Queer/Palestinian Cinema: A Critical Conversation on Palestinian Queer and Women's Filmmaking

Abstract

While expanding critiques of pinkwashing have drawn increasing attention to how queer issues in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories are perniciously mobilized by a network of lobby groups, Brand Israel initiatives, and international gay and lesbian organizations, these critiques often fail to consider how queer Palestinians mobilize and understand themselves. This article reports on an October 2011 panel and film screening at Yale University and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. “Queer/Palestinian: Critical Strategies in Palestinian Queer and Women's Filmmaking” uniquely focused on questions of queerness and Palestine through a program of eight new Palestinian visual productions. The program brought together Palestinian film scholars, filmmakers, visual artists, and curators for a discussion of queer and feminist artistic practice in relation to Palestinian strategies for resistance. Together, the “Queer/Palestinian” films suggest the urgency for Palestinian visual artists to persistently generate new means of expressing, embodying, and critiquing visions for Palestinian society. Films such as Victoria Moufawad-Paul's Nus Enssas/ صيصنصن (Canada, 2011) and Raafat Hattab's Hourieh (Palestine, 2011) explore issues ranging from queer diasporic solidarity politics and challenges to out/closeted binaries and to the creative reinscription of nakba narratives. Nadia Awad's Two Adaptations of the Same Novel (US, 2011), Suzy Salamy's 1982/2006 (US, 2006), and Moufawad-Paul's Rejoice, O My Heart / يبلق اي حرفا (Canada, 2011) suggest an irreverent queer strategy by undermining the narrative conventions and visual codes of mainstream news media and popular US and Egyptian cinema. Salamy's video, previously projected through mobile exhibition on city buildings, and Eli Rezik's online “web-movies” Living Alone without Me (Palestine, 2011) and Between Us Two (Palestine, 2011) compelled a panel discussion of alternative means of distribution and exhibition. Finally, Alaa AbuAsad's Masturbate bil beit (Palestine, 2011) rounded out the program with an explicitly erotic and unapologetically political version of the meeting of “queer” and “Palestinian.”