Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies

Abstract

Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies1 Shlomo Gleibman This article discusses queer images of traditional Jewish clothes and objects-the prayer shawl, the ritual undergarment, and the phylacteries-in contemporary photography and novels, in relation to the biblical and rabbinic texts (the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and Midrash). The selected cultural productions of the turn of the millennium that represent the intersections of Judaism and male-male desire include works of fiction and visual art from Canada, the United States, Israel, and Germany. Michael Lowenthal’s The Same Embrace (1998), set in the early 1990s, follows Jacob, a secular and openly gay Jewish man, who, while visiting his religious twin brother Jonathan, becomes infatuated with Ari, an Orthodox yeshiva student who is his brother’s study partner. Evan Fallenberg’s novel Light Fell (2008) depicts a passionate romance between two Jewish male scholars in the 1970s: Yoel Rosenzweig, an Orthodox rabbi, and Joseph Licht, a university professor. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007) delineates a love relationship between two Jewish men in the 1980s: Elio, a professor’s son, and Oliver, a doctoral student and Elio’s father’s research assistant.2 In all of these works, Jewish religious references serve to establish the immediacy and totality of the intimate connection between male lovers. The photography of Benyamin Reich, produced between 2005 and 2020, and of Oscar Wolfman, produced in 2010–11, employs biblical and rabbinic tropes to represent contemporary Jewish queer experience. Sarah Rosen’s and Tom Stokes’s blog Porn4Jews3 and Duncan Pflaster’s Naughty Jewish Boys Calendar (2015) introduce eroticized Jewish religious references and ritual objects into the contemporary popular culture.4 Drawing upon the works of queer theorists such as Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz, I propose to look at these literary and artistic productions as examples of subversive citationality and (dis)identification that construct queer subjectivity by rethinking traditional religious images and cultural practices across texts and [End Page 41] genres, through particular modes of intertextuality and cultural translation. Like a number of works in Jewish critical scholarship (see e.g. Lefkovitz; Pellegrini), I approach Jewish identity, along with gender and sexual identities, as a performative category enacted in cultural productions through interpretation and reworkings of earlier texts. Judith Butler’s description of identity as performative ritual includes the notion of bodily inscriptions, which, through compulsory citationality, establish textual authority as a form of conventionality and normativity. In Bodies that Matter, Butler defines sex as “citational practice” (71–72). She understands citation as a way of accumulating “the force of authority” through “a prior, authoritative set of practices” (171–72) in which the law is produced through citation (xxiii). Citation produces the norm (xxii), yet it also produces “a viable subject” (177). Butler makes a distinction between “forced citations” and “subversive citations” (232). The very mechanism of sex being “produced as reiteration of hegemonic norms” (70) allows a possibility of “a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification” (70). Citation can invite reappropriation and recontextualization (169). The texts and works of art that cite the tradition differently could be seen as examples of such subversive citations, as instances of bodily citationality through queering biblical and rabbinic texts and religious rituals associated with these texts. The classical religious texts are cited in liturgy, performed in ritual, and enacted by, with, and upon the queer male bodies through subversive erotic performance. When discussing his art, Benyamin Reich draws a parallel between religious ritual objects and sexual fetishes: “Fetish […] is connected to holiness. In religion, fetish is when a person makes kiddush, if he puts tefillin […]. You take an object, and you make of this object much more than what it is. This is the whole idea of art” (Schmoozing 3:54–4:24). The similar roles of imagination in erotic fantasies and in religious concepts bring together sexual practices and religious rituals. This strategy of queer reclamation of traditional images could be understood in light of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentifications. In his discussion of the relation of queers of colour to their mainstream, traditional cultures, Mu...