Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (47 page)

both women embody and enact the unresolvable but culturally useful contra- dictions of a queer, Jewish femininity. Considering that antisemitism and mi- sogyny took quite different forms in 1890s France and 1960s U.S.A., the par- allels in the media’s construction of these two women is remarkable. They are both funny girls.

Notes

I would like to thank Carol Batker, Jill Dolan, Kerric Harvey, Janet Jakobsen, Laura Levitt, Melani McAlister, Ann Pellegrini, David Savran, and Rosemarie Garland Thompson for re- sponding to earlier versions of this essay. For an elaboration of the inquiry here, see my book,
a problem like maria: gender and sexuality in the american musical
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). The epigraph to this essay is from Elspeth Probyn, “Queer Belongings: The Politics of Departure,” in
sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism,
ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (New York: Rout- ledge, 1995), p. 9.

1. This was her first film, but Streisand had already achieved notariety as a singer in the New York club scene, as the star of two acclaimed television variety shows (
   My Name is Barbra
   [1965] and
   Color Me Barbra
   [1966]) and in the Broadway production. Nu- merous biographies detail Streisand’s early career. See, for example, Randall Riese,
   Her Name Is Barbra
   (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); James Spada,
   Streisand: Her Life
   (New York: Crown, 1995); Ethlie Ann Vare, ed.,
   Diva: Barbra Streisand and the Making of a Superstar
   (New York: Boulevard, 1996); Anne Edwards,
   Streisand: A Biography
   (New York: Berkley Boulevard, 1997). For scattered references to Streisand’s early singing ca- reer, see James Gavin,
   Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret
   (New York: Limelight, 1992).
   

2. Richard Dyer,
   Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
   (London: Macmillan, 1986).
   

3. On the history of U.S. production and reception of “celebrity,” see Joshua Gamson,
   Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
   

4. Amy-Jill Levine, “A Jewess, More and/or Less,” in
   Judaism Since Gender
   , ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 151; Carol Ockman, “When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt,” in
   The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity
   , ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 138.
   

5. Tom Prideaux, “Funny Girl with a Frantic History,”
   Life
   (n.d.), p. 10; Gerald Fay, “Review of
   Funny Girl
   ,”
   Guardian
   (Spring 1966); Jerome Robbins, “Barbra Streisand,” in
   Double Exposure
   , ed. Roddy McDowall, 2d ed. (New York: Morrow, 1990), p. 51; Judith Christ, press release (December 1977). Incomplete citations indicate articles from clip- pings files, Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library.
   

6. For analyses of some linkages between Jewishness and queerness, see, for example, Janet
   

   R. Jakobsen, “Queer Is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance,” paper presented at American Academy of Religion, November 1997, reprinted
   GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies
   4, ed. Carolyn Dinshow and David M. Halperin (1998): 511–36; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
   Epistemology of the Closet
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 75–82; Daniel Itzkovitz, “Secret Temples,” in
   Jews and Other Differences: The New
   

   Jewish Cultural Studies
   , ed. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 176–202.
   

   Historically, Jewish men have been characterized as effeminate. See, for example, Sander Gilman, “Freud, Race, and Gender,”
   Jewish Explorations of Sexuality
   , ed. Jonathan Magonet (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), pp. 135–55; Daniel Boyarin, “Homotopia: The Feminized Jewish Man and the Lives of Women in Late Antiquity,”
   Differences
   7.2 (1995): 41–81. In
   The Jew’s Body
   (New York: Routledge, 1991), Gilman historicizes rep- resentations of the Jewish male body—the nose, the feet, the uneven gait. Gilman reads the Jew’s body as “interchangeable with the body of the gay” (p. 196).
   

   In
   Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race
   (New York: Routledge, 1997), Ann Pellegrini accurately summarizes antisemitic discourses which locate Jewish men as feminized and render Jewish women absent. She writes, “All Jews are womanly; but no women are Jews” (p. 18).
   

7. Alexander Doty,
   Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture
   (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3.
   

8. Cherry Smyth, “The Transgressive Sexual Subject,” in
   A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture
   , ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (New York: Rout- ledge, 1995), p. 125.
   

9. Isobel Lennart,
   Funny Girl: A New Musical
   , music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Mer- rill (New York: Random House, 1964).
   

   On Fanny Brice, see Barbara W. Grossman,
   Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice
   (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991); June Sochen, “Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker: Blend- ing the Particular with the Universal,” in
   From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen
   , ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983), pp. 44–57.
   

10. Diana Karanikas Harvey and Jackson Harvey,
    Streisand: The Pictorial Biography
    

    (Philadelphia: Running, 1997), p. 45.
    

11. In such films as
    Clueless
    and
    In and Out
    ,
    The Nanny
    , for example, “Barbra” fandom stands in for musicals’ fandom, which stands in for gayness in a man. See, for example, D.
    

    A. Miller,
    Place for Us [Essay on the Broadway Musical]
    (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998). For references, sections, or chapters on gay men as spectators and fans of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, see, for example, Doty,
    Making Things Perfectly Queer
    ; David Van Leer,
    The Queening of America
    (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Mayne,
    Cinema and Spectatorship
    (New York: Routledge, 1993); Janet Staiger,
    Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema
    (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).
    

12. Doty,
    Making Things Perfectly Queer
    , p. 10.
    

13. Miller,
    Place for Us
    , pp. 89, 90.
    

14. In other words, I am intentionally considering a feminist reading in concert with queer theory and politics. For essays that interrogate the relationship between feminist or lesbian theories and queer theory, see Dana Heller, ed.,
    Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance
    (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) .
    

15. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, “Introduction,” in
    Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture
    (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 3.
    

16. Sharif deals with his few songs in a kind of speech-singing that was a convention of nonsinging men in musicals by the 1960s. First performed by Rex Harrison in
    My Fair Lady
    (with Julie Andrews) on Broadway in 1956, Jack Klugman (in
    Gypsy
    with Merman in 1959), and Christopher Plummer (in the film of
    The Sound of Music
    in 1965) also used the same technique.
    

17. Joseph P. Swain,
    The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 356.
    

18. In terms of form (as opposed to reception context), it is important, I think, to see
    Funny Girl
    as a film adaptation of a Broadway musical, like
    Oklahoma!
    ,
    The King and I
    ,
    My Fair Lady
    , and
    The Sound of Music
    . The transformation from musical play to film maintains some formal structures (of narrative, character, relationship among song and dance and dialogue, integration of book and nondiegetic song) that differ markedly from the made-for-Hollywood musical, such as
    The Wizard of Oz
    ,
    Singing in the Rain
    , and the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. See, for example, Robert Lawson- Peebles, ed.,
    Approaches to the American Musical
    (Exeter: Exexter University Press, 1996); Richard Kislan,
    The Musical
    (New York: Applause, 1995); Ethan Mordden,
    Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Jane Feuer,
    The Hollywood Musical
    (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
    

19. See Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of As- similation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,”
    PMLA
    113.1 (January 1998): 77–89. Also see Mark Slobin, “Some Intersections of Jews, Music, and Theater,” in
    From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen
    , ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 29–43.
    

20. There was, of course, an American performance tradition of Jewish female humorists like Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker. See Sochen, “Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker.”
    

21. Hugh Leonard, “Barbra in a Ragged Cloak,”
    Plays and Players
    13.9 (June 1966): 13.
    

22. Donald Zec, “All Barbra—Heart, Soul, Sound, Music!”
    Daily Mirror
    (14 April 1966): 3.
    

23. All examples are taken from the videorecording of the film, produced by Ray Stark and directed by William Wyler, Columbia Pictures and Rastar Productions, 1968.
    

24. Gilman,
    The Jew’s Body
    , pp. 10–37, 169–193.
    

25. Barbra’s femininity is also emphasized in the moment of disclosure by her extremely long fingernails. Soon after, she plays a few notes on the piano, unable to hit the notes clearly because of her nails. In the opening, postfame scene that frames the film, she is hy- perfeminized to accentuate her body as wealthy and nonlaboring (in a job that would re- quire shorter nails, that is.)
    

26. Gilman,
    The Jew’s Body
    , p. 235.
    

27. Alan Spiegel, “The Vanishing Act: A Typology of the Jew in Contemporary Amer- ican Film,” in
    From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen
    , ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 272.
    

28. See Jay Geller, “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” in
    Peo- ple of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective
    , ed. Howard Eilberg- Schwartz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 243–82.
    

29. The sound was shaped in part by Peter Matz, who has arranged many of her recordings.
    

30. Levine, “A Jewess,” p. 151.
    

31. Oppenheimer, “Review of
    Funny Girl
    .”
    

32. Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” in
    Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology
    , ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 33.
    

33. Ibid., p. 33.

1. See, for example, Chris Straayer,
   Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientation in Film and Video
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
   

2. I want to underline that I’m reading these images in the context of the 1968 film and its available representations available. Certainly the film capitalizes on the well-known image of the Jewish mother.
   

   Mid-century television saw two contradictory images of Jewish motherhood: the epit- ome of the Jewish mother stereotype in the doting Molly Goldberg (written as well as played by the inimitable Gertrude Berg) and the pathetic Jewish mothers who died of ter- rible diseases on
   Playhouse 90.
   

3. Interestingly, the character of Fanny’s mother, played by Kay Medford, is a gen- tle (if amusingly wry), sympathetic character who adores her daughter and supports her. It is Mrs. Straikosh who actually functions as the Jewish Mother in the film, as she pres- sures Fanny about marriage, comments on her appearance, and encourages her to get to- gether with Nick. The film’s displaced representation of a Jewish mother both allows that representation to do its ideological work and idealizes a “real” mother who is not quite Jewish.
   

4. Also, that Fanny can have a child and not care for it is enabled by her African Amer- ican maid, Emma, who appears in several scenes only to boost Fanny’s confidence.
   

5. Riese,
   Her Name Is Barbra
   , p. 266. 39. Ibid., p. 291.
   

1. Harley Erdman,
   Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920
   (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 156.
   

2. Sochen, “Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker,” pp. 46, 49, 46, 49. Also see Grossman,
   

   Funny Woman
   .
   

3. In 1960,
   Playhouse 90
   featured a completely different representation of a beautiful Jewess—rape victim that hearkens back to the early, pre-nineteenth-century image. In this Nazi (melo)drama, a very young Robert Redford debuted as a boy-Nazi with a heart of gold who rescues her.
   In the Presence of Mine Enemies,
   aired 18 May 1960, video from Jew- ish Museum, New York.
   

4. Fay, “Review of
   Funny Girl
   .”
   

5. This is one of Fanny’s very few self-references to being Jewish in the film. It’s also notable that she refers to a stereotypical signifier of lesbianism, the convent.
   

6. Erdman,
   Staging the Jew
   , p. 44. Erdman traces what he calls “the rise and fall of the ‘belle juive’” (p. 40). He contrasts the “old Jewess,” exemplified by
   The Merchant of Venice
   ’s Jessica, with the newer belle juive, an invention of nineteenth-century European Roman- ticism (p. 42). By the early 1900s, the “untamed passion” of the belle juive is downplayed, with Jewish woman characters in by biblical dramas (p. 54), and shortly, almost no Jewish women on stage at all (p. 156).