INTELLIGIBILITY, QUEERNESS, and PALESTINE by Colleen

CINEMATIC OCCUPATION: INTELLIGIBILITY, QUEERNESS, AND PALESTINE by Colleen Jankovic Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Colleen Jankovic It was defended on November 28, 2012 and approved by Mark Lynn Anderson, Associate Professor, Department of English Troy Boone, Associate Professor, Department of English Todd Reeser, Professor, Department of French and Italian Dissertation Advisor: Neepa Majumdar, Associate Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Colleen Jankovic 2012 iii CINEMATIC OCCUPATION: INTELLIGIBILITY, QUEERNESS, AND PALESTINE Colleen Jankovic, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 This dissertation brings a visual culture and queer studies approach to the study of cinema’s role in discourses of belonging in Israel and Occupied Palestine. I argue that cinema and racialized discourses of gender, sexuality and ethno-nationalism play a key role in the denial of Palestinian belonging. I begin by arguing that ongoing Palestinian dispossession remains largely unrecognizable in the dominant North American and European imagination of Palestine in part due to what became a recognizable and inevitable narrative of Palestine as a Jewish national homeland. Revealing the extra-Zionist routes of early Jewish Agency propaganda films, for example, I detach them from reigning progress narratives in Israeli transnational film studies, and explore their implication in a broader visual culture that promoted exclusive Jewish national belonging in Historic Palestine. Through an analysis of painting, landscape imagery, and settlement architecture, including the early Wall and Tower design of the 1930s settlements and their continued logic in the architectures of occupation today, I place cinema in this larger visual and architectural context of what I call Cinematic Occupation, emphasizing its diverse enlistments in occupation and in the denial of Palestinian belonging. I show how Israeli nationalism reiterates an overly stable, demographically regulated, and militarized sense of home, while a trope of unsettled homes in Palestinian cinema suggests the possibility of persisting in an attachment to “Palestine” without stable foundations. Underscoring how Palestinians have maintained a sense of belonging—to Palestine, to a broader Palestinian iv collectivity—without recourse to dominant narratives of national identity, I argue for a model of solidarity that attends to constrained forms of belonging. In this way, I align my work with recent queer studies work on racialized forms of state, military, and administrative violence, including, but not limited to, those that have an obvious relation to issues of gender and sexual diversity. Ultimately, I argue that dominant Zionist and Israeli narratives about the illegitimacy of Palestinian belonging have benefited from the logic that cinema is a source of visual proof, and I explore alternative models in contemporary Palestinian cinematic practice for thinking about cinema’s potential and limits. v TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................ VI LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................................. VIII PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................................ IX 1.0 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 SHIFTING TERMS ....................................................................................................................................... 8 2.0 CHAPTER ONE: NATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY AND QUEERNESS IN HISTORIC AND OCCUPIED PALESTINE ..................................................................................................................................... 17 2.1 “UNRECOGNIZED” PALESTINE: FRAMES OF REFERENCE FOR PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI CINEMA STUDIES ............................................................................................................................................... 17 2.2 “BUT WHY THE CINEMA?” .................................................................................................................... 45 2.3 CINEMA’S EXPANSE ................................................................................................................................ 56 2.4 WHAT’S QUEER ABOUT…?: QUEER RELATIONALITY AND CRITIQUE .................................... 63 3.0 CHAPTER TWO: ZIONIST “PALESTINE FILMS” AND THE SETTLING OF A JEWISH NATIONAL HOME ............................................................................................................................................... 80 3.1 “PALESTINE FILMS” AND CINEMATIC ZIONISM ............................................................................. 83 3.2 “AT ONCE REMOTE AND NEAR—A PARTICULAR PALESTINIAN PROBLEM” ........................ 96 vi 3.3 SABRAS BLOOMING (IN) THE ARID WASTELAND ...................................................................... 111 4.0 CHAPTER THREE: CINEMATIC OCCUPATION .............................................................................. 134 4.1 THE TOWER AND THE VERTICAL IMAGE ...................................................................................... 145 4.2 THE WALL AND THE HORIZONTAL IMAGE ................................................................................... 159 4.3 CINEMATIC OCCUPATION .................................................................................................................. 173 4.4 QUEER CINEMATIC OCCUPATION .................................................................................................... 179 5.0 CHAPTER FOUR: PALESTINIAN CINEMA AND QUEER PALESTINIAN ALLIANCE .............. 190 5.1 HOUSING IMAGES ................................................................................................................................. 190 5.2 PALESTINIAN UNBELONGING ........................................................................................................... 199 5.3 INHABITING RESISTANCE: WHAT CAN CINEMA DO? ................................................................. 213 5.4 QUEER PALESTINIAN ALLIANCE ...................................................................................................... 225 6.0 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................................... 235 APPENDIX A: LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................... 243 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................ 245 vii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1 “BARREN WILDERNESS,” BUILT IN DAY (1938), PRODUCED BY THE KEREN HAYESOD (UNITED ISRAEL APPEAL). SCREENSHOT TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR FROM THE ONLINE HOLDING IN THE VIRTUAL CATALOGUE OF THE STEVEN SPIELBERG JEWISH FILM ARCHIVE. ............................................................................................................................................................ 235 FIGURE 2 NETWORK OF SETTLEMENTS MAP, FROM BUILT IN A DAY (1938), PRODUCED BY THE KEREN HAYESOD (UNITED ISRAEL APPEAL). SCREENSHOT TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR FROM THE ONLINE HOLDING IN THE VIRTUAL CATALOGUE OF THE STEVEN SPIELBERG JEWISH FILM ARCHIVE. ................................................................................................................................. 236 FIGURE 3 SURVEILLANCE IMAGES (BINOCULARS, WATCHTOWER), FROM BEHIND THE BLOCKADE (1947), PRODUCED BY THE JEWISH NATIONAL FUND. SCREENSHOT TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR FROM THE ONLINE HOLDING IN THE VIRTUAL CATALOGUE OF THE STEVEN SPIELBERG JEWISH FILM ARCHIVE. .......................................................................................................... 236 viii PREFACE My parents, Steve and Catherine Jankovic, deserve the first acknowledgement for their encouragement, their intellectual curiosity and generosity, and the sacrifices they must have made—though have never held over me—to put me through college. I owe a certain “pesky” critical approach to academic, activist, and creative work to the fact of being the middle child between my incredibly smart and witty siblings, Steve and Lauren. For all the times Lauren came to my rescue in college because I, exasperated, desperately needed her help to finish an elaborate photography or video project, I wonder how I managed graduate school without her nearby. I owe so much of my everyday joy to my “other family”—my great love, the dependable Oliver Haimson, and the always-classy Joseph Hall. Colleagues and friends in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh created a challenging intellectual space that shaped the contours of my research, teaching, and critical sensibilities. I am especially grateful to my adviser and committee chair Neepa Majumdar, who helped me through many

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