Ashkenizing Homosexuality?: Yossi Avni's "The One Who Does Not Know How to Ask"

Abstract

This article engages Yossi Avni's 1988 novella She'eino yode'a lish'ol through an aspect usually left underexamined in Israeli culture: gay Mizrahi identity. In the cultural context of the 1990s, which typically associated homosexuality exclusively with Ashkenazim and the West, this groundbreaking novella opened new avenues in the representation of non-Ashkenazi sexual minorities. Continuously negotiating what he sees as conflicting parts of his self, Yossi, the narrator of the novella, strives to find a safe space in which he can voice his position as a double minority that is trapped between different exclusionary social systems. Destabilizing essentialist conventions about sexuality and ethnicity, the text offers various ways to resist marginalization.