Resisting Genealogy

Diasporic Grief and Heterosexual Melancholia in the Israeli Films Three Mothers and Late Marriage

Bibliographic Data

ID6152640
AuthorsRaz Yosef (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume4
Issue2
Pages161-161
Publication date2016-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJewish Film & New Media An International Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2169-0324 • E-ISSN: 2169-0332
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.2.0161
OpenAlexW2593540624
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

The article explores the relationships between diaspora and nationalism, heterosexuality and queerness in two Israeli films: Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006) and Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili, 2001). These films reconfigure home as both nation and diaspora outside the heteronormative logics of the family, kinship, and hetero-patriarchal inheritance and genealogy. Although the films are about heterosexual romances, I argue that they offer a radical critique of both national and diasporic narratives that rely on a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction, and which therefore exclude non-heteronormative sexuality and desire. They expose and challenge the politics of the Oedipal organization and normative kinship systems by deploying modes of melancholia to reimagine and reassemble new forms of desire, identification, pleasure, and belonging to spaces such as home and family, diaspora and nation, which have traditionally denied anti-heteronormative existence. The films link ethnic to heterosexual melancholia and show that the loss of the diasporic past conceals the even deeper and more hidden loss of queer familial sexual ties

Developmental psychology · Genealogy · Grief · Melancholia · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Social Psychology

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