Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Itzkovitz
Ann Pellegrini
Series: Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies
Copyright Date: 2003
Published by: Columbia University Press
Pages: 464
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/boya11374
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Book Info
Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
Book Description:

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing -- outing -- "queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.

eISBN: 978-0-231-50895-7
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. ix-xii)
  4. Strange Bedfellows: An Introduction
    Strange Bedfellows: An Introduction (pp. 1-18)
    DANIEL BOYARIN, DANIEL ITZKOVITZ and ANN PELLEGRINI

    The essays in this volume explore the relays between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and antisemitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. The volume is not so much interested in revealing—outing?—“queer Jews” as it is in exploring the complex of social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question thus enacts a change in object from uncovering the hidden histories of homosexuals who were also Jewish or Jews who were also homosexual to analyzing the rhetorical and theoretical connections that tie together...

  5. Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star
    Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star (pp. 19-40)
    MARJORIE GARBER

    In her 1992 study Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber considers the “nature and significance both of the ‘fact’ of cross-dressing and of the historically recurrent fascination with it” (3). Throughout, she pays especial attention to the logics and effects of cross-dressing, the way transvestism variously calls up and seeks to manage “category crisis.” On the one hand, cross-dressing sparks “a failure of definitional distinction,” potentially allowing “boundary crossing from one (apparently distinct) category to another” (16)—for example, from black to white, male to female, or, of especial import for this volume, Jew to Christian. On the...

  6. Epistemology of the Closet
    Epistemology of the Closet (pp. 41-63)
    EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

    The epistemology of the closet is not a dated subject or a superseded regime of knowing. While the events of June, 1969, and later vitally reinvigorated many people’s sense of the potency, magnetism, and promise of gay self-disclosure, nevertheless the reign of the telling secret was scarcely overturned with Stonewall. Quite the opposite, in some ways. To the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability, rather than staled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of public articulations of and about the love that is famous...

  7. Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics
    Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics (pp. 64-89)
    JANET R. JAKOBSEN

    Queers are like Jews. Aren’t they?

    What does it mean to pose the Jewish question in relation to queer theory? Is there any one Jewish question? And does not the Jewish question also pose the question of queer theory itself? What is the relationship between “Jewish” and “queer”? Does queer, after all, refer to the identity of those with whom it is most commonly associated in the current milieu: homosexuals and other sexual dissidents? Or does queer mean something, well, “different” than that, different than a catch-all category with reference to sexuality? And if queer refers to something else—to,...

  8. Freud, Blüher, and the Secessio Inversa: Männerbünde, Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation
    Freud, Blüher, and the Secessio Inversa: Männerbünde, Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation (pp. 90-120)
    JAY GELLER

    In Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud endeavored not only to reconstruct the origins of religion but also those of sociopolitical life. Out of threads of British colonial ethnography (Atkinson, Darwin, Lang, Robertson-Smith, Spencer and Gillen, Westermark) Freud manifestly wove together his narrative of the primal horde (Urhorde), the murder of the father by the band of brothers, and its consequences. Upon this evolutionary patchwork Totem and Taboo would read the Oedipus complex, Freud’s algorithm of individual development and desire within the nuclear family, into the origin of human culture.¹

    This essay argues that the warp and woof that structures Freud’s...

  9. Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr. and Richard “Dickie” Loeb
    Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr. and Richard “Dickie” Loeb (pp. 121-148)
    PAUL B. FRANKLIN

    On 21 May 1924 Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr. (age nineteen) and his lover, Richard “Dickie” Loeb (age eighteen), members of two illustrious, wealthy, Chicago German-Jewish families, kidnapped fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks—Loeb’s second cousin from an equally well-to-do Hyde Park Jewish family—and brutally murdered him with a chisel. They disposed of Franks’s naked, mutilated body in a culvert and subsequently tried to extort a $10,000 ransom from his family. Like seasoned criminals, Leopold and Loeb meticulously plotted the murder, envisioning it as the perfect crime. Instead of eluding capture and outwitting the criminal justice system, however, they botched their efforts....

  10. Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights
    Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights (pp. 149-165)
    ALISA SOLOMON

    It was a down-to-the-wire, nail-biting finish for Israeli pop star Dana Inter-national as the last votes in the 1998 Eurovision song contest were tallied in Birmingham, England. But by the time Macedonia, the last country voting on the World Cup of pop tunes, had weighed in, it was certain that Dana International had edged out Malta, the nearest contender. She swept onto the stage for a victory bow, wearing a feather-bedecked Gaultier gown and waving a large Israeli flag. The blue Star of David flapped triumphantly against a wash of magenta disco light as Dana curtsied and called out, “Next...

  11. Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the “Jewish Science”
    Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the “Jewish Science” (pp. 166-198)
    DANIEL BOYARIN

    In his essay on “The Uncanny” Freud writes of a moment in which he looks by accident into a mirror and thinks he sees someone else: “I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. … Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of [the double] was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?” (Freud, “Uncanny” 248).¹ In another place Freud had written that circumcision “makes a disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained, no doubt by its recalling the dreaded castration” (Moses 91).² Reading these two “uncanny”s in...

  12. Messianism, Machismo, and “Marranism”: The Case of Abraham Miguel Cardoso
    Messianism, Machismo, and “Marranism”: The Case of Abraham Miguel Cardoso (pp. 199-227)
    BRUCE ROSENSTOCK

    I use “marranism” in my title partly for sheer alliteration, but also to draw attention to the term’s deprecatory significance (“pig” in Spanish). It was first used, some argue, by converted Jews (Cristianos Nuevos) in fifteenth-century Spain to distance themselves from other former Jews who privately held on to traditional practices, such as refraining from eating pork. (For evidence about the history of marrano see Caro Baroja 1962:1:383—84.) It became in time the term used by Old Christians to distance themselves from all the New Christians, whatever their private adherence to Jewish ritual and belief. However, the distance between...

  13. The Ghost of Queer Loves Past: Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz
    The Ghost of Queer Loves Past: Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz (pp. 228-245)
    NAOMI SEIDMAN

    In dedicating his 1888 novel Stempenyu to S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem quotes a letter he received from the older writer advising him against trying his hand at the novel form. Playing on the double meaning of the Yiddish word roman to signify both novel and love affair, Abramovitsh declared that “if there are romances [romanen] in the life of our people, they are entirely different from those of other people. One must understand this and write entirely differently.”¹ Abramovitsh took his own advice to heart. In an ironic passage introducing his autobiographical novel, he described his hesitations about writing...

  14. Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body
    Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body (pp. 246-265)
    STACY WOLF

    Since Barbra Streisand made her spectacular film debut as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl in 1968, she has been an object of fascination, vilification, and admiration. ¹ The diva of divas with a well-publicized terror of live performance, Streisand is gossiped about equally as an egomaniacal, control-freak perfectionist on the set (particularly when directing) and as a frail, anxious slip of a girl who solicits opinions from anyone and everyone and still longs for conventional beauty and the approval of the father who died when she was a small child. On the one hand, the contradictions that mark Streisand’s star...

  15. Tragedy and Trash: Yiddish Theater and Queer Theater, Henry James, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger
    Tragedy and Trash: Yiddish Theater and Queer Theater, Henry James, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger (pp. 266-284)
    MICHAEL MOON

    Not knowing whether to laugh or cry is a classic affective dilemma. The mixed sense of pain, absurdity, and ridiculousness that has been the common emotional lot of protoqueer children and adolescents over the past century has probably made many queer adults less patient than we might otherwise be with neat academic distinctions between the comic and the tragic. The intensity and unpredictability with which these two supposedly discrete dramatic modes can interact with each other is a primary concern of this essay’s exploration of relations between two theatrical renaissances in New York, that of the Yiddish theater of the...

  16. You Go, Figure; or, The Rape of a Trope in the “Prioress’s Tale”
    You Go, Figure; or, The Rape of a Trope in the “Prioress’s Tale” (pp. 285-310)
    JACOB PRESS

    The tale told by the Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is, on the literal level, the story of the vicious murder of a saintly Christian child by perverse Jews—no one has ever denied this. But there is more to this case than mere execution. While this child is undoubtedly a victim, we are called upon to query his “innocence”; while the story is undoubtedly of murder, it is also of rape. The boy saint here is a sexual subject and a sexual object; his characterization merges male-male erotics with a narrative of identity formation and cross-gender identification in a...

  17. Dickens’s Queer “Jew” and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values
    Dickens’s Queer “Jew” and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values (pp. 311-333)
    DAVID A. H. HIRSCH

    In assessing the mutual interests of Jewish studies and queer theory, one of the central sites of “common discourse between Jews and others who share a critical approach to the politics of culture” might be the role of the family in the construction of individual and national identity.¹ Given that both Jewish and “queer” identity are defined primarily with relation to “the family,” and that political discourse has frequently centered upon the relationship between family and nation when debating the civic status of Jews and (other) queers, it is crucial for both Jewish studies and queer theory to interrogate the...

  18. Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust
    Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust (pp. 334-364)
    JONATHAN FREEDMAN

    There have been few more powerful—and fraught—predications of identity than those Eve Sedgwick juggles in this quotation, the sexually transgressive and “the Jew.” Her words suggest two things: that each term bristles with connotations, contradictions, and complexities and that relations between the two become yet more fraught the moment they are brought together. Thus, for Sedgwick, Jewishness initially functions as a kind of stabilizing agent in the quest for an identity yet to be known, a vehicle for indeterminacy whose tenor remains yet more indeterminate: we at least know what assimilated Jews are, even if we don’t quite...

  19. Queer Margins: Cocteau, La Belle et la bête, and the Jewish Differend
    Queer Margins: Cocteau, La Belle et la bête, and the Jewish Differend (pp. 365-394)
    DANIEL FISCHLIN

    The genre-bending version of La Belle et la bête, the Jean Cocteau film re-scripted as An Opera for Ensemble and Film by Philip Glass and given its world premiere in Gibellina, Sicily in 1994, stages yet again the Jewish differend. By Jewish differend I mean the controversy over meaning, the hermeneutics of difference and of ethnicity embedded in the Jew as a marker for the uneasy tensions that relate semiosis and Semite. The usurer in the film, a clearly racist caricature of the hook-nosed Jew, is used by Cocteau to lend pathos to the figure of the merchant, whose daughter...

  20. Reflections on Germany
    Reflections on Germany (pp. 395-402)
    JUDITH BUTLER

    When I heard that Suhrkamp Verlag had decided to translate Gender Trouble in 1991, my first thought was that I might then be invited to give a lecture in Germany and, after twelve years, return to the country where I had lived in 1978—79. I’ve never been very clear why it was that I only returned once, in 1981, and that since that time I seemed only to go to France when I traveled to Europe. It was not “the country,” as some Americans will say, or “the people,” since I knew from having lived in Heidelberg and having...

  21. Contributors
    Contributors (pp. 403-406)
  22. Index
    Index (pp. 407-414)
  23. Between Men ~ Between Women Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies
    Between Men ~ Between Women Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies (pp. 415-418)
    Lillian Faderman and Larry Gross
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