Abstract
Eytan Fox’s 2006 Israeli film The Bubble (הבועה) stages a gay affair between an Israeli and a Palestinian in Tel Aviv. The Bubble has traveled LGBT film festivals throughout the world and received abundant scholarly and critical attention. In disciplines including film studies and comparative literature, The Bubble has been cited for its representation of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” in terms of sexual identification. But theories of performance have only partially documented the artistic merit of the movie. The film’s treatments of “live” performance and the philosophical implications of staging the Holocaust in the utopic context have remained unexplored in critical accounts.
It was kind of raw, the way theater always is: good or bad. Real people in front of you, wanting something, showing their desire. I think that’s why theater has a better reputation than it deserves. The people who make it are so vulnerable. Their desire is so palpable. Their lives are filled with struggle. Almost no one gets rich on the theater. That’s why we think of it as a place for progressive ideas, as a progressive force on the culture at large, something hopeful and somewhat pure.
—Sarah Schulman1
Performance was always, for me, a way of experiencing in imagination and desire what I couldn’t even name in a daily experience that was very much about denying the longings I felt.
—Jill Dolan2
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Notes
Sarah Schulman, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 91.
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© 2013 Angela Jones
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Gorshein, D. (2013). The Play Within the Film: Tel Aviv, History, and the Queer Utopia. In: Jones, A. (eds) A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias. Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311979_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311979_2
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