Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (13 page)

25. Ibid., p. 68.

26. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

Queers are like Jews. Aren’t they?

What does it mean to pose the Jewish question in relation to queer theo- ry? 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, for example, that which is other, different, odd,
queer
—what is its relation to the specific difference (queerness?) of Jew- ish? One can certainly imagine instances in which it would be quite queer to be Jewish. But, if we simply take up the concept in this manner—that Jews are the queers of this or that setting—does not all difference get colonized into “queer”? And, doesn’t the specter of sexual identity continue to haunt the word
queer,
leaving sexuality as the fundamental difference? What if Jewish is taken to mean something more than a specific difference? What of the impli- cations of Jewishness beyond Jewish difference?
1
What if Jews are taken to represent a fundamental difference—that which is unassimilable in moderni- ty, for example?
2
In the end, do Jewish and queer become the same simply be- cause both are different?

For the purpose of this essay, I would like to explore these questions through the specificity and complexity of historical relation. I would like to suggest that there are overlapping relations between the “Jewish question” as a fundamental question of difference posed to modernity and the question of difference posed by queer theory. Some of the similarities between these two differences may, in fact, be traced through a genealogy of their interrelations. And yet they are not the same. Jews are not simply the queers of the catego-

ry modernity or even religion. By positing the question of similarity “Queers are like Jews, aren’t they?” in its historical relation between homosexuals and Jews, I hope to elucidate a fundamental complexity of such histories. The sim- ilarities and differences of the two categories are not fully specifiable, because the categories are not fully separable. They are overlapping—intertwined even—but not coextensive. Along the way I hope to look into the possibility of reinvigorating the queer question in queer theory: What does queer mean if it is not simply a multiculti version of sexuality?

Queers are like Jews. Aren’t they?

The longstanding associations, both implicit and explicit, of homosexuals and Jews, at least in terms of antisemitic and antihomosexual discourses, can still be found in contemporary sites ranging from new-right hate groups to the Supreme Court.
3
In 1996, for example, Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s dissent from the decision striking down Colorado’s antigay amendment 2 sounds as if it comes directly from
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.
4
Scalia portrays homosexuals, like Jews, as a small but overprivileged minority with both financial capital and political influence well in excess of either numbers or justified expectation.

The question for activists is what to make of this analogy. How do we re- spond to such derogatory comparisons? And, given the conservative force of such analogies when used by the right, how do we think about the uses of analogy that have become relatively commonplace in progressive politics? For example, the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation was rife with analogies to the 1963 Civil Rights March. These analogies were employed to demonstrate the need for civil rights pro- tections for sexual minorities that would be similar to those offered to racial minorities. This use of analogy proved to be effective in certain ways but problematic in others. Concerns about analogizing sexuality to race have ranged from the issue of “appropriation” to the loss of historical specificity.

There is no question that analogies can be powerful in both progressive and conservative politics. For progressives analogies can show that one form of political oppression and/or struggle is like another. For example, if an au- dience already recognizes that racism is politically indefensible, then analo- gizing sexuality to race can make heterosexism equally indefensible. Analogy is often used in legal reasoning, to show, for example, that one type of dis- criminatory action is like another when the latter is already clearly subject to

legal regulation or penalty. Thus, to show that one form of discrimination is like another, already regulated form would provide the basis for successful litigation.

The use of analogy is particularly powerful because it draws on a language of equality that has been central to modern political discourse. In their im- portant book,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) have demonstrated how analogies employ a logic of equiva- lence by which multiple struggles can be recognized. Laclau and Mouffe also believe that these equivalences can connect movements to each other. They argue, for example, that in the nineteenth century arguments for the recogni- tion of sexism and women’s rights were made on the basis of an analogy to the already established discourse of the “rights of man.” Thus, Mary Woll- stonecraft “displaced [the discourse of rights] from equality between citizens to the field of equality between the sexes” (154). Positioning women’s rights as like the rights of citizens (men) makes women equal to men, just as all cit- izens are equal to each other. This move also makes social movements equiv- alent to one another. If women are equal to men just as citizens are equal to one another, then women are also equal to citizens and the movements for democracy (equality of citizens) and women’s rights (equality for women) are equivalent. For Laclau and Mouffe this logic of equivalence can join move- ments in a common struggle for equality and democracy.

We can see in the history of social movements in the U.S. some of Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis being played out. The power of claiming equivalence is evident in the social movements—feminist, civil rights, international human rights—that have time and again been founded upon it. The logic of equiva- lence has allowed claims for equality and rights to circulate among move- ments. It has not, however, been effective in connecting these movements to each other.

More than that, the very act of making the analogy and displacing the logic of equality from one movement to another can pull apart those move- ments it would seem to connect. It can create women’s rights as an au- tonomous field of activity, separate from but equal to other forms of struggle for rights. If equivalence creates autonomous fields, separate from one anoth- er, then analogies employed within the logic of equivalence may actually un- dercut, rather than enable, alliances among movements.
5

But, in addition to providing the logic of equivalence, analogies are also employed to provide the affect of connection, specifically to promote solidar- ity by creating empathy across different experiences. As Trina Grillo and Stephanie M. Wildman (1997) argue in their critique of analogies:

Analogies are necessary tools to teach and to explain, so that we can bet- ter understand each other’s experiences and realities. We have no other way to understand others’ lives, except by making analogies to our own experience. Thus, the use of analogies provides both the key to greater comprehension and the danger of false understanding.
(44–45)

Grillo and Wildman go on to discuss what, through their own use of analo- gies in various settings, they came to perceive as “the dangers inherent in what had previously seemed to us to be a creative and solidarity-producing process—analogizing sex discrimination to race discrimination. These dan- gers were obscured by the promise that to discuss and compare oppressions might lead to coalition building and understanding” (46). They argue that analogy has three basic and interrelated problems, problems that have also been identified by a number of other critics.
6
First, even as the meaning of the first term in an analogy (e.g.,
sexism
) depends on the second term to which it is analogized (
racism
), the analogy tends to make the first term the center of analysis while marginalizing (if including at all) any analysis of the second term. So, for example, if we say sexism is like racism, we may go on to ana- lyze sexism in great depth without necessarily giving much attention to racism except insofar as it sets up our analysis of sexism.
7
Not only do we learn noth- ing more about racism, but we learn nothing about the relationship between sexism and racism. Thus the analogy reduces the relationship between various “oppressions” to their similarities, and the complexities of their interrelation are lost.

Second, by emphasizing the ways in which “oppressions” are like one an- other, analogy can give the sense that it explains everything about any experi- ence of oppression, such that, for example, the pain of particular experiences of sexism is lost to the ways in which it is like racism. Often, then, the speci- ficity of each experience is lost to a generalized sense of oppression in which all oppressions are (generally) like each other. Moreover, those who have experi- enced sexism but not racism can think that they then understand racism on the basis of their experience. Thus, on the basis of such analogies, generalized processes like “othering” or “marginalization” can come to describe the mech- anism of all oppressions and the historical specificity of racism or sexism is lost. Third, analogy tends to create two distinctive groups. In Grillo and Wildman’s example women who experience sexism are constituted as a dis- tinct category from people of color who experience racism. This move tends to elide the intersection between the two, creating the now infamous con- junction “women and people of color,” which erases the existence of women

of color and simultaneously constitutes “women” as “white.” Once such sep- arate fields are created, it becomes much harder to form alliances, because
women
now names a
white
category separated off from
people of color
, and any desire for alliance is already undercut by the assertion of autonomy. Moreover, other potential lines of complication, but also connection—class or religion, for example—are also elided as constitutive of both sexism and racism. Anti- sexist and antiracist movements are also, then, conceptually separated from each other by the analogy, despite their long histories of interrelation. This context of relation, and its attendant ambiguities and complexities, provides the potential building blocks for alliance among analogized terms or the movements that they name, and yet analogy works precisely by eliding such specifics.

None of these terms—
sexism, racism, heterosexism
—is either unambiguous or fully autonomous from others, although the invocation of each term also has specific effects. This fundamental complexity—that the constitutive terms of politics are both interdependent so as to be resistant to specification and have specific effects—is one that the use of analogy is too narrow to recognize. This is not to say that it is not useful to name such distinct fields and to con- sider the specific effects of such naming, but it is to say that simple analogies will be likely to obscure these specifics, especially in terms of interrelation, and will be unlikely to form the basis for alliance.

These problems with analogy can have significant political effects. Let us return for a moment to the example of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation and its use of analogies to the 1963 Civil Rights March.
8
While depending on the recognition that race was a category worthy of civil rights protections, the argument that march or- ganizers produced for gay and lesbian civil rights made no active connections between antiracist and antiheterosexist struggles. Despite interventions around this issue from various quarters, the public face of the march, as seen, for example, in videotapes produced by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign (then Fund) often failed to produce connections with predominantly African American movements for civil rights. Rather, what was produced was a “gay community” that was distinct from (although supposedly similar to) its African American predecessor in struggle. In its distinction this “gay community” ended up looking much like the dominant public who was the audience for the analogy: predominantly white with a contained African American minority. In the march videos analogies to the 1963 civil rights march are rife, while images of African Americans are segregated and contained within the “broader” (read: white) “gay community.” The NGLTF tape
Marching for Freedom
opens with the

evocation of African American freedom struggles through song and then moves into a series of interviews with mostly white marchers who proclaim their normalcy and similarity to the general public. In the Human Rights Campaign Fund tape
Prelude to Victory
the evocation of diversity is shown through a series of performances in which people of color are always bracket- ed by white people.

The use of this analogy reduced the relation between oppressions to one of similarity. In this formulation “lesbian and gays” are discriminated against “like African Americans.” Here, the analogy fails to recognize historical dif- ferences, such as the historical effects of racialization grounded not merely in discrimination but in the history of slavery. Moreover, this analytic reduction allows those on the political right to challenge claims for lesbian and gay rights simply by enumerating the historical differences between racism and heterosexism. The right-wing videotape
Gay Rights, Special Rights
takes pre- cisely this tack. This videotape was extremely successful in splitting African Americans from political alliances with gay rights movements, and this suc- cess was based in part on the problematic nature of the analogy between sex- uality and race that was deployed by gay rights advocates. In this instance the progressive use of analogy played into the hands of the right.