Beyond homonationalism: queer temporality in contemporary Israeli gay and lesbian cinema

ABSTRACT

The article explores the homonormative and homonational politics and the discourse of LGBT rights in contemporary Israeli cinema. Some Israeli films such as Yossi and Jagger, The Bubble, and The Secrets promote homonormative and homonational discourse that is guided by a progressive trajectory from traditional societies to modernity, from shame to pride, from homophobia and the secrecy of the closet to gay sexual liberation and identity that follows Western standards. In contrast, films like Joe + Belle, Blush and the Arisa Mizrahi party line videos critique logical temporal conventions of development and progress, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility, and the social scenarios which regulate identities into national, sexual, and ethnic normativity. They offer new ways of being in the world, life and relationships based on queer temporality that are not necessarily founded on past lessons or future expectations, but rather derive from the desire for the “here and now.”

KEYWORDS:

• Homonationalism
• homonormativity
• queer temporality
• Israeli cinema
• LGBT rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See also Gilly Hartal and Orna Sasson-Levy (2018).

2. For other uses of Deleuze’s work on post-World War II cinema in analyses of moving images of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni (2008).

3. Following Shohat, the term “Arab-Jew,” since the late 1980s and 1990s, has become a cultural signifier for the second and third generation of Arab-Jewish immigrants who challenged the Zionist order and have shown that there was “an historical moment, or juncture, in which Arabs and Jews could share cultural assumptions, social networks, and common political horizons.” (Yehouda Shenhav and Hannan Hever 2012, 114).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raz Yosef

Raz Yosef is Associate Professor and Head of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, and the co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic and Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. His work on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ethics and trauma in Israeli national visual culture has appeared in GLQ, Third Text, Framework, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Signs, and Israel Studies Review. E-mail: [email protected]