Selected Papers

2010
Morag, Raya. 2010. “Beyond Flesh and Blood”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (4) : 654-656. Request full-textAbstract

The cover photo for Raz Yosef's Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema shows a meticulously directed event of mourning performed by two models dressed as Israeli soldiers in a staged battle scene. One, who seems to be a medic of Mizrahi origin, holds the head of the other, dead, soldier, supposedly Ashkenazi, in a pietà-like pose while using a brush and palette to paint the scar on his half-naked body. The death scene depicts the major contradictions and deep ambivalences embedded in the Israeli cinematic militaristic-national ethos of maleness, traced by Yosef in this pioneering study. Yosef investigates the development of the culture of masculinity, sexuality, and nationality in Israeli cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s. He does so not through a chronological historical depiction but by exploring Israeli cinema's role in the creation of national identity and the complex ways the dialectics of heteronormativity versus queerness embodied in conflicts over race and ethnicity shape this identity. Yosef analyzes the Zionist dream of a new masculinity in Zionist films. Focusing on the Zionist body master narrative, he follows scholars such as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, and David Biale, who describe hundreds of years of European tradition "that associated the male Jew with disease, madness, degeneration, sexual perversity, and femininity" (17). The Zionist films prove the ambivalence that structures Zionist male body politics: Yosef suggests, "On the one hand, the Nazi is the racist emasculator and," referring to Boyarin's famous claim, "on the other hand, the Aryan male is the model for the Zionist hypermasculinity" (36). The Sabra (native-born Israeli) masculinity is therefore a counterimage not only to the old Jewish "feminine" physiognomy and mentality but, in what might be termed a complementary inversion, the fascist-Aryan body image. One striking characteristic of this Zionist fantasy is its "whiteness." Yosef follows Edward Said and Ella Shohat, among others, in inquiring of Zionism's Eurocentrism in Israeli cinema: "Zionist films linked the new Zionist manhood and body hygiene as a condition for 'racial' improvement and nation-building" (47). Accordingly, he claims, Zionist society reinforced and legitimized its nationalism through this whitened racism, based on the marginalization of both the external enemy, the Arab-Palestinian male, and the internal enemy, the Arab-Mizrahi Jew. Two of Yosef's major contributions are his exploration of the construction of the Mizrahi body and sexuality in mainstream Israeli cinema and his examination of the practices of resistance of Mizrahi filmmakers to Zionist-Ashkenazi manhood discourses. Through an attentive reading, he claims that while 1980s and 1990s films address questions of homophobia and gay subjectivity, they are marked by "disavowal of ethnicity in Ashkenazi gay sexual politics and the incorporation of Mizrahi men into stereotyping and sexual objectification" (143). Beyond Flesh analyzes the quintessential Israeliness embedded in the figure of the soldier in the military films of this period, which mark a crisis in Israeli male subjectivity that, according to Yosef, took place after the 1973 war and was aggravated by the war in Lebanon and the Intifada. This crisis is revealed in the films' representation of the disavowal of the soldier's submission to the Law of the Zionist Father, the soldier's seeking of pain and passivity as a way to act out queer identification with other soldiers, and the cinematic focus on the mutilation of the soldier. Discussing interracial sex, Yosef points out that as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became more violent, more films transgressed the taboo of interracial sex. Some of the films use these representations to critique the heteronormative national ideology and the identity politics of the Israeli gay community. The author emphasizes the colonial scene of conquest as saturated with fears of impotence, emasculation, and death, as well as sexual fantasies. Following Leo Bersani, the body becomes a battlefield in which anal sex is regarded as a form of warfare. Though Yosef neither raises the question of defining queerness nor suggests a final overall taxonomy, his book refers, as I see it, to three major performances of queerness that construct the evolution of national/sexual identity in Israeli cinema. First is the twofold queerness of the diasporic Jew: the queerness...

Morag, Raya. 2010. “Interracial (Homo)Sexualities: Post-Traumatic Palestinian and Israeli Cinema during the al-Aqsa Intifada (Diary of a Male Whore and The Bubble)”. International Journal of Communication 4 : 932-954. Request full-textAbstract

An analysis of films depicting interracial sex between men during the al-Aqsa Intifada reveals a complex picture. Eytan Fox’s Israeli film, The Bubble, deals with the love between a young Israeli and a young Palestinian, ending tragically when the Palestinian becomes a suicide terrorist. In Abu Wael’s Diary of a Male Whore, a Palestinian street hustler recalls his violent childhood while he is servicing an Israeli client. Israeli and Palestinian homo(sexual) cinema (2000–2008) requires a rethinking not only of cultural concepts revolving around the possible encounters between the I and the other (prostitution, masturbation, gay-ization, romance) and psychoanalytic interventions (denial, [...]

2008
Morag, Raya. 2008. “Sound, Image, Terror and Memory: Israeli Narrative Cinema in the Age of the Second Intifada”. Israel 14 : 71-88 (Hebrew). Request full-text
Morag, Raya. 2008. “Interpretation without a Body, a Body without Interpretation: On Some Cases of Bulimia in Cinema”. In Telling News Stories: Perspectives on Media Discourse in Israel , ed. Motti Neiger Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Liebes. Jerusalm: Smart Communication Institute and Magnes , p. 353-384 (Hebrew). Request full-text
Morag, Raya. 2008. “Chronic Trauma, the Sound of Terror, and Current Israeli Cinema”. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49 (1 (SPRING 2008) : 121-133. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Representation of the trauma of suicide attacks in Israeli fictional cinema during the height of the Second Intifadah (2000-2004) is blocked by both the repression of the trauma and by collectivization of personal memory. That is, by anti-memory. In contrast, the new genre of short-short films of the tele-cinema project Moments provides a befitting response to the time-trap of chronic traumatic temporality by representing its sudden-ness, irreversibility, uncanny presentification, arbitrariness and negative circularity. The unequaled temporality of the attack is realized mainly through the three-minute format, the before/after [if] structure which subverts the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, and audial representation. The posttraumatic short-short cinema of the Second Intifadah responds to the perception of time as cultural and culture-dependent. In doing so, Moments proves that only bi-temporality and the cinematic psycho-acoustics of the terror attack might enhance the Israelis’ confrontation with conservative political orientations via the trauma. In other words, Moments contests Israeli discourse focusing on Jewish victimhood, denying the heavy price of occupation, and the hegemonization of victory. Through its unique format, it operates to advance acknowledgment of the trauma of terror attacks, and therefore, post-traumatic memory.

Morag, Raya. 2008. “The Living Body and the Corpse—Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah”. Journal of Film and Video (3-4) : 3-24. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article offers a reflection on media ethics originating in cinema. Discussing the shift in the politics of the body/corpse as an outcome of the “new” war allows us to compare perspectives towards trauma resulting from suicide attacks in the Israeli documentary No. 17 (as a representative example of an entire corpus), in video recordings taken of suicide bombers before their missions, and in the Palestinian narrative film Paradise Now. Discussing the ethics of the look, the phenomenology of the event of the attack, and the criterion of contamination (our willingness to become contaminated by the corpse as a criterion of accepting the other) the article seeks to distinguish between the discourses oriented towards the other and those which are closed to this comprehension and to these claims. Proposing the body/corpse relationship as a new “materialistic” discourse for discussing trauma also contests the predominance of memory discourse in trauma studies.

2006
Morag, Raya. 2006. “Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of the Vietnam War”. Communication Review 9 (3) : 189 - 219. Request full-textAbstract

After a latency period, the American cinema is processing the trauma of defeat in the Vietnam War. In these films, defeat is repressed but the defeated male is present. Central to the texts is a profound loss of self, incoherence at the gendered core of masculine identity, the failure to conform to the heteronormative mythical model, loss of traditional affiliations (representability of the social order, fatherhood, brotherhood), tortured body, and shattering of sexuality. All three models of post-traumatic masculinity subvert the identification between masculinity, patriarchy, and nationalism.

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Morag, Raya. 2006. “Not a Dirty Secret: On Some Cases of Bulimia in Cinema.”. Camera Obscura 21 (61.1) : 147-182. Request full-textAbstract

 The cinematic representations of bulimia nervosa are few in number. Their very rarity, however, sheds light on the relations between the private body and the public (social, historical, cultural, and cinematic) body, as well as between the private, external, ostensibly visible body, and the internal, invisible, repressed body. Both Hunger Years (Hungerjahre in einem reichen Land, dir. Jutta Brückner, Germany, 1979) (the film’s original title literally
translates into Hunger Years in a Land of Plenty) and Girl, Interrupted (dir. James Mangold, US, 1999) depict the female bulimic body as a resistant body. They do so by presenting a network of conflicts between the private, external/internal body and the public body. These, of course, are different in each case. Hunger Years, Brückner’s autobiographical movie, describes the bulimia of  the (anti)historical body. The bulimia attests that the body itself
has a history, but not in terms of historical continuity. Rather, the female body in Germany in the 1970s creates resistance to the historical body with which the explicit, and particularly the implicit, public discourse affiliates it. That is, the bulimic body of the 1970s creates itself as a body that is resistant to the intergenerational transition of the Nazi-fascist male, and particularly female, body. In Girl, Interrupted, it is the psychocultural bulimic
body that carries the mark of sexual abuse and incest in the mid1960s American family. The bulimic body is the total inversion of the physical model of sexual excess of the 1960s. Bulimic excess replaces sexual excess, an exchange that is tragic because of the incest. The bulimic body as a rebellious body creates interactions not only with the supposedly liberated physical model that the 1960s culture of sexual freedom propagated but also with the model of the political body engaged in political struggle. Just as it resists the sexual revolution, as well as its perverted manifestation within the family unit, it also presents itself as apolitical. 

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2000
Morag, Raya. 2000. “'Life-Taker Heart-Breaker': Mask-ulinity and/or Femininity in Full Metal Jacket”. In The Seeing Century: Film, Vision, and Identity, Rodopi , p. 186 - 197. Request full-text

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