Explosive: Scenes from Israel's gay occupation

Abstract

This essay examines two works by the Israeli director Eytan Fox-Florentin, a television serial, and The Bubble, a feature film-and the highly divergent ways they negotiate the interplay between queerness, the Israeli state, and the Israeli military occupation. Reading Fox's works symptomatically, the essay proposes that Florentin and The Bubble can be understood as indexes of the changing Israeli political landscape of the last decade-both the vacillating landscape of gay rights and visibility within the nation-state and the changing landscape of Israeli occupation and Palestinian struggle that the Oslo process of the 1990s made possible. In keeping with the tradition of symptomatic reading, the analysis pays close attention to storylines and populations that Fox has excluded from these works, arguing that Fox's representations of gay Israeli life are intimately enmeshed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even at moments when, through cinematic silence, the conflict is implicitly disavowed. © 2010 by Duke University Press.