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The recent prodemocratic protests in northern Africa and the Middle East suggest that transnational feminist scholars should continue to pursue a scholarly trend that was already in the making: a re-turn to considering the nation as performed by gendered bodies. Working toward a methodology that keeps the national and transnational in productive tension, I map the transnational turn in recent feminist scholarship and suggest a refined set of critical concerns going forward. Using the established scholarship of film studies scholar Hamid Naficy and the feminist geographer Doreen Massey as support, I analyze the work of Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, particularly his film The Syrian Bride (Kalah ha-Surit), to demonstrate the salience of a re-turn to a focus on nations and nationalisms. In brief, I argue for the importance of considering gendered social relations in place —that is, as a particular articulation of space-time relations—and argue for a critical approach that understands transnationality as a political modality that is an effect of national border crossing always inflected by these relations. Ultimately, I suggest that a revised transnationalist approach will allow feminist scholars to keep nation, gender/sex, and body as central analytics in their work in order to imagine new representations of embodiment through and beyond current struggles and to take the first steps toward opening up the possibility of what Massey calls "positive interrelations with elsewhere." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005); The Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis, 2008) and Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), explore the Arab-Israeli conflict through women's experience of the political and military stalemate. In presenting Palestinian, Druze, and Israeli women, these filmmakers attempt to contrast and compare women's shared encounters, including their experience of patriarchy. While the characters may come from diametrically opposed sides, their experiences as women occlude their political differences. In these films, women are foregrounded within the plot, and have agency over their actions if not their situations. Rejecting the masculine frame that has governed representations of the conflict, these filmmakers demonstrate a new kind of approach in Israeli film that considers feminist aesthetics in the construction of character and plot, as well as the treatment of women's physicality, gaze, territoriality, and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]