Post-Trauma, Race, and Sexuality: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema during the second Intifada

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.