Dr. Gilly Hartal

Gilly Hartal is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in the Gender Activism Study Track at Bar Ilan University. She has been awarded the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) post-doctoral fellowship for 2016-2017.

As a human geographer, Gilly address the various ways power relations shape and transform in space. Her work specifically focuses on geographies of sexualities and LGBT spaces. She investigates the way geographic space acts upon the politics of sexuality – the changing power relations within and between LGBT groups. The issues involve relations of inclusion (belonging and safety) and exclusion (alienation and power politics). As a feminist qualitative researcher, Hartal’s method is ethnographic – informed by the rich knowledge grounded in the field: personally engaging interviews, participant observations and content analysis of documents.

Her doctoral dissertation examined the discourse on the construction of belonging and the (re)production of power relations in LGBT activist spaces, based on a field study of four such spaces in the center and periphery of Israel.

Her post-doctoral project focused on gay tourism to Tel Aviv. The study discussed the allocation of municipal and national resources, LGBT discourse, and various interests that produce the political economy of gay tourism. The ‘Gay Tourism to Tel Aviv’ project and presented gay tourism’s implications for urban space in Israel and for the LGBT community.

Currently, Hartal is working on a project on the political subjectivities of lesbian, bisexual and transgender women in the Israeli peripheries.