Queering Palestine: Piercing Eytan Fox's Imagined Bubble with Sharif Waked's Chic Point

Abstract

In this piece I address the construction of male homosexuality in Eytan Fox's The Bubble (Israel, 2006) in contrast with its presentation in the artist Sharif Waked's short film, Chic Point (Palestine, 2003). Examining the tensions between Palestinian and Israeli masculinity and homosexual desire, I espouse a narrative about the dualities of representing Palestinian queerness. I argue that the very nature of Palestinian daily life is queer. That is, if we utilize the word in the now anachronistic adjectival sense whereby the word queer describes a sense of strange(ness) or even the life of a stranger. The forced and unpredictable movement of individuals from the now depopulated Palestinian towns, villages, and holy sites into refugee camps and diasporas evidences the queering of modern Palestinian identity in this sense. The emotion or impression that one is a perpetual stranger in one's birth land, without an inherent or stable representation of community identity, encourages one to cling vicariously to “the imagined.” Similarly, the possibility of a secure and collective Palestinian citizenship currently exists only in a fictive guise, as the narrative of perpetual conflict continues to shadow any vision of what a peaceful reality might look like. Thus it is increasingly difficult to speak of sexual politics without reference to grander institutional schemas.