This panel theorizes the production of Jewishness alongside gender, sexuality, and the state. The first paper traces the co-constitution of the homosexual and the Jew in pedagogical materials circulated by Christian clinical pastoral educators from 1928-1941. Pedagogical documents demonstrate a convergence of medicalized and pastoral surveillance in disciplining race, sex, and religion. The second paper maps the terrain of queer Jewish place and space-making in U.S. anti-Zionist movements. It argues that the vibrant queerness of Jewish place-making beyond Zionism attests to the power of spatial disorientation across the layers of social, political, and ecological notions of “home” that are essential to re-imagining our relationships to “place.” The final paper considers cisness and Zionism as ideologically linked, as biopolitical projects of the state directed at controlling the affective flows of gender and Judaism. This focus sheds light on the violence of enforcing strict borders and the inevitability of resistance and refusal.
This paper traces the co-constitution of two figures—the homosexual and the Jew—in pedagogical materials circulated by Christian clinical pastoral educators from 1928 to 1941. Historians of religion and sexuality often narrate Christians’ embrace of psychiatry as an attempt to modernize amid increasing anxieties about secularism. However, this paper reframes the incorporation of psychoanalysis into Christian practices of pastoral care as a repositioning of liberal Protestantism vis-à-vis the figure of the Jew. Pedagogical documents demonstrate a convergence of medicalized and pastoral surveillance in disciplining race, sex, and religion. Drawing on the ACPE archives, I consider the production and transference of knowledge about sex and race in clinical pastoral education settings, with special attention to Jewish psychiatric patients. I trace how the clinical pastoral educators’ stress on correcting non-normative sexuality carved out new landscapes for theologies of racial difference, grounded in developmental teleologies.
This paper will map the terrain of queer Jewish place and space-making in the context of U.S. anti-Zionist movements. Both Jewishness and queerness have historically been invested in the production of counter spaces. While anti-Zionist movements in the U.S. are historically rooted in liberatory and solidarity-based lesbian feminist identity politics, solidarity alone is inadequate for explaining the abundant queerness and creativity of the Jewish anti-Zionist place-making occurring today. The vibrant queerness of Jewish place-making beyond Zionism attests to the power of spatial disorientation across the layers of social, political, and ecological notions of “home” in ways that are essential to re-imagining our relationships to “place.”
Both cisness and Zionism seem to be at a crisis point. As increasing numbers of young people come out as trans and nonbinary, those invested in normative gender are engaged in a prolonged campaign of legislative and cultural backlash; some of these same anti-trans figures promote unwavering support of the state of Israel, even as uncritical pro-Zionism wanes among younger Americans horrified by Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians. This paper argues that cisness and Zionism are ideologically linked, as biopolitical projects of the state. By analyzing cisness and Zionism as biopolitical projects directed at controlling the affective flows of gender and Judaism, we gain clarity about both the violence of enforcing strict borders (around territory, peoplehood, gender, and subjecthood) and also the inevitability of resistance and refusal.
| Brett Krutzsch | brett.krutzsch@nyu.edu | View |