SHORT ASSIGNMENT: One Page: Explain one paragraph of Jakobsen’s text. What is her argument

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~UEER THEORY AND TH'E JEWISH QUESTI01

Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz,

and Ann Pellegrini, Editors

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, Ulest Sussex

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Queer theory and the Jewish question I Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovicz, and Ann Pellegrini, editors.

p. cm.-(Between meh-between women)

ISBN 0-231-11374-9 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN 0-231-11375-7 (pbk.: olk. pape<)

1. Jewish gays. 2. Jewish lesbians. I. Boyarin, Daniel. II. Itzkovitz, Daniel. III. Pellegrini, Ann

IV. Series.

HQ75.15.Q5 2003 305.892'4-dcll

2003048494

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books

are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

010987654321 p10987654321

Acknowledgments

Strange Bedfellows: An Introduction

Daniel Boyarin, Daniel ltzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini

Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star

Marjorie Garber

Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Contents

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They? Analogy and Alliance Politics 64

Janet R. Jakobsen

Freud, Bltiher, and the Secessio lnversa: Mannerbunde, Homosexuality, and Freud's Theory of Cultural Formation

Jay Geller

Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan "Babe" Leopoid Jr. and Richard "Dickie" Loeb

Paul B. Franklin

Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights

Alisa Solomon

121

149

vii

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They? Analogy

and Alliance Politics

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

Queers are like Jews. Aren't they? What does it mean to pose the Jewish question in relation to queer theo-

ry? Is there any one Jewish question? And does not the Jewish question also pose the question of queer theory itself? What is the relationship berween "Jewish" and "queee'? Does queer, after all, refer to the identity of those with whom it is most commonly associated in the current milieu: homosexuals and other sexual dissidents? Or does queer mean something, well, "different" than

that, different than a catch-all ca\egory with reference to sexuality? And if queer refers to something else-to~ for example, that which is other, different, odd, queer-what is its relation to the specific difference (queerness?)' of Jew- ish? One can certainly imagine instances in which it would be quite queer to be Jewish. But, if we simply take up the concept in this manner-that Jews are the queers of this or that setting-does not all difference get colonized into "queer"? And, doesn't the specter of sexual identity continue to haunt the word queer, leaving sexuality as the fundamental difference? What if Jewish is taken to mean something more than a specific difference? What of the impli- cations of Jewishness beyond Jewish difference?' What if Jews are taken to represent a fundamental difference-that which is unassimilable in moderni-

ty, for example?2 In the end, do Jewish and queer become the same simply be- cause both are different?

For the purpose of this essay, I would like to explore these questions through the specificity and complexity of historical relation. I would like to suggest that there ~re overlapping relations berween the "Jewish question'' as a fundamental question of difference posed to modernity and the question of difference posed by queer theory. Some of the similarities berween these rwo differences may, in fact, be traced through a genealogy of their interrelations. And yet they are not the same. Jews are not simply the queers of the catego-

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

ry moderniry or even religion. By positing the question of similariry "Queers are like Jews, aren't they?" in its historical relation between homosexuals and Jews, I hope to elucidate a fundamental complexity of such histories. The sim- ilarities and differences of the two categories are not fully specifiable, because the categories are not fully separable. They are overlapping-intertwined even-but not coextensive. Along the way I hope to look into the possibility of reinvigorating the queer question in queer theory: What does queer mean if it is not s.!mply a multiculti version of sexuality?

Analogy

Queers are like Jews. Aren't they? The longstanding associations, both implicit and explicit, of homosexuals

and Jews. at least in terms of antisemitic and antihomosexual discourses, can still be found in contemporary sites ranging from new-right hate groups to the Supreme Court.3 In 1996, for example, Supreme Court Justice Scalia's dissent from the decision striking down Colorado's antigay amendment 2 sounds as if it comes directly from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 4 Scalia portrays homosexuals, like Jews, as a small but overprivileged minority with both financial capital and political influence well in excess of either numbers or justified expectation.

The question for activists is what to make of this analogy. How do we re- spond to such derogatory comparisons? And, given the conservative force of such analogies when used by the right, how do we think about the uses of analogy that have become relatively commonplace in progressive politics? For example, the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation was rife with analogies to the 1963 Civil Rights March. These analogies were employed to demonstrate the need for civil rights pro- tections for sexual minorities that would be similar to those offered to racial minorities .. This use of analogy proved to be effective in certain ways but problematic in others. Concerns about analogizing sexuality to race have ranged from the issue of "appropriation'' to the loss of historical specificity .

. There is no question that analogies can be powerful in both progressive and conservative politics. For progressives analogies can show that one form of political oppression and/or struggle is like another. For example, if an au- dience already recognizes that racism is politically indefensible, then analo- gizing sexuality to race can make heterosexism equally indefensible. Analogy is ofren used in legal reasoning, to show, for example, that one type of dis- criminatory action is like another when the latter is already clearly subject to

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

legal regularion or penalty. Thus, ro show rhar one form of discriminarion is like anorher, already regulated form would provide the basis for successful lirigation.

The use of analogy is particularly powerful because it draws on a language of equality rhat has been central ro modern political discourse. In rheir im- portant book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesro Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) have demonstrated how analogies employ a logic of equiva- lence by which multiple struggles can be recognized. Laclau and Mouffe also believe that these equivalences can connect movements to each other. They argue, for example, that in the nineteenth century arguments for the recogni- tion of sexism and women's rights were made on the basis of an analogy to the already established discourse of rhe "rights of man." Thus, Mary Woll- sronecraft "displaced [rhe discourse of rights] from equality between citizens to the field of equality between rhe sexes" (154). Positioning women's rights as like rhe rights of citizens (men) makes women equal to men, just as all cit- izens are equal to each other. This move also makes social movements equiv- alent to one another. If women are equal to men just as citizens are equal to one another, then women are also equal to citizens and_ the movements for democracy (equality of citizens) and women's rights (equality for women) are equivalent. For Laclau and Mouffe rhis logic of equivalence can join move- ments in a common struggle for equality and democracy.

We can see in rhe history of social movements in rhe U.S. some ofLaclau and Mouffe's analysis being played out. The power of claiming equivalence is evident in the social movements-feminist, civil rights, international human rights-that have time and again been founded upon it. The logic of equiva- lence has allowed claims for equality and rights to circulate among move- ments. It has not, however, been effective in connecting these movements to each other.

More rhan rhat, the very act of making the analogy and displacing the logic of equality from one movement ro another can pull apart those move- ments it would seem to connect. It can create women's rights as an au- ronomous field of activity, separate from but equal to other forms of struggle for rights. If equivalence creates autonomous fields, separate from one anoth- er, rhen analogies employed within the logic of equivalence may actually un- dercut, rather than enable, alliances among movements. 5

But, in addition to providing the logic of equivalence, analogies are also employed ro provide rhe affect of connection, specifically to promote solidar- ity by creating empathy across different experiences. As Trina Grillo and Stephanie M. Wildman (1997) argue in rheir critique of analogies:

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

Analogies are necessary tools to teach and to explain, so that we can bet- ter understand each other's experiences and realities. We have no other way to Understand others' lives, except by making analogies to our own experience. Thus, the use of analogies provides both the key to greater comprehension and the danger of false understanding. (44-45) ·

Grillo and Wildman go on to discuss whar, through their own use of analo- gies in various settings, they came to perceive as "the dangers inherent in what had previously seemed ro us to be a creative and solidarity-producing process-analogizing sex discrimination to race discrimiilation. These dan-

gers were obscured by the promise that to discuss and compare oppressions might lead to coalition building and understanding" (46). They argue that analogy has three basic and interrelated problems, problems thav have also been identified by a number of other critics. 6 First, even as the meaning of the first term in an analogy {e.g., sexism) depends on the second term to which it is analogized (racism), the analogy tends ro make the first term the center of analysis while marginalizing (if including at all) any analysis of the second term. So, for example, if we say sexism is like racism, we may go on to ana-

lyze sexism in great depth without necessarily giving much attention to racism except insofar as it sets up our analysis of sexism.7 Not only do we learn noth- ing more about racism, but we learn nothing about the relationship between sexism and racism. Thus the analogy reduces the relationship between various "oppressions" to their similarities, and the c;omplexities of their interrelation are lost.

Second, by emphasizing the ways in which "oppressions" are like one an- other, analogy can give the sense that it explains everything about any experi- ence of oppression, such that, for example, the pain of particular experiences of sexism is lost to the ways in which it is like racism. Often, then, the speci- ficity of each experience is lost ro a generalized sense of oppression in which all oppressions are (generally) like each other. Moreover, those who have experi- enced sexism but not racism can think that they then understand racism on the basis of their experience. Thus, on the basis of such analogies, generalized processes like "othering" or "marginalization'' can come to describ~ the mech-

anism of all oppressions and the historical specificity of racism or sexism is lost. Third, analogy tends to create two distinctive groups. In Grillo and

W1ldmails example women who experience sexism are constituted as a dis- tinct category from people of color who experience racism. This move tends to elide the intersection between the two, creating the now infamous con-

junction "women and people of color," which erases the existence of women

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

of color and simultaneously constitutes "women" as "white." Once such sep- arate fields are created, it becomes much harder to form alliances, because women now names a white category separated off from people of color, and any desire for alliance is already undercut by the assertion of autonomy. Moreover, other potential lines of complication, but also connection-class or religion, for example-are also elided as constitutive of both sexism and racism. Anti- sexist and antiracist movements are also, then, conceptually separated from each other by the analogy, despite their long histories of interrelation. This context of relation, and its attendant ambiguities and complexities, provides the potential building blocks for alliance among analogized terms or the movements that they name, and yet analogy works precisely by eliding such specifics.

None of these terms-sexism, racism, heterosexism-is either unambiguous or fully autonomous from others, although the invocation of each term also has specific effects. This fundamental complexity-that the constitutive terms of politics are both interdependent so as to be resistant to specification and have specific effects-is one that the use of analogy is too narrow to recognize. This is not to say that it is not ·useful to name such distinct fields and to con- sider the specific effects of such naming, but it is to say that simple analogies will be likely to obscure these specifics, especially in terms of interrelation, and will be unlikely to form the basis for alliance.

These problems with analogy can have significant political effects. Let us return for a moment to the example of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation and its use of analogies to the 1963 Civil Rights March.8 While depending on the recognition that race was a category worthy of civil rights protections, the argument that march or- ganizers produced for gay and lesbian civil rights made no active connections between antiracist and antiheterosexist struggles. Despite interventions around this issue from various quarters, the public face of the march, as seen, for example, in videotapes produced by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign (then Fund) ofren failed to produce connections with predominantly African American movements for civil rights. Rather, what was produced was a "gay community" that was distinct from (although supposedly similar to) its African American predecessor in struggle. In its distinction this "gay communiry" ended up looking much like the dominant public who was the audience for the analogy: predominantly white with a contained African American minority. In the march videos analogies to the 1963 civil rights march are rife, while images of African Americans are segregated and contained within the "broader" (read: white) "gay community." The NGLTF tape Marching for Freedom opens with the

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

evocation of African American freedom struggles through song and then moves into a series of interviews with mostly white marchers who pr~claim their normalcy and similarity to the general public. In the Human Rights Campaign Fund tape Prelude to Victory the evocation of diversity is shown through a series of performances in which people of color are always bracket' e(l by white people.

The use of this analogy reduced the relation between oppressions to one of similarity. In this formulation "lesbian and gays" are discriminated against "like African Americans." Here, the analogy fails to recognize historical dif- ferences, such as the historical effects of racialization grounded not merely in discrimination but in the histo!y of slavery. Moreover, this analytic reduction allows those on the political right to challenge claims for lesbian and gay rights simply by enumerating the historical differences between racism and heterosexism. The right-wing videotape Gay Rights, Special Rights tak~s pre- cisely this tack. This videotape was extremely successful in splirring African Americans from political alliances with gay rights movements, and this suc- cess was based in part on the problematic nature of the analogy between sex- uality and race that was deployed by gay rights advocates. In this instance the progressive use of analogy played into the hands of the right.

So, should progressives stop using analogies? Will they only be effective for conservatives? One of the reasons that analogy is so effective for conserva- tives while it so often fails to accomplish its intended effects in progressive politics is the structure of analogy itself. Christina Crosby (1994) has explored the structuring effects of analogy. Because analogy is a form of metaphor, analogy accomplishes its work through the transfer of properties from one set of terms to another. To describe this movement, Crosby draws on the theory of Ch. Perelman who points out that with metaphors "it is essential, for anal- ogy to fulfill its argumentative role, that the first [term] be less known, in some respect, than the second ... which must structure the analogy. We will call the [term] which is the object of the discourse the theme and the second, thanks to its effecting the [metaphoric] transfer [of meaning], the phore of the analogy'' (Perelman 4, quoted in Crosby 24). So, in Grillo and Wildman's ex- ample, sexism is the theme and racism is the phore, and in the 1993 March on Washington, heterosexism and gay and lesbian rights is the theme and racism and civil rights for African Americans is the phoros. The legal recognition of racism as a clear wrong that should be remedied through civil rights has ob- viously had a large effect on progressive political discourse. In this sense racism is more well known than sexism or heterosexism. Civil rights protec- tions against gender discrimination were included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act because opponents of the bill thought that it would be impossible to stop

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

protections against race-based discrimination but that the inclusion of gender might kill the bill {and, of course, protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were not included at all). Thus movements at- tempting to demonstrate to U.S. society that sexism or heterosexism is wrong and should be legally prohibited have in their use of analogies depended upon the development of a particular consensus about racism.

Racism has provided the ground for these analogies, and this means that likening sexism and heterosexism to racism communicates differently than likening racism to sexism and heterosexism. This is not to say that the analo- gy cannot be used in the other directions-that racism is like heterosexism, for example-but what is communicated by this reversal will be different, be- cause heteosexism will provide the ground of knowledge. It is quite clear that in the legal arena to liken racism to heterosexism will have different effects, because heterosexism has no legal standing; the analogy would be obviously ineffective. The two analogies also have different meanings in interpersonal settings like those described by Grillo and Wildman. In some ways it might be effective in a multicultural setting to say that racism is like heterosexism, as an attempt to enable white gays and lesbians to think about racism. But, as Grillo and Wildman report, its effectiveness is limited precisely because white gays and lesbians can understand racism only insofar as it is like heterosexism. The ground of the analogy-in this case heterosexism-provides the mean- ing of the analogy and also sets the limits of this meaning.

Crosby concludes that: "The equivalence created in analogy, then, re- quires that the theme have value relative to the phore." In other words, the first term is dependent on the second. The two terms are not simply equivalent and they cannot necessarily be interchanged. In fact, the ground of the anal- ogy must be kept stable in order to shift our understanding of the theme. It is because we supposedly know and understand racism and know how to act to prohibit it that our knowledge of sexism can shift. If sexism is like racism, then what was once accepted as an appropriate set of social relations-in which women could, for example, be denied jobs simply because they were women-becomes legally prohibited discrimination. The use of analogy by the organizers of the 1993 March on Washington was intended to accomplish a similar shift. If heterosexism is like racism, then discrimination against gays and lesbians is no longer an acceptable form of social relation. But in each of these shifts, the ground of the analogy-racism-must remain stable when, in fact, the predominant understanding of racism in the U.S. and the social consensus that it is wrong is actually very weak. Progressives argue that sexu- al orientation should be a protected category, like race, but it is hardly as if legal prohibition has effectively protected people of color from racism in lJ.S.

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

society. This sense, that the theme of an analogy depends on the ground, is part of what can undercut the feelings of empathy among groups that Grillo and Wildman had hoped to produce. Those who fought for civil ~ights pro- tections can feel used when their struggles are invoked as the stable ground of analogy without recognition of either the difficulties of those struggles or the continuing fragility of civil rights protections when it comes to race. Thus, it should not surprise us that, for example, in the very same political discourses · that invoke and depend on analogy to the domination of African Americans, gay and lesbian politics reiterates this very domination. Advocates of gay and lesbian rights-even as they invoke the analogy-can ignore, marginalize, and exploit the struggles of African Americans, thus reenacting the racism of mainstream American political life.

To return to the topic at hand, we can now see why the claim that queers are like Jews is so effective specifically in conservative politics, i.e., politics that are simultaneously homophobic and antisemitic. Because the theme must have value relative to the phoros, then the question of the domination of queers depends upon the maintenance of the domination of Jews as well. The analogy effectively marks both as appropriately dominated and makes that domination interdependent. Because the interdependence is not simply in- terchangeable, however, to claim that queers are like Jews in a progressive nar- rative is to maintain this dependence on the domination of Jews. So, the claim that queers are subject to domination in the United States in the same way that antisemitism operates, is dependent on maintaining the specific value of the phoros-i.e., the domination of Jews-and the progressive claims of queers (insofar as they are based on this analogy) are also based on the con- tinuation of antisemitism.

The internal structure of analogy, then, makes it particularly effective as a tool to iterate dominations across categories and much less effective in at- tempts to avoid such (re)iterations. In fact, this argument shows how various dominations are linked within discursive structures and how these linkages re- inforce specific domination. Resistance that is dependent on these very same structures is thus unlikely to be effective.

Nonetheless, I do not advocate eschewing analogy entirely. Even in build- ing this argument I have depended on analogies, demonstrating some of the

effects of saying that queers are like Jews, by considering what we know about other analogies. In the rest of this essay I will argue for a form of analogy that can recognize the complexity of relation named by it. The mechanism by which metaphoric transfers occur are not simple, because they 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

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

of constraint-it can focus our understanding of heterosexism by constrain- ing our knowledge of antisemitism-but it is also a space of possibility pro- vided that the analogy is used to destabilize the phore as well as the theme. If, when analogizing heterosexism to racism, we were to destabilize racism even

as we changed perceptions of heterosexism, the effects would be quite differ- ent from those that depend on a stable concept of (and, thus, themselves often enact) racism. Similarly, in my analysis above, I have tried to destabilize our understanding of the ground of my own analogy, by shifting our understand- ing of the heterosexism-racism relation. In other words, I have not simply said queers are like Jews just as heterosexism is like racism. I have not left the heterosexism-racism relation intact as a stable ground for the queer-Jew rela- tion. This destabilization of the ground of the metaphor resists both the racist implications of the heterosexism-racism analogy and it changes what we think we know about the queer-Jew relation. It demands that we rethink the queer- Jewish relation in a complex manner. It shows that we don't yet know what it might mean to say, "Queers are like Jews, aren't they?"

~ontextualizing Analogies: Genealogies of Relation

The first question we must ask is: who are the "queers," and who are the "Jews" that they are like? One way to simultaneously shift both theme and phoros is to play out the relational context of the two terms. Providing con- text broadens the: setting of the analogy, so that we can see the breadth, com- plexities, and ambiguities of the relations between the terms. Contextualiza-

tion can also allow us to broaden the reach of the analogy beyond the two terms queer and Jew. In doing so, we can resist some of the limits set by the invocation of the terms alone, thus allowing the ground of the analogy itself to shift. This is the power of what Michel Foucault has called "genealogical" work, and it enables us to ask not just who are the queers and who are the Jews but also how did they come to be so. Are they fully separable? And, how might we bring them together in a manner that both recognizes and resists the limits of each?

I begin my contextualizing genealogies, somewhat paradoxically, by nar- rowing the reach of the term queer in order to consider its specific implication in a genealogy of homosexuality. I take up this initial specifying strategy so that by the end of this essay I will be better able to realize the potential of queer as it might extend beyond homosexual. If we hope eventually to destabilize the connections between contemporary invocations of queer and the politics of sexuality, and of homosexuality in particular, we must first address the homo-

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

sexual genealogy of queers. David M. Halperin (1995), for example, speaks of "rhe ability of'queer' to define (homo) sexual identity oppositionally and rela- tionally but not necessarily substantively,_ not as a positivity, but as a posi- tionality, nor as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm" (66). Halperin uses the parenthetical "(homo)sexual identity'' to show a relation to queer possi-

. bility without making the two terms coextensive. This attention to a homo- sexual genealogy of contemporary queers is particularly important because the queer-Jewish relation is historically grounded in and continues to work out of an attribution of complicity between the two specifically in antihomosexual and antisemitic discourses. One way to establish a more positive force to the analogy-one in which the queer-Jewish relation to difference is in play-is to recognize, and then resist, the constitution of their relation within a nega- tive discourse.

As with analogy itself, negative discourse presents us with both constraints and possibilities. For example, Foucault (1980) tells us in The History of Sex- uality, volume 1 that medicalized discourse about homosexuality in the nine- teenth and· early twentieth centuries, while largely "negative" toward homo- sexuality was also part of the constitutive technology for both homosexuality and heterosexuality. John D'Emilio (1983), in the now classic "Capitalism and Gay Identity," takes a more Marxian view, arguing thar medical theories "were an ideological response to a new way of organizing one's personal life. The popularization of the medical model, in turn, affected the consciousness of the women and men who experienced homosexual desire, so that they came to define themselves through their erotic life" (105).

Both histories raise (although admittedly to a different extent) the ques- tion of the constitutive power of negative discourses in relation to the exis- tence and/or consciousness of those named through the negative. 9 D'Emilio goes on to say, in enumerating the various mechanisms of repression in the postwar period that led specifically to modern "gay identity": "Although gay community was a precondition for a mass movement, the oppression of les- bians and gay men was the force that propelled the movement into exis- tence .... The danger involved in being gay rose even as the possibilities of being gay were enhanced. Gay liberation was a response to this contradiction" (107-8). In D'Emilio's Marxian terms contradictions within capitalism si- multaneously opened the space for the construction of gay identity, for the possibility of organizing one's life around erotic activity, and necessitated in- stitutional attempts to repress the possibility of such life organization. Gay liberation as a social movement works to make of this contradiction an open- ing to possibility, to turn its determination into overdeterminations in favor of rhe possibility of gay life.

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

What are the complexities of working to form social movement in this space? Not only did the contradiction of antihomosexual discourse form a space in which gay identity could be elaborated, but Foucault would encour- age us to think of the ways in which the discourse of antihomosexuality con- tributed to the content of this new space for gay identity. The space of possi- bility is not a content-free zone; we do not enter it and fashion new possibilities in any way we like. Moreover, by failing to take into account the ways in which negative discourses form the content of homosexual or gay pos- sibility we fail to take into account certain constitutive assumptions that can thereby operate with more power than they might otherwise.

Thus the various mechanisms that D'Emilio names as sites of gay repres- sion become important for thinking through gay possibility in the contem- porary historical moment as we continue to work with the effects of the post- war construction of gay identity. If the contemporary invocation of queer at once depends upon but hopes to shift this gay identity, then we must think through the genealogy of both gay and queer. In describing the discourses that formed gay identity, D'Emilio names what have become since the time of his writing the usual suspects:

The Right scapegoated "sexual perverts" during the McCarthy era. Eisen- hower imposed a total ban on the employment of gay women and men by the federal government and government contractors. Purges of les- bians and homosexuals from the militaty rose sharply. The FBI institut- ed widespread•surveillance of organizations, such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. The Post Office placed tracers on the correspondence of gay men and passed evidence of homosexual activity on to employers. Urban vice squads invaded private homes, made sweeps oflesbian and gay male bars, entrapped gay men in public places, and fo- mented local witch hunts. (108)

What connects these various sites of antihomosexual activity into what could accurately be called an antihomosexual discourse is the role that repression of gays plays across these various institutions. Specifically, antihomosexuality is constructed as a legitimate site of widespread government concern in part through its connection with anticommunism in the McCarthy era (note, for example, the language of "purges" that D'Emilio uses). Homosexuals are po- sitioned as a fundamental internal security threat that is connected to the threat of communism.

To understand "capitalism and gay identity," then, we must also under- stand anticommunism and the homosexual threat. What makes this issue par-

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

ticularly relevant is, of course, that in 1950s anticommunist rhetoric this threat is, in fact, triune, with the unholy linkage of "godlessness, communism and homosexuality'' articulating the parameters of the enemies of the Ameri- can nation. Insofar as godlessness serves as a code word for secular Judaism in this context, it places homosexuals (at least in antisemitic and antihomosexu- al, terms) in a particular relation to Jews. Thus, as D'Emilio points out, the development of "gay identity" as described in this period occurs not only in relation to mobility, urbanization, and freedom from the "family," as a unit of economic production, but in relation to an antihomosexual discourse con- nected to anticommunist and antisemitic conspiracy theory.

We now have a sense of a context that extends beyond queers and Jews to a network of discursive relations between capitalism, antisemitism, and gay identity. But, just as we must explore homosexuality as articulated in the post- war form of"gay identity," we must also consider the specifically modern form of antisemitism. Moishe Postone (1980) has provided a synopsis that is at once brilliant and devastating in his reading of the ongoing cultural effects of the Nazi Holocaust. In the modern period, Postone argues, the long-standing as- sociation of Jews with money is articulated with capitalism in a specific way. Under capitalism "value" names both a concrete relation between {in the sim- plest terms) an object and its use and an abstract relation represented through money as the value of an object when it can be exchanged. Postone argues that in modern antisemitism Jews, a group that was supposedly mobile, transna- tional, and related to international finance, become identified with the abstract side of the binary. Jews came to embody "the abstract domination of capital, which-particularly with rapid industrialization-caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, [this abstract domination] be- came perceived as the domination of!nternational Jewry" (107).

Yet National Socialism was able to harness this antimodern impulse and maintain its own commitment to capitalism and to industrial production by splitting the double meaning of value into its abstract and concrete compo- nents. National Socialism could react against capital in antisemitic discourse and simultaneously embrace industrial production by reifying the concrete side of this double valence as good, healthy, natural, and, most important, as opposed to the abstraction of capiralism in the form of finance. IO By focusing on industrial production as the "good" (because concrete) site of capitalism, Nazi discourse could, in fact, locate Jews as the source of all abstract threats to industrial production. Thus, in a crucial twist, Jews were not only the agents of an abstract and threatening finance capitalism, they were also locat- ed as the conspiracy behind the other threat to industrial production, inter- national socialism. To demonstrate how Jews could be placed on both these

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

seemingly opposed positions, Postone provides the example of a Nazi poster in which a Jew is shown pulling the strings of both a threatening finance cap- italism and a menacing socialism. '~-

Postwar America presents us with both certain continuations of the -dy- namic that Postone describes and some important differenc~s and complica- tions. First the continuations: it seems clear that the Ameiican cold war dis- course of the 1950s that connected "godlessness, communism, and homosexuality" as the description of both the external threat opposed to the United States and the threat of subversion from within the United States, is, in part, a continuation of precisely the ideology that Postone describes. The naming of communism in relation to godlessness plays on the. double nature of antisemitism analyzed by Postone. When placed in relation to communism godlessness can name those Jews who are not communists, but rather represent the international finance conspiracy. At the same time godlessness in the Amer- ican cold war formulation can work as a code word for the type of secular Jew- ish socialism that was targeted by National Socialism. Postone argues that the culture the Nazis sought to destroy in the Holocaust was in part designated specifically as eastern European Judaism because of the ways in which eastern European Jewish culture was frequently both secular and socialist. I I Thus it is no accident that it was the Rosenbergs who embodied this threat in the Amer- ican context.

The addition of homosexuality to this list served a particular purpose in the postwar U.S. by providing an embodied site for the conspiracy theory to operate that could1pose a threat in alliance with the international Jewish con- spiracy so as to maintain the sense of threat even in the p

1 9st-Holocaust situ-

ation. Homosexuals and the discourses that form them fu.e constructed not only on the basis of analogy to Jews bur as the crucial allies of Jews in the post- Holocaust moment. Moreover, these connections mean that both Jews and communists could also be accused of being homosexual. The intertwining of the alliance could also lead to identity. In a never ending circle of identifica- tion, communists could be (identified as) Jews could be (identified as) ho- mosexuals could be (identified as) communists.

What, then, are the differences between the U.S. and the historical situa- tion that grounds Postone's analysis? In the U.S. context antisemitic and an- tihomosexual discourse does work to manage the double discourse of value as described by Postone, but it does so in a different manner. National Socialists located themselves on one side of the binary between abstract and concrete value. They extolled the concrete as a site of liberation. This liberation was possible through the absolute destruction of the other side---the abstract-as embodied by Jews. Postone thus reads the "work will make you free" inscrip-

Queers Are Like'ie'J!'S, Aren't They?

tion over the gates of Auschwitz as not a nonsensical or hypocritical claim but as the ideology ofliberation espoused by those who established the camp. The embrace of the concrete, and of an ideology of concrete labor ig particular, was the site ofliberation. U.S. ideology, however-particularly in its cold war form-rejected a full embrace of either the abstract or the concrete sides of the binary.

Concrete work in this American schema is necessary, but is good only if iris also associated with the freedom of mobility (in both class and geographic terms) and the abstraction of capital. Abstraction is good, but only so long as it is under U.S. control. For America to embrace the concrete would be· to give up some benefits of association with abstract capital and with finance in particular. It would be to think of America as a site fully determined by in- dustrial production, while the profits of the stock market might go elsewhere. To be identified only with industry would be to hold America in place, not allowing it to grow with capital. To move completely toward the abstraction of capital, however, would make America subject to the whims of financial markets, unable to fall back on the moral claims of working for a living as a justification for the expectation that the market will serve American's interests. If Americans work hard, they deserve a good standard of living, and inter- ventions in the market to "protect" America are justifiable on these grounds. The move to reject both full abstraction and full concretization, to keep America hovering between these two poles, is part of an effort to protect America from any form of determination-either abstract or concrete-by capitalism. The fundamental U.S. ideology, then, is to protect capitalism as freedom-freedom from determination.

Within this ideology Jews and homosexuals (or Jewish homosexuals/ho- mosexual Jews) might represent the abstract threats, but the threat of being trapped in the concrete was crystallized in the postwar period in relation to ongoing contestation of that quintessentially American form of hatred, white supremacy, specifically as manifested in the domination of African Ameri- cans. Various forms of white supremacist retrenchment were underway through the 1950s. In particular, relations between "white America," and African Americans were being reworked, in part as a response to the effects of social changes wrought by the war and the integration of the military. If military service is central to citizenship in the modern nation (Meyer 1996), then the racial integration of the military posed the possibility of wide- ranging social effects. Renewed racial discrimination, signaled by -changes such as the addition of the Confederate "Stars and Bars" to the flags of sev- eral Southern states in the 1950s and 1960s, was the response to this and other moves toward racial integration.

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

Although antisemitism and white supremacy in the United States have often functioned together historically, in the postwar period they could also function as the splitting of different forms of hate, separated and projected onto different sites. This differentiated hate provides enemies that are, in the

case of African Americans, presumed to be visibly identifiable and that, in the case of Jews, could be invisible enemies to white Christian society. The two oppositions-Christian-Jewish and black-white-work differently from each other, bur they are also articulated so that they materialize an opposition be- tween Jews and blacks that connects Christianity and whiteness and then lo- cates this configuration-Christian-whiteness-as the middle or center. Thus, this network of relations works to fix "Jews" in the postwar period as white, at least insofar as they are made distinct from black, a shift from some previous imaginations of Jew. With Christian-whiteness at the center of this network, both African American Christianity. and non-Christian whiteness are marginalized, but in different ways so as to do different work in the net- work as a whole.

The main work of the invisible threat is to posit a site of threatening power in excess of any visible power relations in U.S. society. 12 Thus, even if American world dominance or Christian and white dominance withip. the United States appears secure, there is a continuing need for vigilance, and even the extension of domination, because ''.America" can never know the full

extent of the threat. The discourses of visibility and invisibility can also inter- act, where the "surplus visibility'' ascribed to particular persons, like African Americans, is "sec+n" as a sign of the ever threatening inordinate power of the_

invisible conspiracy. If white America can see what a threat African Americans are, how ever much more threatening must be the conspirators that are invis- ible. Jews and African Americans might join forces. They could be configured as allies. But they might also be separated as opponents, a schema in conso- nance with the historical fluctuations in "black-Jewish'' relations.

Because homosexuals took up a position that could in the post-Holocaust moment stand in for Jews, the invisible threat oVhomosexuality" could be considered similarly abstract and in need of surveillance so as to rout out pos-

sible subversives. In the postwar moment it would have been difficult to see Jews alone as the site of an international conspiracy of inordinate power, but when tied to their coconspirators the seriousness of threat to the United States was a different matter. Importantly, homosexuals in their alliance (and/or identity) with Jews also form an invisible threat-you can't always tell who they are just by looking-and become associated with whiteness. Thus ho- mosexuals along with Jews could become opposed to African Americans. As should be unsurprising after Foucault, these assumptions grounded in anti-

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

homosexual discourse often carry over into the elaboratiofl of a discourse called homosexuality. In fact, as various critiques have demonstrated, coming- out stories and other cornerstones of "gay identity" often _carry with them the .assumption of whiteness (Martin 1988; Pellegrini 1998). 13

The importance of considering this history is that it provides the rela- tional context that is invoked in the claim to analogy as well as in the hope for alliance. Homosexuals are like Jews in antisemitic and antihomosexual discourse. Like Jews, you can't tell who they are just by looking; like Jews they are associated with capitalism (are, in fact, if D'Emilio is right, a product of capitalism), and they appear to have economic power not accorded to "visi- ble" minorities; like Jews they are geographically mobile (hence the sense of the otherwise nonsensical proclamation that homosexuals should "go back where they came from"); like Jews they appear to have inordinate political power in comparison to their numbers (hence the importance of right-wing arguments that Kinsey's "IO percent" must be an inflated estimate).

I have suggested, however, that if this relation is taken up in progressive politics in terms of analogy it might not produce an alliance. It is true that if homosexuals and Jews are allied or even identified in antisemitic and antiho- mosexual discourse, then that alliance can become part of the elaboration of homosexuality or Jewishness as a discourse. But such a transfer will not nec- essarily happen. Moreover, if homosexuals and Jews are allies because they are analogized in discourses of social hierarchy and domination, then the alliance can easily break down, once the analogy shifrs. Jews and ·African Americans were sometimes allied in a discourse of common enmity. During the Jim Crow era signs in front of establishments that were segregated for "whites" might read, "No Blacks or Jews." And, yet, when the historical conditions of enmity changed, as Jim Crow was undermined and, crucially, as Jews "became white" over the course of the twentieth century. the positive basis for alliance had not been established strongly enough for it to hold. 14 Here the alliance broke down because the ways in which Jews and African Americans were dif- ferent could be exploited to undermine any connection based on the ways in which they were similar. Thus analogy provides a shaky basis for alliance pre- cisely because it does not imagine a connection in which both likeness and dif- ference could be the basis for connection and collaboration.

Relational rereading of the historical narrative of the production of gay identity produces a different story, however. Relational context makes for both the limits and the possibilities of any given historical site. The categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality are not fully distinct entities that are separable either analytically or politically. White supremacy can name a hier- archy over both African Americans and Jews or it can name a discourse that

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

separates African Americans and Jews who might or might not be "white." Thus, even ifJews and homosexuals are able to form a positive alliance based on their common enemies, this alliance will not necessarily be progressive. Homosexuals and Jews might, for example, become allied in a mutual "whiteness," bur this could hardly be thought of as a progressive alliance.

Relational reading; then, shifts our thinking in at least two ways. First, we must think of the ways in which homosexuals are both like and different from Jews, and second, we must place this pairing in its context. One way to think of this relation where, for example, Jews and. homosexuals are both like each other but allied as distinctive actors as well is "twinning." Twins, whether fra- ternal or identical, are, afrer all, different people who may be like each other and who may (or may not) act together. One of my concerns is how to max- imize the radical political potential of such twinning .

. Unlike the relations of analogy where one term effectively elides or even replaces that to which it is analogized, in this conceptualization both terms re- main present, and they may form an active relationship of complicity or al- liance. Homosexuals and Jews are not just like each other; they may act to- gether. The valence of the terms complicity or alliance depends on whether this relation is configured as an accusation of conspiracy or a promise of positive action, but I would suggest that progressive politics would do well to recon- sider the possibilities presented by complicity.

If we take up the space of linkage as a projection of complicity rather than simply analogy-in particular, if we think of "Jews" and "homosexuals" as twins, as different persons with historical ties that enable them to stand in for one another but also to choose whether or not to act in concert-then we can begin to articulate the complexity of relations that might form the basis for an alliance. Thinking ofJews and homosexuals as in a complicitous, rather than analogous, relation can then be part of a process for thinking about how to subvert the network of power that ties together antisemitic, an- tihomosexual, and white supremacist discourses. By recognizing that Jews and homosexuals are not just like each other but may act together, we must also ask about the conditions of possibility for such action and about it; ef- fects. Will the pairing of homosexuals and Jews reinforce or resist racial dom- ination? Fleshing out histories of relations that are condensed into analogies can help us to address networks of power rather than singular ~ppositions or pa1nngs.

And what of contemporary relations? What if we.move from the valence of homosexuality and gay identity to that of queers? Queers are like Jews. Aren't they?

Queers Are like Jews, Aren't They?

Doing Differently: Jewish Queers?

The hope for a revitalized sense of queer possibility in the 1990s was intend- ed to help move peyond some of the limits posed by homosexuality and gay Identity as a basis for a progressive or radical politics of sexuality. Queers took up a potentially pejorative epithet in the hopes of reworking it for progressive purposes. Q,.ueers are not just those who are different and reviled, queers are those whose difference is potentially resistant, subversive, perhaps even liber- atory. It was supposed to name a space of difference that didn't just produce a new identity-homos'exuals who are different from heterosexuals, gays who are different from straights-but might also allow us to remain in the space of difference itself, without being trapped in identity.

"While the use of queer is meant to create ~ par.ticular site of openness, to assume it as completely open can also be misleading. Queer cannot simply be appropriated as "free" from the antihomosexual and antisemitic discourses that form it. As Judith Butler has so clearly described, the task of reclaiming such words carries with it traces of the violences of its constitution. 15 And as Halperin suggests, the assertion of queer as a site of open possibility can make it seem as though issues of race and class differences among various "queers" have been transcended and that something like "queer solidarity has decisive- ly triumphed over historical divisions" (64). Recognizing the historical con- ditions of queer possibility can, in fact, make it more likely that the invoca- tion-..of queer will realize its potential openness, because it can show the conditions that must be addressed for the triumph of "queer solidarity." Without active resistance to the limits of this history, i.e., resistance that goes beyond the claim that queer is different, what is materialized is precisely an indifference to racial location, such that (as has been borne out all too fre- quently in queer spaces) it just so happens that "queers" are white (and ho- mosexual). Here the network of discursive relations that places homosexuals in complicity with Jews· and in opposition to African Americans can in its continuing effects configure queers in a similar position.

The hope based on the analogy between queers and Jews is that a differ- ent and more open meaning for queers and Jews might be realized through the analogy. The hope, in fact, is that the representation of "difference" of- fered by both queers and Jews could be pulled together to create an alliance. This hope might be realized, but analogy provides a shalry basis for such hope. As we have seen, the analogy depends on stable ground. It locks Jews into a specific location. Moreover, if Jews are locked into an identity-even i( that identity is "different"-then the meaning of queer when analogized to Jews

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

will also produce an identity. Ultimately, the logic of the analogy and its sta- ble ground will produce precisely the type of identity thar both those queers and those Jews who have promoted the progressive understanding of Jewish difference have hoped to avoid.

Must we think, however, of Jews as the stable ground for an identity?. Is Jewishness something that we are? Or, could it, like queer, be something that we do? 16 In asking these questions, I'm suggesting that we understand both "queer" and "Jewishness" as something that we do in complicated relation to the historical possibilities of who we are. This opens up two moves in build- ing on analogies as the basis for alliances: 1. it makes both the theme (in this case queers) and the phoros (in this case Jews) of the analogy mobile; 2. it al- lows us to respond context, to the specific and complex history of the terms invoked by the analogy.

In turning to the performative, I am obviously referring to Judith Butler's (1993) theory that bodies are produced in their particular form through the iteration of the norms that (in)form such categories as sex and race. While such categories are not simply chosen but are rather command performances, the question of how we do our identities is nonetheless an important one in understanding the play of power that enables both the command and the per- formance, In her later work Butler (1997) has reconceptualized agency with- in the context of power relations, arguing that the institution of any norm also institutes ambivalence within the subject of power. This ambivalence in- duces both the iteration of the norm and resistance to it and thus can becoJIIe the site for iteratii;g the norm differently, for shifting its ground.

My suggestion is that thinking the possibilities of alliance also requires thinking through the networks of relations that constitute any given norm or social category. If sex or race is constituted within a network of social rela- tions, a network of normative enactments, then these plays invoke such net- works. Importantly, just as the institution of any given norm institutes a slip- page and ambivalence that opens a space for agency, so also the multiple norms of social categorization open spaces for multiple enactments. The work that analogy and alliance can do is to bring together more than one term. Queers and Jews can, for example, act in complicity. To do so in ways that subvert conspiracy theory requires making the norms of each term mobile. This opens the possibility of playing norms off against each other.

In thinking through the possibilities of playing off multiple norms, I am deeply indebted to a panel on Jewish performativity at the 1997 American Studies Association meeting thar included Jill Dolan, Carol Batker, Laura Levitt, Ann Pellegrini, ~nd a reading by Stacy Wolf o(Barbra Streisand's queer performances that appears in slightly different form in this volume. In a com-

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

' plicated reading, Wolf argue..rhat Streisand "queers" a number of norms-of voice, body, and action. I have considered this example at length, elsewhere Uakobsen 1998b), but I return to it here because Wolf's analysis provides a particularly useful reading of the move from the noun of identity to the per- formative verb by reading Barbra Streisand's Jewishness not in her identity but in a particular, and varied set of activities. For example, Wolf reads that para- digmatic marker of Streisand's Jewishness-her nose-not simply as a physi- cal characteristic but as an action-a refusal, in fact-a refusal to get it "fixed." This refusal is also a refusal of the reduction of Jewishness to white- ness that is part of the postwar conspiracy theory. Streisand acts so as to re-

main visibly Jewish, refusing to assimilate Jewishneis to a white identity that is merely "religiously" different.

Interestingly, this refusal, and the difference that embodies it, works on behalf of Streisand in relation to the norms of the market. In other words, it does not "queer" her marketability but is instead part of her star quality. This is "difference as charisma." Wolf thus complicates the argument, noting that

"it's impossible to identify with Streisand's body. Hers is not a face that makes an un-bobbed nose take heart." This claim follows Wolf's expression of her own desires to be "not a JAP, not a mother-but a star."

Wolf's read,ing of Streisand's Jewishness in relation to queer possibility has particularly radical potential in thinking through the implications of analogy, and of the analogy between queers and Jews in particular, because it destabi- lizes the ground of the analogy. If Streisand's Jewishness is related not to her heritage per se b.ut to her actions, we no longer know precisely what it means to be Jewish. What it means to be Jewish will depend upon enactments of Jew- ishness, so we cannot know in advance what it means that queers are like Jews. We cannot fix queerness in a Jewish base, because the base itself is nor"fixed."

More than this, Wolf amibutes ·not just Jewishness but queerness to Steisand. Barbra is queer. not because of her identity per se, nor because of her difference per se, but because of a set of associations, of alliances and complic-

, ities between homosexuals and Streisand. Thus queer and Jew are here pro- duced as intertwined categories. In fact, we cannot precisely determine which might be the ground of affinity, and which the figure. In one sense Streisand's Jewishness is located precisely in her queerness: in her refusal to be simply "white" (and, therefore, presumably "Christian") by getting her nose fixed. In another sense her queerness is located in her Jewishness, which is part of what produces Streisand's popularity within a queerly inflected homosexual culture. Queers can identify with her so much, not simply because she has a huge voice and star quality-so does Julie Andrews-but because she's different. She isn't simply white and Christian. Barbra doesn't quite fit. This intertwined queer

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

Jewishness/Jewish queerness could be the starting point for a wider queer/Jew- ish resistance to white supremacy (although, again, not necessarily-only if we make it so).

Because of this intertwining in which neither "queer" nor "Jewish'~ is the ground of the a~alogy, yet their meanings are determined in their relation t~ each other, Wolf pursues the Jewish question in queer theory mainly through the interrogative. In Funny Girl, for example, which she argues is not so much about Fanny Brice as it is about Streisand playing Fanny Brice, Wolf makes the following observation about the norms of "womanhood": ''As she [Streisand/Fanny] becomes what a 'woman' should be-a star, married, monied-the film reiterates how Fanny is not like other women. Is this dif- ference queer?" Here the question seems to imply that Jewishness can queer certain dominant norms like "woman," (and its presumption of both Chris- tian and heteronormativity). Yet later in the essay Wolf argues that the way that Streisand in particular does Jewishness might also queer dominant rep- resentations of Jewish women: ''After World War II, images of the Jewish mother appeared, and then around 1960, images of the Jewish American Princess proliferated. Streisand's performance in Funny Girl relies on and troubles (queers?) these representations." Note that once again "(queers?)" is here placed in the interrogative. At this moment Wolf shifts from the adjec- tival form of "What's Jewish about this? What's queer about this?" (emphasis added) to the verb form: Streisand "queers?" dominant representations. ~ur ther, she suggests that this activity-to queer?-both "relies on and troubles" the norm. The .network of nor~s is both empowering and constraining. Streisand's ability to trouble some norms-Christian, American, woman-is enabled, in part, by her reliance on others-marketability.

The simultaneous resistance to multiple norms allows for connections or alliances between persons or movements that might not be available if the norms were played differenrly. The twinning of Jew and homosexual might not produce a queer alliance, but if the connection is played out it might provide the site for queering both antisemitic and antihomosexual discourses. Henry Abelove has argued that "queer" is a politically useful sign because it is a pos- sible site for persons to come together who might not otherwise be able to rec- ognize themselves as allies. 17 He bases this claim on a historical reading of a particular set of alliances in the 1950s, thinking particularly of Frank O'Hara and Paul Goodman. 18 Here queer is indeed a site that enables cross-racial al- liances, but the specific conditions that made alliance possible in one situation would have to be considered in any attempt to reinvigorate it i.n another.

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

Queers Are. Like Jews, Aren't They?

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 doffiinant·-facial norms, including gen- dered racial norms. In so doing the act of queering? can forge a connection to those parts of]ewish histoty 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 ofren 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.·

I~ 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

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

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 othetwise 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 relati~n 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 chis 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 co alliance see Jakobsen (1998a), particularly

chapter 2.

Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They?

6. See, for example, Judith Butler (1994). ?. 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 (f998a), 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' arti.sanal 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. k Pos- tone concludes, "le is precisely the hypostatizacion of the concrete and the identification of capital with the manifest abstract which renders chis 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 lab.or 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 co 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 chemes-'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, ancihomosexual discourse is, in part, constitutive of "homosexuality," the relative openness co homosexuality in African Ameri- can communities chat 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 chose of the dominant society.

JANET R. JAKOBSEN

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 becween 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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