sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

Israel as a gay haven in darker tones. Moreover and complementarily, it seems that the films
separate the personal from the political, and, along these lines, also shun from elaborating on the
complex cultural politics formatively at work in Yaelle’s father’s homophobia.
In Aya and Yaelle’s relationship and films, the marriage ceremony is an ultimate aim and
endpoint. Under this canopy, Aya and Yaelle stand together, surrounded with Aya’s family and
friends in Israel; Aya’s father, moreover, delivers his wishes and thus declares his acceptance of their
relationship with his special dedicated speech. To that end, Aya’s efforts to sway Yaelle into the
marriage institution may be seen as attempts to dissipate the Mizrahi immigrant’s homophobic
heritage and precipitate her assimilation in the presumably liberal Euro‐American‐oriented Jewish
society in Israel. These attempts, finally, require Yaelle’s full disclosure of her truthful self.
And yet, let us highlight another, far from miscellaneous, final point, that our above examination
indicates: that the more Yaelle’s real self is sought, the harder the camera and the phone have to
work to capture, mediate, and construct her audio‐visual image. If we reckon that the revelation and
assimilation of Yaelle's presumable inner self inevitably rely on a reflexively mediating camera, and
on a feminized telephone device that facilitates diasporic disconnects, we may consequently discern
the films' potential points of internal contestation. Indeed, this conclusive note wishes to
underscores that Please Love and Home is You not only reiterate a Zionist master narrative, but they
also facilitate a critical reading against its – and its own – grains.
In fact, rather than unearthing coherent knowledge about her identity, the multimedia event of
emotional exposition portrays and produces cracks and absences in Yaelle’s tearful and trembling
unraveled bare self. “When you’re on the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even if this
flow is unmarked”, contends Ronell: the telephone “sheds the purity of an identity as a tool,
however, through its engagement with immateriality.” 18 This series of cinematic productions and
de/constructions of lines of dis/connections in turn shed light on the unmarked and immaterial loss
and lack structuring Yaelle’s multiple engagements to and with Aya. For, it may be said that the closeup
events render the explicit yet unexplained, charged yet recondite, topic of Yaelle and her mother's
conversations – Yaelle's father's absence due to his homophobia – as a caesura begging for further
contextualization. In this way, the cinematic emphasis on redundant, particularly feminized,
audiovisual mediations in the close‐ups scenes paves the path to a contextualization and
politicization of a paternal and patriarchal homophobic denunciation: such contextualization and
politicization were the tasks of our essay.
Today, the women are no longer together. Home is Everywhere – says Aya in the end. Yet the
films leave us with questions about Home & Love that perhaps cannot be retrieved all in one central,
or even particular, place. Perhaps it is neither the here, nor the there, but rather, if to borrow from
Orly Lubin, only “the margins are the site where ethnicity may find itself, and create itself, a home,
where it won’t be marked as “an ethnic otherness.” 19 Perhaps, we should return to our own mothers’
tongue, the Turkish, where “ev” means “home”, and convey that Home is, or could be, Everywhere.
This will certainly require a future film (and/or a future paper).
Keywords: Auto/biography, Films, Queer studies, Women’s life narration, Myths and
historiography
Shirly Bahar
sb3360@nyu.edu
Yasmin Sason
Tel‐Aviv University & Minshar for Art
maxyasmin@gmail.com