Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (16 page)

Relational rereading of the historical narrative of the production of gay identity produces a different story, however. Relational context makes for both the limits and the possibilities of any given historical site. The categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality are not fully distinct entities that are separable either analytically or politically. White supremacy can name a hier- archy over both African Americans and Jews or it can name a discourse that

separates African Americans and Jews who might or might not be “white.” Thus, even if Jews and homosexuals are able to form a positive alliance based on their common enemies, this alliance will not necessarily be progressive. Homosexuals and Jews might, for example, become allied in a mutual “whiteness,” but this could hardly be thought of as a progressive alliance.

Relational reading, then, shifts our thinking in at least two ways. First, we must think of the ways in which homosexuals are both like and different from Jews, and second, we must place this pairing in its context. One way to think of this relation where, for example, Jews and homosexuals are both like each other but allied as distinctive actors as well is “twinning.” Twins, whether fra- ternal or identical, are, after all, different people who may be like each other and who may (or may not) act together. One of my concerns is how to max- imize the radical political potential of such twinning.

Unlike the relations of analogy where one term effectively elides or even replaces that to which it is analogized, in this conceptualization both terms re- main present, and they may form an active relationship of complicity or al- liance. Homosexuals and Jews are not just like each other; they may act to- gether. The valence of the terms
complicity
or
alliance
depends on whether this relation is configured as an accusation of conspiracy or a promise of positive action, but I would suggest that progressive politics would do well to recon- sider the possibilities presented by complicity.

If we take up the space of linkage as a projection of complicity rather than simply analogy—in particular, if we think of “Jews” and “homosexuals” as twins, as different persons with historical ties that enable them to stand in for one another but also to choose whether or not to act in concert—then we can begin to articulate the complexity of relations that might form the basis for an alliance. Thinking of Jews and homosexuals as in a complicitous, rather than analogous, relation can then be part of a process for thinking about how to subvert the network of power that ties together antisemitic, an- tihomosexual, and white supremacist discourses. By recognizing that Jews and homosexuals are not just like each other but may act together, we must also ask about the conditions of possibility for such action and about its ef- fects. Will the pairing of homosexuals and Jews reinforce or resist racial dom- ination? Fleshing out histories of relations that are condensed into analogies can help us to address networks of power rather than singular oppositions or pairings.

And what of contemporary relations? What if we move from the valence of homosexuality and gay identity to that of queers?
Queers
are like Jews. Aren’t they?

The hope for a revitalized sense of queer possibility in the 1990s was intend- ed to help move beyond some of the limits posed by homosexuality and gay identity as a basis for a progressive or radical politics of sexuality. Queers took up a potentially pejorative epithet in the hopes of reworking it for progressive purposes. Queers are not just those who are different and reviled, queers are those whose difference is potentially resistant, subversive, perhaps even liber- atory. It was supposed to name a space of difference that didn’t just produce a new identity—homosexuals who are different from heterosexuals, gays who are different from straights—but might also allow us to remain in the space of difference itself, without being trapped in identity.

While the use of
queer
is meant to create a particular site of openness, to assume it as completely open can also be misleading.
Queer
cannot simply be appropriated as “free” from the antihomosexual and antisemitic discourses that form it. As Judith Butler has so clearly described, the task of reclaiming such words carries with it traces of the violences of its constitution.
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And as Halperin suggests, the assertion of queer as a site of open possibility can make it seem as though issues of race and class differences among various “queers” have been transcended and that something like “queer solidarity has decisive- ly triumphed over historical divisions” (64). Recognizing the historical con- ditions of queer possibility can, in fact, make it more likely that the invoca- tion of queer will realize its potential openness, because it can show the conditions that must be addressed for the triumph of “queer solidarity.” Without active resistance to the limits of this history, i.e., resistance that goes beyond the claim that queer is different, what is materialized is precisely an indifference to racial location, such that (as has been borne out all too fre- quently in queer spaces) it just so happens that “queers” are white (and ho- mosexual). Here the network of discursive relations that places homosexuals in complicity with Jews and in opposition to African Americans can in its continuing effects configure queers in a similar position.

The hope based on the analogy between queers and Jews is that a differ- ent and more open meaning for queers and Jews might be realized through the analogy. The hope, in fact, is that the representation of “difference” of- fered by both queers and Jews could be pulled together to create an alliance. This hope might be realized, but analogy provides a shaky basis for such hope. As we have seen, the analogy depends on stable ground. It locks Jews into a specific location. Moreover, if Jews are locked into an identity—even if that identity is “different”—then the meaning of queer when analogized to Jews

will also produce an identity. Ultimately, the logic of the analogy and its sta- ble ground will produce precisely the type of identity that both those queers and those Jews who have promoted the progressive understanding of Jewish difference have hoped to avoid.

Must we think, however, of Jews as the stable ground for an identity? Is Jewishness something that we are? Or, could it, like queer, be something that we do?
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In asking these questions, I’m suggesting that we understand both “queer” and “Jewishness” as something that we do in complicated relation to the historical possibilities of who we are. This opens up two moves in build- ing on analogies as the basis for alliances: 1. it makes both the thème (in this case queers) and the phoros (in this case Jews) of the analogy mobile; 2. it al- lows us to respond context, to the specific and complex history of the terms invoked by the analogy.

In turning to the performative, I am obviously referring to Judith Butler’s (1993) theory that bodies are produced in their particular form through the iteration of the norms that (in)form such categories as sex and race. While such categories are not simply chosen but are rather command performances, the question of how we do our identities is nonetheless an important one in understanding the play of power that enables both the command and the per- formance. In her later work Butler (1997) has reconceptualized agency with- in the context of power relations, arguing that the institution of any norm also institutes ambivalence within the subject of power. This ambivalence in- duces both the iteration of the norm and resistance to it and thus can become the site for iterating the norm differently, for shifting its ground.

My suggestion is that thinking the possibilities of alliance also requires thinking through the networks of relations that constitute any given norm or social category. If sex or race is constituted within a network of social rela- tions, a network of normative enactments, then these plays invoke such net- works. Importantly, just as the institution of any given norm institutes a slip- page and ambivalence that opens a space for agency, so also the multiple norms of social categorization open spaces for multiple enactments. The work that analogy and alliance can do is to bring together more than one term. Queers and Jews can, for example, act in complicity. To do so in ways that subvert conspiracy theory requires making the norms of each term mobile. This opens the possibility of playing norms off against each other.

In thinking through the possibilities of playing off multiple norms, I am deeply indebted to a panel on Jewish performativity at the 1997 American Studies Association meeting that included Jill Dolan, Carol Batker, Laura Levitt, Ann Pellegrini, and a reading by Stacy Wolf of Barbra Streisand’s queer performances that appears in slightly different form in this volume. In a com-

plicated reading, Wolf argues that Streisand “queers” a number of norms—of voice, body, and action. I have considered this example at length, elsewhere (Jakobsen 1998b), but I return to it here because Wolf ’s analysis provides a particularly useful reading of the move from the noun of identity to the per- formative verb by reading Barbra Streisand’s Jewishness not in her identity but in a particular and varied set of activities. For example, Wolf reads that para- digmatic marker of Streisand’s Jewishness—her nose—not simply as a physi- cal characteristic but as an action—a refusal, in fact—a refusal to get it “fixed.” This refusal is also a refusal of the reduction of Jewishness to white- ness that is part of the postwar conspiracy theory. Streisand acts so as to re- main visibly Jewish, refusing to assimilate Jewishness to a white identity that is merely “religiously” different.

Interestingly, this refusal, and the difference that embodies it, works on behalf of Streisand in relation to the norms of the market. In other words, it does not “queer” her marketability but is instead part of her star quality. This is “difference as charisma.” Wolf thus complicates the argument, noting that “it’s impossible to identify with Streisand’s body. Hers is not a face that makes an un-bobbed nose take heart.” This claim follows Wolf ’s expression of her own desires to be “not a JAP, not a mother—but a star.”

Wolf ’s reading of Streisand’s Jewishness in relation to queer possibility has particularly radical potential in thinking through the implications of analogy, and of the analogy between queers and Jews in particular, because it destabi- lizes the ground of the analogy. If Streisand’s Jewishness is related not to her heritage per se but to her actions, we no longer know precisely what it means to be Jewish. What it means to be Jewish will depend upon enactments of Jew- ishness, so we cannot know in advance what it means that queers are like Jews. We cannot fix queerness in a Jewish base, because the base itself is not “fixed.” More than this, Wolf attributes not just Jewishness but queerness to Steisand. Barbra is queer not because of her identity per se, nor because of her difference per se, but because of a set of associations, of alliances and complic- ities between homosexuals and Streisand. Thus queer and Jew are here pro- duced as intertwined categories. In fact, we cannot precisely determine which might be the ground of affinity and which the figure. In one sense Streisand’s Jewishness is located precisely in her queerness: in her refusal to be simply “white” (and, therefore, presumably “Christian”) by getting her nose fixed. In another sense her queerness is located in her Jewishness, which is part of what produces Streisand’s popularity within a queerly inflected homosexual culture. Queers can identify with her so much, not simply because she has a huge voice and star quality—so does Julie Andrews—but because she’s different. She isn’t simply white and Christian. Barbra doesn’t quite fit. This intertwined queer

Jewishness/Jewish queerness could be the starting point for a wider queer/Jew- ish resistance to white supremacy (although, again, not necessarily—only if we make it so).

Because of this intertwining in which neither “queer” nor “Jewish” is the ground of the analogy, yet their meanings are determined in their relation to each other, Wolf pursues the Jewish question in queer theory mainly through the interrogative. In
Funny Girl
, for example, which she argues is not so much about Fanny Brice as it is about Streisand playing Fanny Brice, Wolf makes the following observation about the norms of “womanhood”: “As she [Streisand/Fanny] becomes what a ‘woman’ should be—a star, married, monied—the film reiterates how Fanny is not like other women. Is this dif- ference queer?” Here the question seems to imply that Jewishness can queer certain dominant norms like “woman,” (and its presumption of both Chris- tian and heteronormativity). Yet later in the essay Wolf argues that the way that Streisand in particular does Jewishness might also queer dominant rep- resentations of Jewish women: “After World War II, images of the Jewish mother appeared, and then around 1960, images of the Jewish American Princess proliferated. Streisand’s performance in
Funny Girl
relies on and troubles (queers?) these representations.” Note that once again “(queers?)” is here placed in the interrogative. At this moment Wolf shifts from the adjec- tival form of “What’s
Jewish
about this? What’s
queer
about this?” (emphasis added) to the verb form: Streisand “queers?” dominant representations. Fur- ther, she suggests that this activity—to queer?—both “relies on and troubles” the norm. The network of norms is both empowering and constraining. Streisand’s ability to trouble some norms—Christian, American, woman—is enabled, in part, by her reliance on others—marketability.

The simultaneous resistance to multiple norms allows for connections or alliances between persons or movements that might not be available if the norms were played differently. The twinning of Jew and homosexual might not produce a queer alliance, but if the connection is played out it might provide the site for queering both antisemitic and antihomosexual discourses. Henry Abelove has argued that “queer” is a politically useful sign because it is a pos- sible site for persons to come together who might not otherwise be able to rec- ognize themselves as allies.
17
He bases this claim on a historical reading of a particular set of alliances in the 1950s, thinking particularly of Frank O’Hara and Paul Goodman.
18
Here queer is indeed a site that enables cross-racial al- liances, but the specific conditions that made alliance possible in one situation would have to be considered in any attempt to reinvigorate it in another.