The Lilith Blog

June 22, 2018 by Laura Winnick

On “Disobedience:” Threesomes, Friendship and Queer Families

 Although Director Sebastian Lilio’s recent film Disobedience is about a forbidden lesbian love between Esti (Rachel McAdams) and Ronit (Rachel Weisz), the most compelling scenes are when the characters are either in solitude, or united as a threesome with Dovit Esti’s husband (Alessandro Nivola),

This oddity might be because Esti and Ronit’s queer coupling is so unrealistic; their sex, for all of the constraints they face in their frum Orthodox community, is lustless: a sequential love-making performed while the two women remain halfway-clothed. Oddly enough, the Forward published a takedown of the film by an Orthodox woman, claiming that she is sick of being fetishized. But this piece notably omits of the word queer, and similarly sidesteps any discussion of what is also fundamentally fetishized in the film: lesbian sex.

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