Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema

Reel Gender, co-edited by Palestinian scholar Sa’ed Atshan and Israeli scholar Katharina Galor, provides a groundbreaking opportunity to bring together chapters that address the social realities and the filmic representations of Palestine and Israel. Although numerous overlapping themes and inquiries within Palestinian and Israeli film explore and portray gender-related questions, scholars have largely continued to focus on either Palestinian or Israeli repertoires separately. The eight essays of Reel Gender, by leading scholars in their respective fields, demonstrate how Palestinian and Israeli film production―despite obvious overlaps and similarities and while keeping in mind the inherent asymmetry of power dynamics―are at the forefront of engaging gender and sexuality. At the same time, the scholars remain mindful that comparisons and similarities need to be anchored with cognizance of structural asymmetries at the levels of production, reception, and general political-social contexts. They construct and deconstruct still and moving images, characters, and stories that together create an entanglement of Palestinian and Israeli fiction and reality. Together they portray the region’s diverse but unexpectedly intermingled ethnic, religious, and national communities, framed or countered by various societal norms, laws, and expectations, and defined by geopolitical boundaries, while drawing methodologically from the fields of Media and Cultural Studies, Critical and Postcolonial Theory, Feminism, Post-feminism, and Queer Theory.