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14. Homonational Desires: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Trauma in the Cinema of Eytan Fox
- University of Texas Press
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1 8 1 Zionism’s political project of liberating the Jewish people and creating a nation like all other nations was intertwined with a longing for the sexual redemption and normalization of the Jewish male body. In fin-de-siècle anti-Semitic scientific-medical discourse, the male Jewish body was associated with disease, madness, degeneracy, sexual perversity, and femininity as well as with homosexuality. This pathologization of Jewish male sexuality had also entered the writings of Jewish scientists and medical doctors, including Sigmund Freud.1 Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau were convinced that the invention of a stronger, healthier heterosexual “Jewry of Muscles” not only would overcome the stereotype of the Jewish male as a homosexual but also would solve the economic, political, and national problems of the Jewish people. This notion of a new Jewish masculinity became the model for the militarized masculine Sabra (nativeborn Israeli). Unlike the passive, ugly, “feminine,” diasporic Jewish male, the new Zionist Sabra man would engage in manual labor, athletics, and war, becoming the colonialist explorer in touch with the land and with his body. Israeli films expressed this national desire through various visual and narrative tropes, enforcing the image of the hypermasculine nation-builder —an image dependent on the repudiation of the “feminine” within men.2 These gender and sexual oppressive aspects of the Zionist project led to the (formal and nonformal) exclusion of gays and lesbians from Israeli society. The end of the 1980s and 1990s signified the growth of an Israeli gay and lesbian consciousness, which was related to the public and political activity of Aguda: The Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and raz yosef 14 Homonational Desires Masculinity, Sexuality, and Trauma in the Cinema of Eytan Fox 1 8 2 Holocaust and Trauma Transgender in Israel. The association’s members fought for the expansion of their civic rights and the right to represent sexual preference in culture and criticized the absence and marginality of gays and lesbians in Israeli society. A series of legal and social struggles led to the provision of a degree of civic legitimacy for gays and lesbians in the central institutions of Israeli society—the army, family, and motherhood—that define the limits of membership and participation in the Israeli collective.3 The successes of these struggles also promoted the visibility of gay men and women in mainstream media as well as allowing the rise of an urban queer culture that confidently took its place within the heterosexual national consensus. Emphasis was placed on the “normality” of the community’s members, being “good citizens ,” and being “like everybody else.” As Lee Walzer writes: “the Aguda was pursuing a very mainstream strategy and image at that time—demonstrating that gays and lesbians are ‘just like everyone else,’ serving in the military, and living in committed long-term relationships.”4 The cinematic work of Eytan Fox—the leading male gay filmmaker in Israel today—is responsible for the increasing visibility of gay people in Israeli culture. In his films such as Yossi and Jagger (2002), Walk on Water (2004), and The Bubble (2006), Fox tries to deconstruct Zionist national heterosexual masculinity and to offer new images of homosexual social existence that sometimes transgress national and ethnic boundaries. In The Bubble, for example, Fox places gay sexuality within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film focuses on the forbidden love between Noam (Ohad Knoller), a young Israeli man, and Ashraf (Yousef “Joe” Sweid), a handsome young Palestinian. Both men are entrapped in a national social reality of the violent conflict and occupation and are torn between love for each other, on the one hand, and familial and national loyalties, on the other. The film begins at a checkpoint between Israel and the Palestinian Authority , depicting the degradation that Palestinians have to endure at the hands of the IDF. Noam is part of the patrol, and Ashraf and a dozen or so other Palestinians wait to cross the border. This setting becomes the opening for Noam and Ashraf’s relationship. Checking for bombs, Israeli soldiers demand that the Palestinian men raise their shirts, and as Ashraf does so he catches Noam’s queer gaze. The sexual subtext of the opening sequence continues as a pregnant Palestinian woman, also humiliated by the soldiers, goes into labor after the group is cleared. As the Palestinian men break into panic, Ashraf runs to Noam to get help. His immediate reaction is characterized by fear, and...