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 paper. 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 feminised entity. He sets this against the stereotypes of a Christian normative macho male identity and the overtly anti-semitic trope of the feminised male Jew. In popular culture, post war American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, often embraced the macho male (and its mysoginist 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 post war macho masculinity can be seen in the ambivalence of his films towards women. This tension is heightened by Dwoskin’s own disability, that left him in callipers and subsequently a wheel chair. Boyarin’s claim that the outsiderness of the Jew affords an empathy with the feminist critiques of manhood resonates with Dwoskin’s own claim that his works such as Dyn Amo (1972) were in empathy with the plight of women’s oppression. Through a close reading of passages of 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.

This edition was edited by R Garfield