Judaism, Gender, and Sexuality: Discipline and Protest

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.