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Abstract

It is perhaps well known that Stephen Dwoskin was a survivor of polio and made work that was in many ways defined by the lifelong legacy of that childhood event. The focus on the body and its subjectivities has other resonances that demonstrate deep roots of preoccupation to do with Dwoskin’s cultural background that I aim to discuss in this article. Not explicitly explored in the film work, critically this aspect of his work has been ignored. Jonathan Boyarin, in his text, “Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Jewish Man” (1997) sets out a framework for the rethinking of Jewish masculinity as an embodied and proudly feminized entity. He sets this against the stereotypes of a Christian normative macho male identity and the overtly antisemitic trope of the feminized male Jew. In popular culture, postwar American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth and Norman Mailer often embraced the macho male (and its misogynist tendencies), symptomatic of the assimilationist impulse and opportunity of the US at that time. For Stephen Dwoskin, the tension between the Jewish masculinity of his upbringing and the postwar macho masculinity can be seen in the ambivalence of his films towards women. This tension is heightened by Dwoskin’s own disability, which left him in calipers and subsequently, a wheelchair. Boyarin’s claim that the outsiderness of the Jew affords empathy with the feminist critiques of manhood resonates with Dwoskin’s own claim that his works such as Dyn Amo (1972) were empathetic to the plight of women’s oppression. Through a close reading of passages from this early film, and comparisons with Dwoskin’s later autobiographical films such as Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994) and Grandpere’s Pear (2003), I will interrogate the tensions in Dwoskin’s masculinity, disability, and representation of women through Boyarin’s framework of Jewishness.

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