Abstract:

An analysis of films depicting interracial sex between men in Israeli and in Palestinian cinema, which were produced during and after the second Intifada (2000-2008), reveals a complex picture. Both corpora deal with the post-traumatic intersection of race and nationality with gender and sexuality. The paper examines two examples: Eytan Fox’s Israeli film, The Bubble, and Tawfik Abu Wael’s short Palestinian film, Diary of a Male Whore. While the Israeli film focuses on interracial sex infiltrated by terror within the urban Western gay scene, the Palestinian film focuses on interracial sex within the post-traumatic memory of expulsion and loss of home.

These constructs – together with socio-religious differences between the two cultures and their film industries – have ramifications on how (homo)sexualities are represented. Homosexual Palestinian and Israeli cinema during and after the second Intifada (as presented in Bubble and Diary) suggests a complex network of interracial sexual relations. This paper, therefore, offers a rethinking of cultural concepts (e.g., gay-ization, the permeable body, masturbation, gay shame-pride-humiliation, gaze and scopic economics), as well as of memory, trauma, and post-trauma

Morag, Raya. 2011. “Post-Trauma, Sexuality And the Occupation: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema during the second Intifada" (Hebrew).Theory and Criticism 38-39: 211 - 234. 
 

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