ellauri152.html on line 595: I’ve seen Yentl the movie-musical several times, and there’s so much to unpack there, you could watch it a hundred times and have something new to talk about each time—whether it’s in the vein of despairing over the unnecessary heterosexuality of it all (even Wikipedia notes how aggressively the film erases as much queerness as it can!), or reveling in its grudging gayness (because even if Streisand decided she was playing a straight cis woman, the author is dead and it’s so easy to see Anshel and Avigdor on screen, both men, falling in love with each other).
ellauri152.html on line 609: It’s frustrating to catalogue the ways in which the film works to cis-normify the story. No Yentl crossdressing into the infinite future. No wrestling with her gender identity. The film’s ending throws out the story’s ambiguity and unapologetic queerness in favor of, one might charitably say, a feminist ending, or one might say uncharitably and truthfully, a cisnormative ending.
ellauri152.html on line 621: This genderqueerness is the simple fact of Yentl’s character in Yeshiva Boy, but totally painted over in Yentl.
ellauri152.html on line 622: And yet in other ways, the film can’t help preserving the queerness of the story despite itself. Barbra Streisand can add a song about how Yentl is just jealous of Badass for being a conventionally feminine woman whom Avigdor loves, but she can’t stop me from putting my grubby little bi hands all over her film, pointing at Yentl’s tortured gaze aimed at Badass, and saying “GAY.” And she certainly didn’t no-homo the interactions between Anshel and Avigdor very well, because they are in fact very yes-homo, and I will point and say “GAY” at that too.
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