Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema

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Reel Gender is a groundbreaking collection that addresses the collective realities and the filmic representations of Palestinian and Israeli societies. The eight essays, by leading scholars, demonstrate how Palestinian and Israeli film productiondespite obvious overlaps and similarities and while keeping in mind the inherent asymmetry of power dynamicsare at the forefront of engaging gender and sexuality. The scholars of this volume construct and deconstruct still and moving images, characters, and stories that create an entanglement of Palestinian and Israeli cinema. Together they portray the regions diverse but unexpectedly intermingled ethnic, religious, and national communities, framed or countered by various societal norms, laws, and expectations, while also defined by colonial realities. The essays draw methodologically from the fields of media and cultural studies, critical and postcolonial theory, feminism, post-feminism, and queer theory.

Reviews

A double lens on Israeli and Palestinian film, 2 distinctive yet enmeshed sets of films addressing contemporary connundra of gender, sexuality, and identity in a desperate, yet vital world inhabited so differently by both, yet with similar anxieties and to a degree, aspirations. The book begins with a superb introduction by the pair of editors, one Israeli the other Palestinian, and is followed by trenchant and interesting studies by top scholars. This book is a must for anyone wishing to decipher the complex double reality of Israel/Palestine. * Daniel Herwitz, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor, Comparative Literature, Philosophy and History of Art, University of Michigan, USA *
Without losing sight of the 'inherent asymmetry of power dynamics,' Reel Gender projects the entanglement of Palestine/Israel for us to see. Against the backdrop of settler colonialism and through the lens of gender which puts power and inequality in focus, Atshan and Galor bravely invite their contributors and readers to a difficult and necessary conversation about the making of fiction and reality. * Huda J. Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA *

Author Bio

Sa'ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, USA. He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (2020) and coauthor of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020). Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Brown University, USA. She is the coauthor of The Archeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins through the Ottomans (2013) and The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020) and the author of Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (2017).