A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias

Angela Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This anthology is a symposium on queer space and queer utopias. Through the presentation of empirical work by contemporary queer theorists this book aims to create a critical dialogue about the emergence of queer spaces and the ways in which they aim to further queer futurity.

Part I

Theater and Performance

Chapter 1

The Play Within the Film: Tel Aviv, History, and the Queer Utopia

David Gorshein

It was kind of raw, the way theater always is: good or bad. Real people in front of you, wanting something, showing their desire. I think that’s why theater has a better reputation than it deserves. The people who make it are so vulnerable. Their desire is so palpable. Their lives are filled with struggle. Almost no one gets rich on the theater. That’s why we think of it as a place for progressive ideas, as a progressive force on the culture at large, something hopeful and somewhat pure.

—Sarah Schulman¹

Performance was always, for me, a way of experiencing in imagination and desire what I couldn’t even name in a daily experience that was very much about denying the longings I felt.

—Jill Dolan²

Eytan Fox’s 2006 Israeli film The Bubble

stages a gay affair between an Israeli and a Palestinian in Tel Aviv. The Bubble has traveled LGBT film festivals throughout the world and received abundant scholarly and critical attention. In disciplines including film studies and comparative literature, The Bubble has been cited for its representation of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” in terms of sexual identification. But theories of performance have only partially documented the artistic merit of the movie. The film’s treatments of “live” performance and the philosophical implications of staging the Holocaust in the utopic context have remained unexplored in critical accounts.

The specificity of the Jewish Holocaust is particularly vital in the context of gay Israeli identity, even as The Bubble critiques the inevitability of historicization in a moment of staged “liveness.” My argument centers on The Bubble’s incorporation of a “live” scene from Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979). Bent is an American play about the forbidden relationship of two male prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. In addition to the film’s inclusion of a scene from the play, the cinematography in The Bubble replicates some of Bent’s codified imagery.

Sherman’s play has been vilified by theater and literary critics for its depiction of gay suffering during World War II. Adapted into a Hollywood film in 1997, Bent achieved famed status despite attacks for supposed participation in “oppression olympics,” discourses seeking an answer to the question of who, historically, suffered more.³ Debates on the play’s significance have remained in the Euro-American context; here, I address the controversies surrounding Bent’s legacy in a consideration of queer utopic transnationalism. In my close analysis of select scenes from the film I call upon archival research to establish the Israeli reception of Martin Sherman’s play. My analysis is supported by newspaper reviews of the Israeli premiere of Bent

on the Haifa Theater’s “national stage” in 1983, and in a revival in 2003 staged by Beit Zvi in Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb. Critical accounts suggest that the legacy of Bent and the implications of Holocaust performance resound with exceptional nuance in the Israeli context. Funding from the UCLA Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American and World Culture sponsored my archival research at the Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts at Tel Aviv University, where I gathered reviews and playbills. In Tel Aviv, I also interviewed actors and filmmakers, including Gal Uchovsky, coproducer of The Bubble and the film’s screenwriter.

One of the most fascinating and unexplored aspects of The Bubble is the metatheatrical subversion of the play Bent in the film’s farcical “passing” of Ashraf, Noam’s object of affection. Ashraf, a Muslim character, “passes” as the Jewish Israeli named Shimi in order to have an openly gay affair in Tel Aviv. Israeli characters in the film “pass” as French in the Palestinian territories. The theatrical strategy of “passing” alludes to the “passing” of a gay character in Bent as Jewish in an earlier interpretation of the utopic motif of “star-crossed lovers.”

The film depicts a hegemonic, American queerness, whose liberalism is defined by idealized visions of interethnic gay love that ignore political conditions of disparity. Anthropologist Rebecca L. Stein asserts in the article “Explosive: Scenes from Israel’s Gay Occupation” that the film The Bubble suggests “queer desire and sociality can bridge the divide between Israelis and Palestinians . . . in ways that traditional political processes cannot.”⁴ Stein astutely points to the filmmaker’s “Romeo and Juliet template” of forbidden love, but Stein does not go as far as to identify the utopic underpinnings of the mythology. ⁵ In fact, queer theory’s philosophical preoccupation with utopia provides a lens through which to discuss the implications of the play within the film.

My critical assessment of Fox’s film engages theorizations of the Jewish, utopic nation-state, as well as theorizations of utopia from within queer studies. The queer utopia outlined in my discussion synthesizes three theoretical articulations of utopic possibility. The first utopic framework emerges from the historical prescriptions of Israel as the Jewish homeland. The second concept, in the words of scholar Jill Dolan, is the “utopian performative” achieved in theater collaboration and spectatorship.⁶ The third definition of utopia may be found in hopeful futurity, the “collective potentiality” of queerness as described by scholar José Esteban Muñoz; one is never fully queer, and queerness is not yet here, but always possible.⁷ These three imaginative treatments accommodate the national specificity of The Bubble’s fantasy, while hinting at the universalized underpinnings of the cultural object (and of utopic theorization).

Discourses in and about Israel often define the nation as a Jewish utopia in an otherwise hostile, anti-Semitic world. The Bubble’s representation of the Jewish haven historicizes the nation-state in relation to the

Shoah, “the Hebrew word connoting ‘widespread, even cosmic disaster,’ waste, and desolation” during the attempted Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis.⁸ Since Israel’s proclaimed independence in May 1948, dominant national discourses have deployed the Holocaust as the definitive mark of a collective, secular society.⁹ Within the nationalizing project, the Holocaust “became one of the symbols granting a secular identity” to the Israelis.¹⁰ The critical force of the Holocaust as the secular symbol of national separatism in The Bubble must be understood as utopic, in other words, collective.

Jewish and queer theories often insist on collectivism in articulations of utopia. In Israel, the Shoah remains a launch pad for nationalism, a foundation upon which is constructed a “collective memory of the public.”¹¹ For Muñoz, as noted above, queerness offers “a flight plan for a collective political becoming,” a transcendent “collective potentiality.”¹² In The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society, sociologist Meira Weiss describes “collectivism” as “the ‘civil religion’ of Israel, the larger frame of reference through which other issues and problems—such as militarization, the melting pot of immigration, the relations with the diaspora Jews and the Palestinians—are all defined and . . . connected to the military threat Israel faces on a daily basis.”¹³ The Holocaust is regarded as a memory of collective significance, integral to national identification. While The Bubble essentializes homonormative identity in its representation of utopic love, the film’s metatheatrical comment provides historiographic subtext.

The Bubble and Queer Utopia

In the first scene of the film, Palestinian Ashraf meets Israeli Noam at a military checkpoint. Noam stands idly at the border, fulfilling national duty as guard and restricting Ashraf’s access into the country. As Ashraf waits to enter Israel, the film highlights the impositions placed on his mobility as an Arab in an Israeli state. We see surveillance and institutionalized control personified by the gatekeepers (in the words of scholar Nir Cohen, “the Establishment”).¹⁴ At the military checkpoint, national differences are pronounced most divisively. Noam stands listlessly in camouflage, rebuking some amateur photographers who are documenting perceived injustices by the Israeli soldiers. After trying to dissuade the watchdog photographers from filming, Noam asserts in resignation, “Go ahead and film, what do I care?!” The aesthetics suggest the unfortunate reality of political restrictions. The cinematography aims to present the actuality of the scripted moment. The scene depicts off-the-cuff “authenticity,” as the film dabbles in the visual codes of documentary and surveillance, with a black-and-white color scheme, and a blinking red recording signal. These visual codes are dropped when Noam leaves the military compound for the urban paradise of Tel Aviv, shielded from the violent reality of geopolitical struggles.

Ashraf’s entrance into the national sphere is hypersexualized as the film sets up its utopic parameters. Noam represents, in the words of scholar Adi Kuntsman, “the figure of the soldier as a gay icon.”¹⁵ The borders standing between Noam and Ashraf may be viewed, circumstantially, as a site of cruising for gay sex; the men met anonymously in a fit of danger, among strangers. The film underscores this possibility by continued sexualization of the social disparity. The Arab men are asked by the Jewish soldiers to raise their shirts, in order to guarantee no Palestinians have concealed explosives. An Israeli guard demands from the line of men, “I said, slowly! So that I’ll b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice
• Part I Theater and Performance
• Part II Eroticized Spaces
• Part III Queer Counterpublics
• Part IV Queer Political Activism
• Part V Family
• Bibliography
• Notes of Contributors