Imagining Independence Park.

Abstract

My dissertation, entitled Imagining Independence Park, uses literary texts, photographs, and art installations to explore the strategies and practices that gay Israelis adopt in order to assimilate into mainstream society and to distinguish themselves from it. I analyze diverse cultural representations of Independence Park, the main site for cruising in Tel-Aviv, theorizing the ways in which the local queer community defines itself through the issue of space and sex. My dissertation writes the history of the park and introduces a new way to think about the history of the LGBT community in Israel: cruising as a grassroot tool of community building. With the help of comparisons to American and European cultures, my dissertation examines how, when facing the threat of HIV/AIDS, Israeli gay men ascribe new meanings to their spatial environment, their own bodies, and other men. I study how they construct sexual narratives within a community that sees itself peripheral to western gay culture. My project also discusses cultural constructions of self and communal identity as complex outcomes of diverse cultural influences—Jewish, Israeli, and also western homosexuality—vis-à-vis ideological, historical, political, social, and religious forces.