...Anal Israel
_Hide and Seek_ (1980) was the first Israeli film that referred directly to interracial male-male sexual desire. Against the background of 1946 Jerusalem during the British Mandate, the film presents the story of Uri, a young boy left with his grandfather after his parents are sent on a political mission to Europe. Uri and his friends form a secret society that aspires to help Jewish underground organizations, such as the Haganah, in their war against both British rule and the Arab enemy. At the same time, he develops a warm and trusting relationship with his schoolteacher, Balaban, a man who is unconventional not only because of his informal teaching methods but because of his refusal to join any underground organization. When Uri spots Balaban exchanging words and notes with Arab men, he and the other boys suspect him of being a spy. While the members of the Haganah find him not guilty of espionage, they nevertheless discover his secret -- he is having sex with an Arab man -- and decide to punish him for his "treason." Wanting to protect Balaban, Uri rushes to his apartment and, through the window, witnesses him and his Arab partner making love. A few seconds later the Haganah members break open the door and beat them up.
The film critically links prestate nationalist anxieties and fears of biracial homosexuality. Male-male desire is perceived as a threat to national security and as an alien, unnatural behavior because of its un-Zionist practice, its sexual entanglement with the Arab enemy. The film conflates homosexuality and fears of Arab infiltration to show that homophobia and nationalist ideology are closely intertwined. The ability of the homosexual, like the spy, to "pass" produces anxiety for heterosexuals -- especially for heterosexual men or, in this case, boys -- about the undetected pervasiveness of sexuality and the subversive activities of the enemy within. For this reason the homosexual/spy must be identified, made visible, marked, tracked, and regulated. Furthermore, the reading of the homosexual, like the spy, as both visibly different (Balaban "doesn't look like a man at all," says one of the boys) and totally invisible produces in the heterosexual child, Uri, a simultaneous desire to see the "secret world" of homosexuality and a fear of the spectacle of male-male sex. Indeed, he dreads this sight precisely because of his desire to look at, to make visible, and to control the visibility of homosexual difference. He desires to see but, paradoxically, cannot afford to see. The glimpsed vision of male-male sex marks the threatened return of (anal) pregenital pleasures that the heterosexual subject must disavow in order to submit to the triumphant law of the father. Thus the sight of two men fucking must be visible only through its repudiation, figured in the Haganah's homophobic violence. Through this repudiation the heterosexual boy comes into being.
Although _Hide and Seek_ critiques nationalist ideology for denying the possibility of interracial sexual expression, it avoids representing the actual relationship between Balaban and his nameless Arab lover. Their presence is expressly staged as an allegory of the nationalist fanaticism engulfing Israeli society. Their queer voice is never heard, for we always witness them from a distance, through Uri's gaze. Images of biracial male-male sexual desire appear only in the last moments of the film, which therefore eschews the complexities and tensions inherent in the construction of racial homosexual subjectivities in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Interracial (homo)sexuality, then, remains at the fringes of, or is excluded from, both the film and the official nationalist discourse.
Amos Guttman was the first filmmaker to produce queer Israeli cinema. _Drifting_ (1983), his first feature film, presents sexual relations between Israeli and Palestinian men and suggests a critique of both the official nationalist ideology and the sexual politics of Israeli gay subculture. Generally, representations of (homo)sexuality in Guttman's films offer no redemptive vision. The protagonists are hopelessly caught in vicious circles of sexual and emotional exploitation. They depend on each other for their social, economic, and emotional existence -- for their very identity -- but cannot bear the incursions of others into their lives. They are oppressed, manipulated, and betrayed, but at the same time they exercise power and domination over others. In _Drifting_, for instance, Ilan is a married gay man who has sex with his wife ("You close your eyes and think about the national anthem") only because he is afraid to be without her economic support. Yet he mocks his one-night-stand soldier lover, who "gets a dick up his ass and immediately talks about a relationship." In another scene, at a gay club, Robby, a young filmmaker who wants to make "the first Jewish gay movie," follows an attractive man into the bathroom, hoping for casual sex. Rejected on the spot, he gives a blow job to another young man whom he does not desire and whom he himself rejects a minute later. During another episode Robby finds out that an old man who had promised to sponsor his new film never had the money to begin with. "He asked me not to leave him, because he doesn't have anyone," Robby says. "He asked me to sleep with him. . . . I slept with him. I don't know how." In _Amazing Grace_ (1992), Yonatan falls in love with Thomas, who continually rejects him but eventually has sex with him, then returns to New York, leaving Yonatan alone and infected with HIV. In the same film Miki, an army deserter who tries to commit suicide after his mother hands him over to the military police, says sadly: "Whatever I do, I am always left alone."
This pessimism, inflated to the point of self-annihilation, is interspersed with flashes of ecstatic optimism and sexual fantasies, most of them unattainable. Guttman depicts threatening emotional situations as well as moments of self-sacrifice and unconditional love in an aesthetically pleasing, camp form that makes psychic and social existence tolerable. Most of his films present a dancing ritual that dramatizes the power relations of sex. In these rituals of subjection and possession, men challenge and fight one another, seduce and touch one another, play games of domination and submission, of weakness and dependency, performing the mechanics of control expressed in the sexual act. In _Drifting_, Robby takes into his home three runaways, convincing them that he will give them roles in his new film if they will obey him. Sitting masterfully in his "director chair," he orders them to take off their clothes and perform oral sex. In this scene the hierarchical authority inherent in cinematic production dramatizes the power relations and self-abasement in sexuality itself. Guttman rejects the illusory, redemptive account of sexual desire in favor of what Leo Bersani terms "the inestimable value of sex as -- at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects -- anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving." 20
Guttman's radical visions of sexuality were rejected by the Aguda, the Israeli association of gay men, lesbian, bisexuals, and transgendered people that in the 1970s began to demand more "positive" images of Jewish Israeli gay life. 21 He was accused of incorporating into his films a "depressing," "alienating," even homophobic imagery of gay social existence. 22 Indeed, Guttman shows obvious contempt for the demand for "politically correct," idealized and sanitized, depictions of (homo)sexuality. He refuses to provide "positive" images of either gay or straight sex. Contrary to the Zionist project of redeeming the male body, male (homo)sexuality is associated in his films with power and domination, with violence and death. Fantasies of power and control give way, in anticipatory excitement or in the orgasmic shattering of the body, to degrading self-abolition. Representations of sex emphasize the sexual act as the embodiment of abdication of mastery, of the desire to abandon the self in favor of communicating with "'lower' orders of being." 23
In _Drifting_ this subversive sexual politics is dramatized through the sexual relationship between Robby and two Palestinian "terrorists," as his grandmother calls them, whom he invites into his home. He feeds them, bandages the wound of one of them (it is implied that they are running away from the Israeli police), and even pleasures them by summoning a female prostitute to the house. In the middle of the night he wakes one of them, an attractive, hypermasculine man; leans against the wall; pulls down his underwear; and asks the Palestinian to fuck him.
Gay anal receptivity is associated in phallocentric culture with the abdication of power, with insatiable feminine sexuality. Gay men who embrace this understanding of anal sex represent to others, according to Bersani, a desire to abandon positions of mastery and the coherence of the self: "Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis." 24 Contrary to Gedalia in _Hamsin_, for example, Robby willingly renounces his self-mastery, submits to the domination of the racial other, and positions himself as the object of an Arab male's anal penetration. He yearns for dissolution of the psychic boundaries of the self, forfeits his authority as the oppressor, relinquishes his sovereign status, attempts to become the other rather than the colonizer. For Robby, only at the moment of merging -- at the sexualized political and racial moment of mixing, in the terrible and pleasurable shattering of the subject -- is jouissance to be found. By willingly submitting in this way, however, he passionately and compulsively seeks an antiredemptive self-shattering of ego boundaries and national identity, thereby demonstrating his hostility toward the Israeli political and national order. At the same time, by celebrating the sexual pleasure found in anti-identificatory self-annihilation, _Drifting_ challenges the Aguda's sexual identity politics and its imperious demand for a "respectful" representation of homosexuality. Thus the film articulates a radical and highly critical position versus the sexual and nationalist norms of (gay and straight) Israeli society.
In _Drifting_, Guttman's most autobiographical film, the diegetic and extradiegetic filmmakers (Robby and Guttman) present this critique at the outset, when the protagonist addresses the camera in a monologue. Complaining about the lack of support his new movie has received from the gay and straight Israeli establishment, Robby shifts in his monologue from the third to the first person, from talking about the hero of his forthcoming film to talking about himself:
If the film dealt with a social problem, or if the hero at least had a political opinion: if he were a soldier, if he were a resident in a developing town, if he served on a naval destroyer, if he became religious, if he were a war widow. But if you must have him be a homosexual, then at least he should suffer; he shouldn't enjoy it. The state is burning; there's no time for self-searching. There's a war now. There's always a war. He left the army of his own will, without a reason. The viewers won't accept this. There are too many dead relatives. He's not sympathetic, not thoughtful; he scorns all those who want the best for him. He's not even a sensitive soul, a composed intellectual. Why should they [the viewers] identify with me? Why should they identify with him? Even the Gay Association doesn't want to hear about the short films I've made. They're not positive films. They don't put homosexuals in the desired light.
According to Robby/Guttman, homosexuals do not have a right to representation not only because they do not serve "national interests" but because, in the rare cases when they are represented, they must be constructed as sad, suffering people. Obviously, Guttman is not aiming for a positive image of gay men; in fact, he sharply critiques it in the monologue. When Robby/Guttman argues that homosexual men, according to the straight mind, cannot be happy and enjoy life, it is because homosexual sex is intolerable to heterosexual culture, on account of its threatening appeal of loss of ego, of self-debasement. Homosexual people must suffer -- they must not "get it," and certainly they must not enjoy it -- because male-male sexual desire threatens the traumatic undoing of the psychic and national self on which heterosexuality is based.
Guttman achieves this complex critique of the nationalist discourse and the sexual politics of the Aguda through the narrative of male-male sex between Israeli and Palestinian. But what does this sexual agenda imply for _Drifting_'s representation of the Palestinian men? I would argue that Guttman's radical vision of (homo)sexuality comes at the price of a racist construction of the Arab male, who is compelled to inhabit an uninhabitable zone of ambivalence that denies his identity. 25
In _Drifting_ Robby does not (and we do not) know much about his Palestinian companions: they have no names, no history. It is not clear (and it seems not to matter) whether they are Israeli citizens or Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. They simply came from "The Village." The film thereby maintains the long tradition of repressive and discriminatory politics of representation of Arabs and Palestinians in Israeli cinema: their identity is elided, dismissed, stripped of its uniqueness, and it becomes an abstract object for Israeli examination, knowledge, and sexual pleasure. 26 The homogenization of their subjectivity and history not only makes Israeli discursive domination easier but enables the construction of an Israeli (male homosexual) authority and sovereign consciousness in which, and in relation to which, the Palestinian people emerge. Further, Arab masculinity is associated in the film with hypersexuality and virility, embodying for the Israeli orientalist gaze, to put it in Said's terms, a promise of "excessive 'freedom of intercourse,'" suggesting the "escapism of sexual fantasy" and "untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies." 27 Palestinian men are held to engage in not just any sex but licentious same-sex sex, reinforcing the Israeli homophobic belief that "all Arab men are homosexuals" or at least participate in homosexual sex. At the same time, they are represented in the film as coming from a backward, primitive, and conservative Islamic society. "In our village someone like you would be dead by now," the Palestinian whom Robby has had sex with says to him.
The stereotype of homophobically violent "Islamic fundamentalist" Palestinian men is embedded in _Drifting_, along with their image as terrorists. Once their assumed homosexuality is displaced onto homophobia and terrorism, _Drifting_ can rehearse the Israeli national (anal) anxiety that "the Arabs want to fuck us in the ass," an allegory for the constructed Palestinian desire to eliminate Israel. In Israeli cultural representation, the Arab anal threat is figured in terms of the enemy's sexual pathology and anti-Semitism and not in terms of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. The paradox that "all Arab men are homosexuals" and "all Arabs are homophobic terrorists" enables Israeli cultural discourse not only to regulate the Arab male body and Arab sexuality but to deny Israel's own colonialist practices and racist (sexual anal) aggressiveness by assigning them to the inimical body of the Palestinian man. 28 This ambivalent representation of Palestinian masculinity allows _Drifting_ to exploit the Arab male body and sexuality and to absolve itself of guilt by associating the Palestinian man with homophobic and nationalistic violence and, at the same time, aligning itself with presumably Western attitudes of tolerance and progressiveness toward racial and sexual issues. In this way, fears of and desires for the Arab male body that structure the homophobic discourse of the Orient help constitute the construction of the Israeli/Western (homo)sexual self.
Robby's sexual jouissance and ego shattering could be achieved not in spite of or in contrast to Israeli domination but because of it. The Israeli gay man is allowed the privilege of sex with Palestinian men because of certain historical and economic factors, such as the Israeli colonization of the Occupied Territories. Palestinian bodies are exploited not only for cheap labor but as objects of (homo)sexual desire. Looking through his window with desire at the Palestinian male's half-nude muscular body, Robby's friend asks him, "Should I buy him for you?" 29 Fixed by the Israeli male homosexual gaze, the Palestinian male body becomes a product, a commodity for the consumption and visual pleasure of the young Israeli film director, as well as for the Israeli new queer cinema and its viewers. No matter how much Robby subverts the Israeli sexual and national order, he still enjoys the privileges of Israeli occupation. Under the sheltering sky of Israeli colonization, the anally penetrated male does not necessarily occupy a position of powerlessness or submission, or the penetrator one of mastery and domination. Rather, anal-sex power relations are effected and structured by race, class, and national privilege....
Raz Yosef holds a Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University. He is visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. His book _Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema_ is forthcoming.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v008/8.4yosef.html> & <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v008/8.4yosef.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>