Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (4 page)

1. Notes
   

   1. For a recent study of the formative role played by the black/white “color line” in the invention and elaboration of U.S. models of homosexual identity, see Somerville’s
      Queer- ing the Color Line
      .
      

   2. This is a bond more explicit than the homosociality thematized in Sedgwick’s
      Be- tween Men
      , but it is still played out over the bodies of women. As support for Seidman’s reading, we might mention here that in the Hassidic
      Shiv
      h
      ei Habesht
      (hagiography of the founder of Hassidism), a homoerotic love between the bride’s brother and the bridegroom is made the condition for the effectuation of a marriage, suggesting that this was, indeed, a Hassidic commonplace.
      

   3. This dis-placement eccentric to “the family” recalls David M. Halperin’s enunciation of “queer” as a positionality resistant to the regime of “normal” heterosexuality. Hirsch’s contribution to the volume also articulates well with Mosse’s overlapping account of bour-
      

      geois sensibility, sexuality, and nationalism in his
      Nationalism and Sexuality
      and
      The Image of Man
      .
      

   4. In contrast to earlier historicist moves that understand and read the text as a trans- parent reflector of its sociocultural and political histories, the newer historicism treats lit- erature as an opaque and complex participant in ramified and not at all self-consistent mo- ments. These moments themselves help to construct social and cultural differences in service of projects of hegemony and power, as well as—sometimes—in the service of high- ly critical treatments of those moments. Hence, the cooperation of close reading and con- text, arguably the most significant of contributions of theory to practical critical projects, to interpretation in praxis. “New historicist” reading is, therefore, anything but reductive, as all three of these exemplary essays show.
      

   5. A compelling parallel to this phenomenon surfaces in Alice Kaplan’s reading of Jean- Paul Sartre’s
      The Childhood of a Leader
      . In that text Sartre shows how a feminized, homo- sexualized Frenchman constructs himself as male by the abjection of Jews. As Kaplan ar- gues with respect to that French fascist, “Only anti-Semitism succeeds in giving him the gift of masculinity he has sought” (19), thus anticipating Fischlin’s claim vis-à-vis Cocteau.
      

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Bray, Alan.
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Chauncey, George, Jr. “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conception of Female Deviance.” In Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, with Robert Padgug, eds.,
Passion and Power: Sexuality in History
, 87–117. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Davidson, Arnold. “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality.” In Edward Stein, ed.,
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, 89–132. New York: Routledge, 1992.

D’Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” In Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds.,
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Geller, Jay. “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other.” In Howard Eilberg- Schwartz, ed.,
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——— “A Paleontological View of Freud’s Study of Religion: Unearthing the Leitfossil Circumcision.”
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Gilman, Sander L.
Freud, Race, and Gender
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The Jew’s Body
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——— “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess.’”
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Halperin, David M.
Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography
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Harrowitz, Nancy A. “Weininger and Lombroso: A Question of Influence.” In Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, eds.,
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Nationalisms and Sexuality
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———
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Category Crises: The Way of the Cross

and the Jewish Star

MARJORIE GARBER

In her 1992 study
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
, Mar- jorie 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 “cate- gory crisis.” On the one hand, cross-dressing sparks “a failure of definition- al 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 Chris- tian. On the other, the mechanics of displacement unleashed by cross- dressing in its various (dis)guises may also be turned back to stabilize, or conserve, cultural norms. We can see this tension between disruption and conservation (or normalization) played out in the cross-dressed figure of Yentl, which Garber examines in the first of two excerpts from
Vested Inter- ests
reprinted below. In it, she contrasts the labile potentialities of I. B. Singer’s “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” with the heteronormative “straightened” version on offer in Barbra Streisand’s filmic adaptation. Garber’s discussion of these two Yentls is immediately preceded by her analysis of attempts to stage-manage, or tame, Shakespeare’s cross-dressed female characters. If the cross-dressed figure of Yentl has some features in common with Shake- speare’s Rosalind or Viola, Yentl also allegorizes anti-Semitic stereotypes of “the Jew as always-already a woman.” Thus, in the second excerpt from
Vest- ed Interests
, Garber considers this disturbing overlay of sexual and racial stereotypes as she pursues the vexed crossings of “woman” and “Jew.”

What a strange power there is in clothing.

—I. B. Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”

The point is made remarkably in the contrast between I. B. Singer’s short story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” published in 1962, and the 1983 Barbra Streisand film
Yentl
, adapted from Singer’s work. For Streisand makes her film a classic progress narrative or role-model allegory for the eighties, the story of a woman’s liberation from old world patriarchy, the emigration of a Jewish Princess to the new world of Hollywood. Singer’s story, by contrast, insists not only upon the quasi-mystical otherness of his nineteenth-century old world setting but also upon the transvestite as a subject rather than a “stage.” The “Anshel” of his tale escapes, is not converted but dispersed and reborn.

In Streisand’s film, jokingly described by Hollywood skeptics as “
Tootsie on the Roof
,”
1
Yentl is a young girl who is more interested in studying the He- brew scriptures with her scholar father than in buying fish with the local housewives. When her father dies, she faces herself in the mirror (in an im- portant narcissistic moment), cuts off her long hair, and, dressed as a boy, sets off to become a scholar and spend her life reading the Torah. She takes the name “Anshel,” which, since it was the name of her brother who died in child- hood, represents her fantasied male self. (Compare this to Viola/Cesario’s af- fecting little story in
Twelfth Night
about a mythical “sister” who never told her love, and pined away—or, equally pertinent, Viola’s decision to dress her- self, in her guise as “Cesario,” exactly like her brother, Sebastian.)

Inevitably, Yentl/Anshel meets a young man, Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), with whom she falls in love, though he himself is in love with Hadass (Amy Irving). When Avigdor’s marriage is prevented (his brother had committed suicide, rendering the whole family outcast and unsuitable for alliance), he urges “Anshel” to marry Hadass. A comic series of episodes follows, including one rather pointed scene at the tailor’s, where the terrified husband-to-be is being fitted for a wedding suit. In the course of a long, determinedly broad song-and-dance number the audience is invited to speculate on “Anshel”’s trousers, and on what the tailors see—and don’t see—beneath them in the course of their work.

These tailors, like the tailors who intimidated Freud’s Wolf-Man, are
Schneiders
, cutters—a word related, as Freud points out, to the verb
beschnei- den
, “to circumcise.”
2
Are Orthodox Jewish men, ritually circumcised, really any different from women? the fi seems, teasingly, to ask. Streisand/Yentl/“An- shel,” reenacting in comic (and musical) terms the always-already of castra-

tion/circumcision, draws attention to her quandary—the heterosexual female transvestite facing the prospect of marriage to a woman—as incapacity. In the next scenes, of the wedding and its remarkably eroticized aftermath, she will tri- umph over that apparent obstacle.

On the wedding night, “Anshel” persuades Hadass that there is no rush to consummate their marriage—that Hadass should choose sex rather than having it forced upon her. In an extraordinarily tender and erotic scene of in- struction, the forbidden sexual energy is deflected into a mutual reading of the Talmud, with Streisand (the woman playing a woman dressed as a man) teaching Irving how to understand the Law. This is one of the scenes that most reminds me of Rosalind in
As You Like It
, in her guise as “Ganymede” teaching Orlando how to show his love.

Streisand’s film is at least on the surface normatively heterosexual, so that this dangerous liminal moment in which Hadass falls in love with Yentl/An- shel is flanked—so to speak—on the one side by an early, comic moment in which Yentl/Anshel has to share a bed with Avigdor (who of course thinks she’s a boy, and doesn’t therefore understand her reluctance to strip and get under the covers) and on the other side by the revelation scene, in which Yentl declares her “true” sexual identity to Avigdor, ultimately baring her breasts to resolve his doubt.

Yet the scene between Streisand and Amy Irving smoulders with repressed sexuality. Irving later declared that she was “pretty excited. I mean, I’m the first female to have a screen kiss with Barbra Streisand! She refused to re- hearse, but after the first take she said, ‘It’s not so bad. It’s like kissing an arm.’ I was a little insulted, because I believed so much that she was a boy that I’d sort of fallen in love with her” (Considine, 344). In another interview she ex- plained that Streisand “was like the male lead, and she gave me the feminine lead. No problems.”
3
Is Irving’s “like” a comparative, or eighties babble-speak punctuation for emphasis?
Was
Streisand the male lead—or just an imper- sonator? Her own response to “Anshel’s” undecidable and undeniable eroti- cism was, predictably, a kind of appropriative denial. When Hollywood pro- ducer Howard Rosenman, attending a private screening of
Yentl
, told her, “You were fabulous as a boy. Anshel was very sexy,” she replied, he says, “very cutelike, in that nasal voice, ‘Howard! Anshel is taken’” (Considine, 351).