sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

HOME IS AN/OTHER? QUEER TRANSNATIONALISM BETWEEN
NOWHERE AND EVRYWHERE IN PLEASE LOVE AND HOME IS YOU
Shirly BAHAR *
“Now I know what love is” says Yaelle, smiling to the camera. “What is love?” 1 Aya
asks, her face unseen on the screen. “It can’t be explained,” the answer immediately
arrives. The outset of Home is You, appearing in the earlier Please Love too, weaves
collective definitive statements: “We are going to change the definition of ‘coming out’ 2 :
everyone who has a secret is in the closet,” Aya asserts. “We will use the term ‘revelation’:
when you decide to not lie to yourself anymore, to know yourself, and to get people to
know you,” Yaelle completes the sentence. Respectively, this exchange is echoed in the
films’ identical closing scene. There, Yaelle faces Aya and announces: “You taught me not
be afraid of the truth, you gave me strength to be who I am.”
Yasmin SASON **
The documentary films Please Love (Israel, 2011) and Home is You (Israel, 2012) by Aya Shwed
and Yaelle David, portray their shared everyday life as a lesbian couple living in Israel. Framing the
film, the scenes noted above seem to simply foreground Aya and Yaelle’s unanimous explication of
their mutual desire to experience the power of the revelatory. In the quests for love and to finding
home, Please Love and Home is You outline Aya and Yaelle’s journey to personal revelation through
cinematic documentation – indeed, through the women’s filming and filmmaking of their lives. Yet
while ardently seeking for answers, the films also pose two open‐ended fundamental questions
hinted in their names: What is Love? And: where is Home? Accordingly, we too, ask: what do the
women reveal, what do they conceal, and what are they unconscious of, in sharing their personal
performances of self‐identifications throughout the films?
Carefully attending to the cinematic means and audio‐visual activity underpinning the women’s
filmmaking, we spectators pursue, and reroute, Aya and Yaelle’s journey in various winding,
sometimes rocky, liminal and even marginalizing, interpretive directions. We trace the footsteps of
Yaelle and Aya, and follow their verbal and visual speech acts of explicable, but also ambivalent, and
at times absented, dis/closures, to both navigate in their personal identifications, as well as draw a
gendered, trans/national, and post/colonial critical analysis of them. This essay wishes to complicate
the films’ thrive for lucidity, by situating Aya and Yaelle’s personal identification in a particular
Hebrew and Jewish‐Israeli political, cultural, linguistic, and discursive, context. It is only a rigorous
examination of the productive and de/constructive, yet often overlooked, mechanisms of
documentarian filmmaking that can shed significant light on this context.
Typically, as Alisa Lebow has showed in her writings on Jewish and queer First Person
documentaries, one’s Jewish and/or queer identification always either appears as additional to that
person’s other identities, or, at other times, remains completely hidden:
“The declarative and affirmative statement of identification, coming out, is central to
both gay and Jewish visibility in ways that many other identificatory regimes navigate only
marginally…queers and diasporic Jews have to negotiate the terms of their visibility.
Wherever the question of passing exists, so too the problem of the closet. Yet the paths
toward or away from visibility of various Jewish communities are historically distinct from
those taken by gays and lesbians…there are competing strategies at work…and the result
is a contradictory ambivalence, evidenced in an ambiguity of representation of one or
other of these identificatory positionalities.” 3
*
New York University - New York, USA
**
Tel Aviv University - Tel Aviv, Israel