Scienceעמל זיו

Amal Ziv

Amal Ziv is an Israeli scholar, poet and activist who researches pornography, sexual representation and queer culture.

born 1964Research on pornography and sexualityCo-founding the Sex Akher conferenceCo-editing Beyond SexualityQueer and feminist activism

Born: 14 December 1964
Occupation: poet, literary theorist, writer, literary scholar
Education: Brown University, Tel Aviv University

Amal Ziv was born in 1964

Amal Ziv was born on December 14, 1964, and grew up in the Ramat Aviv neighborhood. Ziv was one of the founders of the LGBT newspaper Hazman Havarod. In the 1990s Ziv wrote on feminist and LGBT topics in newspapers and journals, and published poetry, some of which was set to music and recorded by Carmella Gross Wagner.

Ziv completed an MA in comparative literature at Brown University in 1992. Back in Israel in 1993, Ziv set up a queer theory study group at the Agudah in Tel Aviv. In 2005 Ziv completed a PhD at Tel Aviv University on the female subject in pornographic fiction.

In 1996 Ziv co-founded the Queer Reading Group at Tel Aviv University, and in 2001 co-founded the annual Sex Akher conference. In 2003 Ziv co-edited Beyond Sexuality, the first book of queer essays in Hebrew. Ziv did postdoctoral research at the Hebrew University on queer activism, and has taught in the Gender Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University since 2008, heading it in 2016.

Ziv lives in Tel Aviv with partner, the poet Sharon Haas, and their son. In 2022 Ziv came out as genderqueer and non-binary, using the name Amal.ia.