Fashion Storytelling and the Aesthetics of Queer Stealth in Jenin

Dababeer Nest is a fashion collective founded in Jenin by two young women committed to using clothing as a medium of creative resistance. The work of the collective, which has been put on hold for the time being, reveals how, before the unleashing of Israel’s genocidal violence in 2023, fashion was being used in this locale to animate the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In light of the ongoing invasions and planned annexation of the West Bank, as well as the devastation of the Jenin camp and its environs, this article serves to document how, within the tightly knit community of Jenin, young creatives developed fugitive strategies of community-building. Relying on interviews conducted with members of the collective over a period of three years and a visual analysis of films and photographs, this article theorizes fashion in Jenin as a practice of queer stealth, which is understood as a mode of effacement of Israeli surveillance and Western epistemologies of gender legibility, as well as an Indigenous refusal of the human-nonhuman binary that is inherent in settler-colonial endeavors.