Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (17 page)

Wolf ’s reading of “queering?” in relation to Streisand’s Jewishness enables us to undo both
queers
and
Jews
as stable terms in an analogy and to see them

as intertwined terms in complicity, but the effects of such a possible alliance depend on how it is played out in a broader context. In particular, if we un- derstand Jewishness as an identity that is only distinguished from dominant American Christianity on the basis of religion, we do not destabilize the net- work of relations that holds white Christianity at the center and opposes Jews and African Americans. This “respectable” way of doing Jewishness might make some Jews the allies of some queers, but the alliance would only work for those who wish to be similarly allied to white Christians in maintaining the privileges of race. This need not be the case, however. Queering? Jewish- ness/Jewish queerness can also queer dominant racial norms, including gen- dered racial norms. In so doing the act of queering? can forge a connection to those parts of Jewish history in which Jews are not necessarily white. If queers are like Jews in this sense, we can be reminded that the actors in queer histo- ry, including founding moments like the Stonewall riots, have not necessari- ly been white.

What’s needed to actualize the radical possibilities of the queer-Jewish re- lation, then, is an analysis that recognizes multiple social relations, the norms of which form any particular social location along with strategic action to sub- vert those norms in their multiplicity. The argument from analogy, rather than highlighting such relational complexities, can tend to elide them. When one social category is claimed to be like another, the two are set up as distinct entities rather than complexly interrelated social possibilities. The specifics, for example, of the historical relations that made homosexuals like Jews are most often not acknowledged by an analogy between the two, yet those his- torical relations are crucial to the formation Jews and queers, not only in re- lation to each other but also in relation to a dominant and white supremacist culture and the “others” who are subordinated by that dominance.

If, however, queers and Jews work actively to destabilize their associa- tion with whiteness, they also close off specific antisemitic and heterosexist tropes such as the claim that they represent an “overprivileged” (because white) “minority” (because not heterosexual or Christian). This type of re- sistance creates possibilities for intervening in contemporary right-wing politics. Current attempts by the Christian right to form alliances with con- servatives in the black church have been based on claims to a shared Chris- tianity that opposes both Jews and homosexuals and that highlights African Americans as the “true” minority. This enables a type of language used in
Gay Rights, Special Rights
that pits racial minorities against other less de- serving minorities even as the tape locates all civil rights—even those offer- ing protections against racial discrimination—as special rights. Moreover, attempts to ally with conservative Jews, as in the not particularly effective

but nonetheless indicative attempts by the (predominantly Protestant) Christian Coalition to form Catholic and Jewish alliances, have been or- ganized around claims of a shared Christian and Jewish ethic that opposes homosexuality, thus leaving parts of the analogy intact—queers may still be like Jews in their supposed class and race privilege—while disabling an al- liance between them. Thus the reason to develop a better language for de- scribing relations among oppressed groups is not simply one of theoretical correctness, but is rather a crucial matter of political effectiveness.

This new language need not eschew analogy entirely. It needs rather to rec- ognize the complexity of relation named by analogy. Analogy as a form of metaphor accomplishes its work through movement, through the transfer of properties from one set of terms to another. The mechanism by which such transfers occur is not simple, because the transfers depend on a fundamental category error. Analogizing queers to Jews violates the categories that might otherwise separate them. This category error is potentially a space of constraint or of possibility. After all, queers, in all of their diversity and complexity, are not like Jews, in all of their diversity and complexity. But, if read in a compli- cated manner, the analogy can be seen to sustain both similarity and difference. As Christina Crosby notes, “The opening of the metaphoric transposition . . . opens the possibility of transformation, for the ‘is’ of metaphor is simultane- ously an ‘is not,’ an ‘as if ’ [queers both are and are not like Jews]. . . . This ‘is not’ allows for the possibility of a ‘way out’ of our current system” (1663), in which differences produce interchangeable enemies, rather than allies.

Thus the Jewish question in relation to queer theory also raises the queer question of relation to difference. Crosby suggests that the opening provided by the complexity of metaphorization is a site in which “one might address metaphorically the difference within difference” (ibid.), meaning the “is like” and “is not like” that is carried by any specification of difference, whether queer or Jewish. To raise the Jewish question in relation to queer theory, then, is also to ask whether we can queer? queers.

Notes

1. See, for example, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin’s (1993, 1997) reading of the impli- cations of Jewish cultural studies for our understanding of “diaspora.”
   

2. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990) reads Jewish difference in this manner. For a critique of this reading see Shapiro (1994) and Boyarin and Boyarin (1993).
   

3. See Blee (2002) for descriptions of some of these connections in new right hate groups.
   

4. For an extended discussion of Scalia’s dissent see Jakobsen and Pellegrini (1999).
   

5. For a critique of autonomy in relation to alliance see Jakobsen (1998a), particularly chapter 2.
   

6. See, for example, Judith Butler (1994).
   

7. Jean Fagan Yellin (1989) has done an extensive analysis of some of these problems in nineteenth-century social movements when white women began to describe women’s rights on the basis of an analogy with slavery.
   

8. I have considered this example at length in Jakobsen (1998a), chapter 4.
   

9. Daniel Itzkovitz (1997) has already beautifully explored some of these relations in the first half of the twentieth century. See also Erin Carlston’s (1998) work in
   Thinking Fascism
   , which traces the connection between antisemitism and antihomosexuality, back to Proust. I will focus on the second half of postwar period, because that is the time named by John D’Emilio as crucial for the formation of contemporary “gay identity.”
   

10. Postone (1980) says, “On the logical level of capital, this ‘double character’ allows industrial production to appear as a purely material, creative process, separable from capi- tal.
    Industrial capital then appears as the linear descendent of ‘natural’ artisanal labor, in op- position to ‘parasitic’ finance capital
    . Whereas the form appears ‘organically rooted,’ the lat- ter does not. Capital itself—or what is understood as the negative aspect of capitalism—is understood only in terms of the manifest form of its abstract dimension: finance and in- terest capital” (100). This splitting then allows for “anti-modern” movements that simul- taneously can embrace the development of industrial production and technology. As Pos- tone concludes, “It is precisely the hypostatization of the concrete and the identification of capital with the manifest abstract which renders this ideology so functional for the devel- opment of industrial capitalism in crisis” (111).
    

11. For more on Jewish secularism see Irene Klepfisz’s (1990) “Yiddishkeit in America.”
    

12. We see this dynamic is at work in discussions of race in affirmative action policies in hiring when the relatively small changes in labor market segregation in relation to the structure of labor markets as a whole are seen to have either “solved the problem” of race or have even “gone too far” the “other way.”
    

13. Even within the text of “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” D’Emilio (1983) is uncer- tain how to understand homosexuality within African American communities. Part of D’Emilio’s argument is that the economic freedom from kinship networks provided by the development of capitalism in conjunction with postwar geographic mobility contributed to gay possibilities. Thus, within his argument the more freedom from kin networks in a given community the more openness it should display to homosexuality. He writes, “In contrast [to this argument], for reasons not altogether clear, urban black communities [with strong kinship ties] appeared relatively tolerant of homosexuality. The popularity in the 1920s and 1930s of songs with lesbian and gay male themes—‘B.D. Woman,’ ‘Prove It on Me,’ ‘Sissy Man,’ ‘Fairey Blues’—suggests an openness about homosexual expression at odds with the mores of whites” (106). If, however, antihomosexual discourse is, in part, constitutive of “homosexuality,” the relative openness to homosexuality in African Ameri- can communities that is recorded by D’Emilio may be an indicator of the different stakes for African Americans in routing out invisible enemies. Importantly, the African American sites to which D’Emilio refers are cultural sites that are not necessarily tied to Christiani- ty. The stakes of African American Christianity in antihomosexual discourse are quite com- plicated, as African American Christianity is both implicated in relation to and distin- guished from the white Christianity that forms the center of “American” ideology. Thus, African American communities may be more open to homosexuality at some points, while remaining at other points closed to homosexuality in ways that are connected to those of the dominant society.
    

14. The results of this breakdown have been played out in electoral politics in New York City, as the Democratic majority in the city has been split, often along lines that di- vided Jews and African Americans (in the race between David Dinkins and Rudolf Guil- iani) or between Jews and a coalition of people of color (in the race between Mark Green and Michael Bloomberg after Green’s primary race with Fernando Ferrer).
    

15. For an extended consideration of the reappropriation of “queer” for radical politi- cal purposes see Butler (1993), chapter 8.
    

16. I’ve explored the possibility of queer as a means of doing rather than being at length in Jakobsen (1998b).
    

17. Henry Abelove, personal communication, May 1997.
    

18. For a brief rendition of his reading of Frank O’Hara, see Abelove (1995).
    

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