Jewish Gender Studies and Contemporary Literary Criticism

My starting point for this discussion is my work in literary criticism, especially in terms of my ongoing research which focuses on contemporary British Jewish writing. So, drawing from a contemporary cultural context, in the following, I situate gender studies in relation to the ways in which it impacts on readings of recent Jewish literature. Rather than trying to sum up five decades of thinking about gender, I suggest a few moments in the development of gender studies, in terms of some of the achievements, challenges and changes we have seen since the 1970s; and then, in brief, I look forward to future developments. Theoretical Contexts Firstly, I want to give a broad overview of some theoretical contexts and then look at the ways in which ideas about Jewishness have intersected with those developments. Literary criticism is of course informed by wider intellectual, social and cultural movements. So, in line with other disciplinary approaches, I begin with an understanding of gender as focused on the construction and representation of categories of masculinity and femininity. In terms of the evolution of the kinds of gender studies that are applied within literary criticism today, we need to situate developments from the early contexts of Second Wave feminism and its impact in the academy during the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside a new emphasis on women’s experience within literature and criticism, which was formative throughout the 1980s and 1990s, feminism has to some extent evolved into what we now think of as gender studies. That is to say that the construction of masculinity, as a social and cultural category, has, alongside the study of femininity, also become a significant focus of enquiry. In recent years gender studies has further evolved to incorporate a far wider exploration of sexual identification. Within the contemporary social context, as well as within academic discourse, there are now many and various non-binary permutations of gender, sex and sexuality. In terms of literary theory, the inception of queer theory has been pivotal within this development and has shaped much current critical thinking in cultural and literary studies. Most notably, the work of the philosopher and theorist, Judith Butler, in the 1990s, particularly her exploration of gender performativity, was groundbreaking.1 Alongside other theorists of the time, such as the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this work transformed the field.2 As Sedgwick and her contemporaries argued at the time, queer theory allows for a multiple and diffuse understanding of identities. In a defining statement she explained that: [Queer] is the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’. These influential academic considerations arguably prefigured some of the more mainstream social and cultural developments that we see today. * Reader in the Department of English, Creative Writing and American Studies, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK. Email: ruth.gilbert@winchester.ac.uk 1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men (New York: Columbia, 1985); Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994). 3 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8. 22 MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 13 (2019) In terms of the particularly Jewish focus of this contribution, it is interesting to explore how a queer potential for destabilisation and multiplicity, with regard to categories of sex, gender and sexual identification, intersects with conceptualisations of Jewishness. Both Butler and Sedgwick originate from Jewish backgrounds and this is perhaps not entirely coincidental. With its interest in “possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances”, queer theory is a methodology that can be applied within and beyond gender studies and I would suggest that it also underlies many developments in cultural Jewish studies of recent decades. So, what is it that makes it possible to read Jewishness alongside queerness and how does this strategy inform developments within contemporary Jewish literary studies? An example of the influence of such thinking might be seen in the work of Daniel Boyarin, whose work on Jewish masculinity in the 1990s is significant in developing the connection between the ways in which both gender and Jewishness are constructed within fundamentally unstable cultural categories.4 In an important 2003 edited volume, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Boyarin, along with his co-editors, explains that the aim of the collection is to look at “rhetorical and theoretical connections” in order to explore how “Jewishness and queerness...are bound up with one another in particularly resonant ways.”5 The uncertainty that has characterised historical attempts to categorise Jewishness is one particular point of resonance with queer theory. Here the work of Sander Gilman on the Jewish body, focusing often on nineteenth and early twentieth-century European conceptualisations of gender, sex and Jewishness has been central in shaping the field. Similarly, the literary critic Bryan Cheyette has argued, in a persuasive body of work, that Jewishness has historically been constructed within British culture as a profoundly ambiguous signifier of difference. As Cheyette explains, within late nineteenthcentury and modernist discourses, the “Jew” was figured as a confusing embodiment of indeterminacy and this effect has, to some extent, lingered.6 Cheyette’s work, first published in the 1990s, has been vital in developing the field of Jewish literary studies, especially within the British context. Cheyette’s critical contribution has also encouraged a new generation of literary critics whose work explores relationships between Jewishness, gender and sexuality, alongside intersecting identifications such as nationality, race and ethnicity. These include academics whose work focuses on gender and sexuality, such as Nadia Valman, who has looked particularly at the construction of the “Jewess” within nineteenth-century literature; and David Brauner, who has written extensively about both male and female Jewish authors.