A new book by Dr. Raz Yosef of TAU's Film and Television Department, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), offers a queer and post-colonial critique of the complex role played by Israeli cinema in the construction of the Israeli nationalistic concept of heterosexual masculinity. It also explores the cinema's attempt to marginalize, discipline and normalize "queerness" (a generic term for non-heteronormative sexuality) within the Israeli national masculine identity. The author argues that Israeli heterosexual masculinity cannot imagine itself apart from the externalized sexual, ethnic and racial "others" on whom it was founded and which it produced. He analyzes such issues in terms of such cardinal Israeli historical and sociopolitical discourses as: the Zionist project, military culture, interethnic tension between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim (Oriental and European Jews), the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict, and the emergence of lesbian and gay consciousness.
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| Adi Nes, Untitled, 1995, 90x90 cm, C-print, Coutesy of Dvir Gallery, Tel-Aviv |
Zionism, Dr. Yosef argues, is obsessed with Jewish masculinity. The political project of liberating the Jewish people to create 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 siecle anti-Semitic scientific-medical discourse, the male Jewish body was associated with disease, madness, degeneracy, sexual perversity, femininity and homosexuality. This pathologization of Jewish male sexuality even entered the writings of Jewish scientists and medical doctors, including Freud. The Zionist movement sought to transform the very nature of European Jewish masculinity as it existed in the Diaspora. Thinkers such as Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau were convinced that the invention of a stronger, healthier heterosexual "Jewry of Muscles" would both overcome the stereotype of the Jewish male as effeminate and solve the economic, political and national problems of the Jewish people. Zionist Israeli films expressed this national desire through various visual and narrative tropes, such as pioneering, gymnastics, body-building as an allegory of nation-building, etc. This reinforced the image of the Israeli hyper-masculine colonialist/explorer via the homophobic repudiation of the "feminine" within men. This new Jewish masculinity became the model for the militarized, masculine sabra, the native-born Israeli.
This narrative was further intertwined with attitudes on the breeding of children, bodily hygiene, racial improvement and Orientalist perspectives - which associated the East, and especially Eastern bodies, with unsanitary practices, plagues, disease and sexual perversity. By stigmatizing Israel's 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, theMizrahim.
Dr. Yosef's book offers not only a theoretical and critical view of the construction of masculinity and "queerness" in Israeli cinema and culture; it also suggests a broader model for the investigation of the role of male sexualities within the constitution of any national culture. He also challenges the dominant tendency to treat race, sexuality and nationalism separately. By insisting on their historical and theoretical intersectionality within national culture, his book opens up a space in between those categories in which subjectivity is constituted.
