Beyond flesh: Queer masculinities and nationalism in Israeli cinema

Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

Abstract

Zionism was not only a political and ideological program but also a sexual one. The liberation of Jews and creation of a new nation were closely intertwined with a longing for the redemption and normalization of the Jewish male body. That body had to be rescued from anti-Semitic, scientific-medical discourse associating it with disease, madness, degeneracy, sexual perversity, and femininityeven with homosexuality. The Zionist movement was intent on transforming the very nature of European Jewish masculinity as it had existed in the diaspora. Zionist/Israeli films expressed this desire through visual and narrative tropes, enforcing the image of the hypermasculine, colonialist-explorer and militaristic nation-builder, an image dependent on the homophobic repudiation of the "feminine" within men. The creation of a new heterosexual Jewish man was further intertwined with attitudes on the breeding of children, bodily hygiene, racial improvement, and Orientalist perspectiveswhich associated the East, and especially Eastern bodies, with unsanitary practices, plagues, disease, and sexual perversity. By stigmatizing Israels Eastern populations as agents of death and degeneration, Zionism created internal biologized enemies, against whom the Zionist society had to defend itself. In the name of securing the life and reproduction of the new Ashkenazi Jewry, Israeli society discriminated against both its internal enemies, the Palestinians, and its own citizens, the Mizrahim (Oriental Jews). Yosefs critique of the construction of masculinities and queerness in Israeli cinema and culture also serves as a model for the investigation of the role of male sexuality within national culture in general.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationNew Brunswick, N.J
PublisherRutgers University Press
Number of pages203
ISBN (Electronic)0813533759, 0813535379, 0813566401, 9780813535371, 9780813535379
ISBN (Print)9780813533766, 0813533767
StatePublished - 2004

Keywords

  • LGBTQ Studies
  • Film
  • Media studies
  • Communications

ULI Keywords

  • uli
  • Homosexuality in motion pictures
  • Masculinity in motion pictures
  • Motion pictures -- Israel
  • Motion pictures, Israeli

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