phone out of the sauna locker, I saw that my colleague had sent me a sweet message. I do not want to rant; I am fine, I said. But in reality, all I was thinking about is that I want university workers to be politically organized transnationally because accepting the status quo is very dangerous for the future of education, and like Paulo Freire and bell hooks, I believe in ‘education as the practice of freedom.’ Would they do more if they read a statement? And what are the limits of their solidarity? It is time to start looking at people on our side: our comrades, colleagues, and friends. It is time to raise the bar of our expectations because the anti-colonial struggle is long and exhausting, and ‘it needs a long breath’ in Shireen Abu Akleh’s words. The colonial and imperial systems of oppression count on our collective exhaustion. I want my colleagues to turn from allies to accomplices and risk their privileges in the process.
Not every personal is political. When I rethink the second-wave feminist slogan ‘The Personal Is Political’ or ‘The Private Is Political’ today, the day 623 into the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza committed by Israel, I wonder which personal is political. I had my first notebook when I was seven years old; I used to write about the blue sky, cats and flowers, singing and playing with my sisters. When I found it in my library in Damascus years later, I thought about how children in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria are prevented from living their childhoods due to colonial violence and how they cannot write about the sky without writing about the bombs. Not every personal is political, but theirs is because their existence is political. The unchilding of Palestinian children forces them to give conferences and speeches in English.
Writing, reading, and teaching about the personal today is a survival strategy. When Black, people of colour, and Indigenous people — when the colonised — write about the personal, they reclaim their right to life. Writing the personal is a refusal to behave like a ‘perfect victim’; it challenges the ‘politics of appeal’ (El-Kurd, 2025). It is a reclamation of the right to speak about our joys, our mistakes, the right to imagine, and the right to grief. The right to resist in the ways our people see fit. The right to poetry, love, and romance. The right to anger and imperfection — I want to make fun of the people who silence us. The right to be dysfunctional in a system that abuses our bodies and sees them as testing grounds for its weapons. The right to refuse how things have always been done and justified in Western academia. To refuse to be grateful for a system based on theft and the extraction of resources from our land, and knowledge from our people. We write ourselves, in our own way. We write our anger, and this becomes a threat to the system. Language changes with us, because all languages fail after Gaza. And this is how we become dangerous. So, we are criminalised and threatened. They tell us, you came to our countries and did not respect us, we tell them, we want our land back. Our personal haunts them forever.
[1] On October 9th, 2024, I was fired from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Simultaneously, the Austrian Academy of Sciences terminated my doctoral fellowship. The dismissal was triggered by a reposted story from disorientalizing Instagram account that I shared when Israel was carpet bombing Beirut, and it says: "death to Israel" is not just a threat. It is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution. may the entire colony burn to the ground for good.' The Academy later falsely claimed that the story ‘constitutes a criminal offense under Austrian law’. I am currently pursuing legal action against the Academy for potential defamation. For more context, see HERE and HERE.
Bibliography
El Akkad, O. (2025). One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Random House.
El-Kurd, M. (2025). Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal. Haymarket Books.
Hooks, B. (1990). Marginality as a site of resistance. Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures, 4, 341-343.
Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.
Nour Shantout is an artist, researcher, and educator. Born in Damascus and based in Vienna since 2015. Her practice centres on themes of subjugated heritage, counter-memory and history, labour, and alienation, approached from a postcolonial feminist perspective. It is situated in continuity with the political application of Palestinian embroidery—a practice that emerged from the struggle for Palestinian liberation.