Sander Gilman's Review on Englander and Sagi book: Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (original) (raw)
Related papers
Abstract: This article asserts that politics motivated Aharon Reuveni to employ representations of psychic fragmentation and dysfunctional social institutions to portray Palestinian Jewish life in his novelistic trilogy ‘Ad Yerushalayim. These purportedly decadent representations helped him foreground individual and collective flaws he saw limiting the early twentieth-century Palestinian Jewish community’s development and promote norms he saw as conducive to growth. Thus, as examination of the trilogy’s central male figures demonstrates, Reuveni advances a Zionist masculinity grounded in introspectiveness and ongoing commitment to the achievement of communally shared goals. To further support this Zionist masculine form, the trilogy categorizes men who pursue homosocial ties with others who don’t maintain this masculinity as homosexuals. Thus gender and sexuality are used to coerce male readers into adopting specific behavioral norms. This attention to gender and sexuality’s role in early twentieth-century Palestinian Hebrew fiction offers a way to grasp its long-overlooked political character.
Sexuality and the Body in the New Religious Zionist Discourse (with Prof. Avi Sagi) (In English)
2015
Religious-Zionism developed in Israel as an attempt to combine halakhic (Jewish Law) commitment with the values of modernity, two networks of meaning not easily reconciled. This book presents a study of the discourse on the body and sexuality within religious-Zionism as it has developed in recent decades, including in cyberspace, and considers such issues as homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, and the relationships between the sexes. It also analyzes the shift to a pastoral discourse and alternative religious perspectives dealing with this discourse together with its far wider social and cultural implications, offering a new paradigm for reading religious cultures.
"'From the closet into the Knesset:' Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity, 2018
This article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself.