New Article: Amihay, Color Photography and Self-Outing in Jewish Women’s Comics

Amihay, Ofra. “Red Diapers, Pink Stories. Color Photography and Self-Outing in Jewish Women’s Comics.” Image & Narrative 16.2 (2015): 42-64.

URL: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/811

 

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the function of color photography in autobiographical comics through a comparative analysis of confessional works of comics by two Jewish women artists, Jewish-American cartoonist Dianne Noomin’s 2003 comics spread “I Was a Red Diaper Baby” and Israeli cartoonist Ilana Zeffren’s Pink Story (written in Hebrew). While exploring the tensions evoked in these works between comics and photography and between black-and-white and color representations, I highlight an important difference in the nature of the images used in each work, evoking yet another tension: that between private and public. I demonstrate that these works by Noomin and Zeffren represent the array of private and public photographs available to any autobiographer, ranging from public images taken from posters, magazines, and video screenshots to intimate family snapshots. I argue that the choice between personal and public photographs in these works poetically determines the path of self-outing in each work, thus representing the two key options for such an act of self-outing, namely, using the personal sphere as a path to the public one or vice-versa. Finally, I address the role of Jewish identity in these two self-outing comics. I posit that while Jewish heritage is not a major factor in either work, the fact that in both cases the community of reference is a minority group within a Jewish community plays a significant role, introducing specific dilemmas into the already complicated identity struggle. By shedding light on the unique function of color photography in autobiographical comics about ethnographically charged self- outing experiences, the analysis of these specific works introduces to a wider audience two important yet insufficiently explored voices of women cartoonists.

 

New Book: Tzur, Space and Place in the Novels of S. Yizhar (in Hebrew)

צור, דביר. בין הבית לשדה, בין אדם למקום. המרחב והמקום בספריו של ס. יזהר ‘מקדמות’ ו’צלהבים’. ירושלים: מאגנס, 2015.

URL: http://www.magnespress.co.il/

 

Abstract

S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel’s most prominent authors, is considered by many to be the greatest literary conqueror of the local Israeli space, of which he wrote his epic novels and short stories. With his pen Yizhar transformed space into a place which is an integral part of the world for many, a place that is theirs and to which they belong.

In 1992, after 28 years of literary silence, Yizhar published his novel Preliminaries. The following year he published Zalhavim. These two books were the opening notes for his later wave of writing which included, in addition to these novels the short stories collections Asides, and By the Sea, and the novels Lovely Malcolmia and Discovering Elijah.

In this book, Tzur follows the footsteps of Preliminaries and Zalhavim. He examines their poetics of space, focused on the home and the field, two places that Yizhar alludes to time and again. In these novels Yizhar is not the literary conqueror of Israeli space, but rather one who observes his home and environment in a complex way. The Yizharian space is revealed as a world where the private and the public are intermingled with each other side by side. This is a space where the concrete and the envisioned, the universal and the local, are combined and intertwined with one another; a very Israeli space, very local and yet at the same time a space that raises existential and political questions, the answers to which is always nuanced, always multi-dimensional.

Cite: Fenster and Hamdan-Saliba, Gender and feminist geographies in the Middle East

Fenster, Tovi and Hanaa Hamdan-Saliba, “Gender and Feminist Geographies in the Middle East.”

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2012.709826

Abstract

This article aimed to review the research carried out in the Middle East
primarily on gender and feminist geography and also on place formation,
urban space, movement and mobility in the social and political
sciences. This aim turned out to be challenging primarily because of the
colonial and post-colonial history of the region that continues to have
a profound effect on the development of academic knowledge among Middle
Eastern scholars as well as a restricted accessibility to material
published inside the Middle East. Despite this, the article primarily
focuses on feminist research on Middle Eastern women done by Middle
Eastern scholars and published in Middle Eastern journals and books
primarily in Arabic (and Hebrew in Israel). However, during the process
of reviewing a large variety of articles, book chapters and books that
exist on Middle Eastern women, we realized that it is sometimes
difficult and rather artificial to review the material with only this
division in mind. In the end, we reviewed the literature on gender and
feminism in the Middle East mainly highlighting local published research
and also briefly referring to research published in the West by both
Westerners and local researchers. The article begins with presenting its
research methodology. It then analyzes the website and literature
review that we carried out on the contexts, frameworks and themes of
gender and feminist geography and spatial research in the Middle East
with particular attention on the research carried out in
Israel/Palestine. We focus on the private–public spheres; migration and
diaspora and the veil as key concepts in analyzing the literature in
this section. In the last section, we explain the reasons for the
limitations on gender and feminist research in geography inside the
Middle East and mention some general conclusions.