Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (44 page)

1. In this regard,
   The Dybbuk
   is a precursor to the occult-possession films Carol Clover analyzes, in which the exorcism of the possessed female protagonist—monstrously open, hideously pregnant, physically colonized—enables the emotional catharsis of a male protagonist in the grip of homosexual panic. “On the face of it,” Clover writes, “the occult film is the most ‘female’ of genres, telling as it regularly does tales of women or girls in the grip of the supernatural. But behind the female ‘cover’ is always the story of a man in cri- sis.” Carol Clover,
   Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
   (Princeton, 1992), 65.
   

2. Ansky,
   Der dibuk
   , 52–53.
   

3. Eve Sicular, “
   A yingl mit a yingl hot epes a tam
   : The Celluloid Closet of Yiddish Film” in
   When Joseph Met Molly: A Reader on Yiddish Film,
   ed. Five Leaves Publications (Nottingham, 1999). Sicular states, in a footnote that reminds us of the difficulty of doing homosexual history in a homophobic context, that Waszinski was reputed to be gay. Per- sonal communication with J. Hoberman.
   

4. Alisa Solomon,
   Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender
   (London and New York, 1997), 121.
   

Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body

STACY WOLF

Barbra Streisand is Barbra Streisand. There is no other way of describing her or ex- plaining her.

—Sidney Skolsky,
New York Post

Following queer desire turns us into readers who make strange, who render queer the relations between images and bodies.

—Elspeth Probyn, “Queer Belongings”

Since Barbra Streisand made her spectacular film debut as Fanny Brice in
Funny Girl
in 1968, she has been an object of fascination, vilification, and ad- miration.
1
The diva of divas with a well-publicized terror of live performance, Streisand is gossiped about equally as an egomaniacal, control-freak perfec- tionist on the set (particularly when directing) and as a frail, anxious slip of a girl who solicits opinions from anyone and everyone and still longs for con- ventional beauty and the approval of the father who died when she was a small child.

On the one hand, the contradictions that mark Streisand’s star persona echo those of any star. As Richard Dyer has written, the star identity, by its very definition, enunciates a constant tension between normalcy and extraordinar- iness, between authenticity and fabrication.
2
Stars must display vulnerability as well as charisma. And that Streisand does. Furthermore, if a star functions on one level as a coexistent representation of the everyday and the exceptional, then she works on another level as symbolic signifier. Simultaneously, then, Streisand “the person” can be psychoanalyzed, chastised, and respected, while Streisand “the symbol” can represent gay men’s love of American musicals, post-
Feminine Mystique
ambition, and, above all, late twentieth-century Jew- ish American femininity.

On the other hand, Streisand is not only or simply or definitively a star. The particularities of Streisand’s stardom—or perhaps, more accurately, the

peculiarities of Streisand’s stardom—exceed the typical habits of the star self that invite easy identification.
3
Her marked portrayal of Jewishness in body (her nose), voice (frequent yiddishisms), and behavior (aggressiveness) run counter to the ideal of “The Feminine” in American culture. The Jewess, notes Amy-Jill Levine, is “more and less than ‘woman,’” or as Carol Ockman describes her, “Womanhood gone awry.”
4
Streisand, as a singer, stage actor, film actor, director, and “person” redefines the very meaning of celebrity and produces a new category of representation of Jewish women that is, simply, complexly, tautologically “Barbra.”

This contradiction—Streisand-as-every-Jewish-woman versus Streisand- as-only-herself—is evident at the site of Streisand’s body. When
Funny Girl
opened on Broadway in 1964, one reviewer called Streisand both “an ancient Hittite princess” and “a rag doll.” Another described her (in a single review) as a “cyclone,” a “fascinating creature,” a “freak” whose hands and fingers are “a sort of art form in themselves, but more frightening than amusing.” Di- rector and choreographer Jerome Robbins said, “Her movements are wildly bizarre and completely elegant.” After the release of the film, Judith Christ proclaimed her “a combination of waif and nice-Jewish girl, of gamine and galumpher; she is that contemporary enigma, the beautiful ugly who defies classic form.”
5
Not only does she occupy the place of both singularity and typicality, but both sides of the equation have positive and negative valences.

In this essay I want to explore the consolidation of Streisand’s star persona in
Funny Girl
, in the role of the famous, early twentieth-century Jewish co- median and singer of vaudeville and radio, Fanny Brice. As I hope to show, Streisand’s performance in the popular musical knits together queerness and Jewishness to create a “woman” who, in body, gesture, voice, and character, is indeed a “funny girl.”
6

The strategies by which
Funny Girl
demonstrates its queerness—perfor- mativity, irony, parody, deconstruction, disavowal—differentiate its represen- tational project from a more mimetic, “positive-images” depiction fueled by identity politics. “Queer,” writes Alexander Doty, can “mark a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non (anti- , contra-) straight cultural produc- tion and reception.”
7
There are no visible queers or homofolk in
Funny Girl
, yet Streisand’s performance opens up numerous opportunities for queer visual and aural pleasures. First, Streisand’s method of playing Fanny Brice frequent- ly undercuts the mimetic expectations of acting (even in the broad style of a musical) creating gaps between actor and character; second, Fanny’s trajectory of fame/fortune/marriage/separation undermines the assumptive heteronarra- tive of musicals; and third, her characterization draws on other, historical rep- resentations of Jewish women but dislodges the heterosexuality on which these

representations are based. The star persona configured through the film, re- views, and biographies of and gossip about Streisand at once refers to and trou- bles historical depictions of Jewish women. The denaturalization of heterosex- uality as a “negative” representational strategy confirms Cherry Smyth’s claim that “the advent of a queer movement . . . acknowledges the fracturing bound- aries of sexual identification.”
8

“She Looks a Bit Off Balance”

Funny Girl
is the musical comedy version of the life story of Fanny Brice, the famous vaudeville singer and comedian who starred in the Ziegfeld Follies in the early 1920s.
9
The play and the quite similar film (from which my per- formance examples are drawn) follow Fanny’s career from an unsuccessful chorus girl to a star, and her personal life from her courtship and marriage to charmer and gambler Nick Arnstein to his financial demise and their eventu- al breakup. The play saw a successful run of 1,348 performances, and the film was a financial and critical success and won Streisand an Oscar for Best Ac- tress (she tied with Katherine Hepburn). The soundtrack was a big hit as well, and even competing with late 1960s rock ’n’ roll music was on the top of the pop charts for weeks.
10
Funny Girl
is considered the last of the “golden age” or “classic” musicals, after which rock musicals like
Hair
and
Jesus Christ Su- perstar
and the “concept” musicals of Stephen Sondheim, such as
Sweeney Todd
and
Sunday in the Park with George
prevailed.

The musical, in spite of its mainstream popularity and the attendant conservative gender, sexual, and racial politics of its content, offers queer spectatorial interventions. If its synecdochic relationship to gay masculinity is not enough to “prove” the queerness of musicals, then the formal conven- tions of the genre do.
11
The musical is structured by way of song and dance, by overt displays of vocal aptitude and physical prowess, that is, by its own pleasure in its own performativity. Musicals, in spite of composers’, lyricists’, and librettists’ historically articulated effort to “integrate” the book and the musical numbers, are figured around Brechtian pauses, gaps, absences, and “Alienation-effects.” The musical invites extravagant identifications, aggres- sive reappropriations, and elaborate forays into fantasy—in short, a queer use of them.

The pleasures of musicals have been productively articulated in conjunc- tion with gay male culture. Alexander Doty, for example, writing about Hol- lywood musicals, is interested in their

“feminine” or “effeminized” aesthetic, camp, and emotive genre charac- teristics (spectacularized decor and costuming, intricate choreography, and singing about romantic yearning and fulfillment), with reference to the more hidden cultural history of gay erotics centered around men in musicals.
12

In
Place for Us [Essay on the Musical]
, D. A. Miller poetically evokes a personal history of a gay man as it intersects with his desirous fascination for the “somehow gay genre,” the Broadway musical. Like Doty (but in a complete- ly different rhetoric), Miller sees the musical as feminine and feminizing. He argues that part of the musical’s magnetism is its seductive ability to make (gay) men want to be (to perform as) women. Describing it as “the utopia of female preeminence on the musical stage,” Miller argues that it is “a form whose unpublicizable work is to indulge men in the thrills of femininity
be- come their own
.”
13
I agree with Doty and Miller that musicals are striking in their dependence on women as performers and their locating a woman as the strong center of the show. Also, women in musicals are active and athletic, and musicals often contain numbers with groups of women dancing togeth- er, creating a homosocial dynamic.

I intend my project to complement Doty’s and Miller’s, to use “queerness” and queer theory interlaced with feminist interpretive strategies.
14
While I privilege the flexible, shifting, multiple significations of representation vis-à- vis sexuality, I also want to favor (savor?) the bodies and voices of women as women. Even so, my “lesbian” reading of Streisand in
Funny Girl
is one, I hope, easily taken up by queers of all sorts. As Doty and Corey K. Creekmur argue, queerness is “at the core of mainstream culture even though that cul- ture tirelessly insists that its images, ideologies, and readings were always only about heterosexuality.”
15

The film,
Funny Girl
, conforms to the musical’s genre distinctions but goes even farther to value women over men. Except for the first verse of a Ziegfeld number sung by “the boys,” only women sing in the film.
16
The ma- jority of the film space is occupied by Streisand, followed by groups of women—the Ziegfeld girls and Fanny’s mother and her friends—thus women visually and vocally dominate the film. Nick Arnstein only appears in relation to Fanny: in the first part of the film, as an object of her desire, and, in the second, as self-destructive and “emasculated” (and all the more desirable for it). Nick and the other men in the film—Eddie the stage manager, sweet and ineffectual, and Ziegfeld, authoritative and ineffectual—are feminized throughout. As Mrs. Straikosh, Fanny’s mother’s friend, says, “What kind of

name is Florenz for a boy?” And, as I will later discuss,
Funny Girl
asserts het- erosexuality’s importance weakly.

The musical is, by “nature,” a very Jewish genre as well. From the begin- ning, Jewish men (with the notable exception of the gay Cole Porter) created the most American of cultural forms.
17
From
Annie Get Your Gun
to
Girl Crazy
, from
South Pacific
to
My Fair Lady
, from
Gypsy
to
Mame
, Jewish men, including Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Jule Styne, and later, Stephen Sond- heim and Jerry Herman, wrote the songs of Broadway (many of which, like
Funny Girl
, were adapted for film).
18
Assimilation of American Jews was as ev- ident among the second-generation Jewish men who were the makers of the Broadway musical as elsewhere in the New York business and art worlds.
19
Not surprisingly, perhaps, no roles were for Jewish women. If the men enact- ed their assimilationist dreams through thoroughly American melodies and poems, they elided the existence of Jewish women altogether. Like Molly Picon in Herman’s
Milk and Honey
(1961), Barbra Streisand was one of the first Jewish women to play a Jewish woman on the Broadway musical theater stage.
20
Streisand’s Jewish-woman-stardom foregrounds the assimilationist masculinity of mid-century musicals.

“Hello, Gorgeous?”

Although she was already a well-known singer, Streisand’s first starring role in a Broadway musical invited a different kind of media scrutiny. As the leading lady, a role dominated by blond ingenues, Streisand’s differentness was con- stantly remarked upon. She was invariably compared to the real Fanny Brice in style and talent; both were seen as the ugly Jewish girl who makes good in her own special way. Many reviewers went so far as to say that she was Fanny Brice. Virtually every reviewer agreed on her immense talent (even if they found the show itself lacking), but many spent much of their word count in minute, almost horrified descriptions of Streisand’s body and face. Rather than specifically point to her all-too-obvious “Jewishness,” though, journalists focused on her inappropriate femininity. One describes “the Nefertiti nose . . . the face of an urchin, the nose too big for it . . . her eyes hell-bent on joining forces in a Cyclopian manner. Her hair, piled up mountainously, gives her the pathetic look of a chicken trapped under a tea-cosy.”
21
The writer’s distaste for Streisand’s appearance is palpable, as he categorizes her physicality through metaphors that mark her distance—whether geographic, economic, mythical, or animalistic—from accepted ideals of feminine appearance, but he never