Performance Anxieties

Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race

Ann Pellegrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135207632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both. Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative.

Part I

JEWISHNESS

…I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my “race.”

—Sigmund Freud,
An Autobiographical Study

chapter 1

JEWISHNESS AS GENDER
Changing Fraud's Subject

Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity….

—Sigmund Freud, “Femininity”

Our investigation may perhaps have thrown a little light on the question of how the Jewish people have acquired the characteristics which distinguish them. Less light has been thrown on the problem of how it is that they have been able to retain their individuality till the present day. But exhaustive answers to such riddles cannot in fairness be either demanded or expected.

—Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

WITHIN THE western—and Christian—imagination “Jewish difference” has been articulated through overlapping and often contradictory appeals to “race,” gender, religion, and nation. The intersection of race and gender at and as the site of Jewishness can be seen in much of the popular and “scientific” literature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and Austria, where a stereotyped femininity underwrote representations of Jewishness. For Jewish male bodies, marked for an anti-Semitic imaginary as “black,” “effeminate,” and “queer,” the sexualization of “race” and the racialization of “sex” were constitutive features. Indeed, the feminization of Jewish men was so frequent a theme in this period that Jewishness-more precisely, the Jewishness of male Jews—became as much a category of gender as of race.¹ It remains to be asked what such “interarticulations” (to borrow Judith Butler's formulation) of gender and race may have meant for Jewish women.²

The Jewish male's putative effeminacy came to signal “the” Jewish people's “racial” difference, effectively eliding differences between Jewish men and Jewish women.³ For example, many of the medical conditions for which all Jews were held to be at higher risk as a “race” were the same conditions to which all women were believed predisposed as a “sex.” Perhaps the most telling case in point is hysteria. The root “cause” of Jews' allegedly heightened risk for hysteria was much debated, with some putting it down to environmental factors (including anti-Semitism) and others, to heredity (“race”). Not in dispute, however, were claims, by fin de siècle medical specialists in Europe and the United States, that hysteria and other forms of mental illness occurred with greater frequency among Jews (Gilman 1993a, III-13). Although hysteria's principal sufferers and “textbook cases” were women, a high incidence of hysteria among Jewish men, especially Jewish men from Eastern Europe, supposedly distinguished Jewish men from other men. Images of the “eternal Jew” here converge with the “eternal feminine” to articulate the male Jew's “racial” difference from his Aryan counterpart through and as “sexual difference.”⁴

But what room does the intensely anti-Semitic and implicitly misogynist identification of male Jews with “woman” leave for Jewish women? The collapse of Jewish masculinity into an abject femininity displaces Jewish women. Yet, Jewish women, differently from but no less than Jewish men, were objects and subjects of sexualized and racialized forms of knowledge/power: the stereotype. In an important essay on “The Other Question,” Homi K. Bhabha describes the stereotype as a mode of differentiation which does not just secure the borders between “us” and “them,” but also articulates ambivalent points of identification for racialized and sexualized others.⁵ Putting Bhabha's observation together with Butler's reformulation of social construction in Bodies that Matter, we might say that stereotypes participate in “a process of materialization” that produces the body as an “effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (Butler 1993a, 9). How did stereotypes of “the Jewess” bear on the Jewish female body? One of the ambitions of this section is to bring the construction of the Jewish female more directly into analysis, though it is not my aim to emphasize sexual difference over and against racial difference in order to make the Jewish female body appear.

Significantly, in the homology Jew-as-woman, the Jewish female body goes missing. All Jews are womanly; but no women are Jews.⁶ This, at any rate, is one of the consequences of Otto Weininger's infamous 1903 study, Sex and Character. For Weininger, Jew clearly means male Jew. He explicitly refers to “the Jewess” in only one passage in Sex and Character, and there, as Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams have also noted, to indicate how the deficiencies of Jewish masculinity set the Jewish woman's chances at achieving full subjectivity even lower than the Aryan woman's.⁷ The displacement of Jewish women from the scene of Jewishness is also one of the unfortunate side effects of Sander L. Gilman's pathbreaking studies of race, gender, and Jewishness. Gilman has framed his arguments through and around the Jewish male. For the most part, the Jewish female enters the frame of analysis only to exit as a man in female drag.⁸

Ironically, during the very period in which Weininger was writing, which is also the historical period Gilman examines, Jewish women—far from disappearing from the scene—prominently figured in the literary and aesthetic imagination of fin de siècle Europe. In the novels of Eliot,James, and Proust, for example, Jewish women are exotic and erotic spectacles. Moreover, to name two celebrated figures from “real” life, the French stage was dominated and dazzled by Rachel in the first half of the nineteenth century and then, in the latter half and into the early decades of the twentieth century, by Sarah Bernhardt. Both women were also international stars, their exploits on stage and off frequently the subject of newspaper profiles and of popular and “high society” gossip. Jewishness—as performatively constituted and publicly performed—dearly needs to be thought through the female Jewish body, no less than through the male.

In what follows I want to restage some representative performances of the Jewish female body. I revisit Freud's Dora, laying especial stress upon the status of the name. My interest in this opening movement is to show how Freud's transcription of the signs of male Jewishness into the enigma of woman and femininity does not finally succeed in erasing either the male or female Jewish body. These claims will be fleshed out more directly entr'acte, when the image of another Dora takes the stage. Next I move to a recent and contradictory occasion of Jewish female performativity, Sandra Bernhard's 1990 film, Without You I'm Nothing. My reading of Sandra Bernhard's queer (and queerly Jewish) enactments is an analogy extended: I trace theatrical tropes of performance quite nearly to their source. In other words, I make Sandra Bernhard perform for me.

To introduce “race” into the domain of psychoanalysis is also a retrieval. Psychoanalysis, after all, dates to an historical period when the medical and natural sciences were deeply concerned with and, to some degree, even determined by biological theories of race. In the historical context of psychoanalysis, race means “Jewishness.” Nor is this only because of the historical fact that the founders and leading practitioners of psychoanalysis were Jewish.⁹ Within the “thought-collective” of late nineteenth-century Austro-German medical science, “race” called up the opposition “Jew/ Aryan.”¹⁰ In the increasingly secular, urban landscape of nineteenth-century Europe, categories of religious difference, Christian/Jew, were transformed into categories of “racial” science, Aryan/Jew (Gilman 1991, 202).

Nonetheless, the transformation was not total. The opposition Jew/ Aryan vacillates among boundaries based on religion and culture (Jew as standing in for Judaism; Aryan as the standard-bearer for an unnamed, but always implicit Christianity), “race” (Jew and Aryan as opposed racial categories in the emerging “science” of race), and language (Aryan as the name for a family of languages whose influence and highly “evolved” character contrasts with the “static,” “immutable” Semitic languages).¹¹ This vacillation is itself instructive, indicating as it does the competing discourses which mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imagination of Jewishness variously into religion, nation, and race. Thinking das wesen des Judentums through racial difference did not replace thinking the essence of Judaism through religious or cultural difference.¹² Rather, the rhetoric of “race” secularized the difference of the Jewish body from the Christian body (Gilman 1991, 38).

But it is important not to lay too much stress on this rhetorical shift from the language of theology to the language of scientific reason, especially given the epistemological links between these two world views. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's challenge to historians of sexuality is worth repeating in this context. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick criticizes attempts to locate a great paradigm shift in the definitional understanding of homosexuality. Such efforts, she argues, have the effect of flattening out “a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces” into a unidirectional, coherent narrative field (1990, 44–48). This insight applies also to contemporary efforts to understand the historical meanings of Jewishness and anti-Semitism. Discontinuity and “rupture” do not tell the whole story; neither does continuity. Gavin Langmuir argues that the transhistorical application of the term “anti-Semitism” unwittingly replays the racist stereotype of Jews as “unchangeable,” “eternal,” a people outside history (1990).

The historical forms taken by anti-Semitic discourse in the nineteenth century were informed not only by emerging racial “sciences,” but by developments in anthropology and ethnology. Increasingly, Jewish difference was charted across a geography of race, and “black” Africa was one region to which the racial difference of the Jew was frequently traced back. The putative blackness of the Jew was a sign of racial mixing and, so, racial degeneration. The English anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain attributed Jews' “mongrel” nature to their indiscriminate race-mixing; during the period of their Alexandrian exile, Chamberlain asserted, Jews had “interbred” with black Africans (qtd. in Gilman 1993a,21). In 1935,WW Kopp could warn of the dangers Jewish blood posed to Aryan stock; race-mixing with Jews was liable to produce offspring with notably “Jewish-Negroid” features (qtd. in Gilman 1993a, 22).

Nonetheless, “color” was not the only nor even the dominant way of imagining the racial otherness of Jews. Moreover, even in instances where color-coding was the privileged mechanism for “fixing” Jewish difference, the color was as likely to be “yellow” as black. The eighteenth-century Jewish physician Elcan Isaac Wolf identified the Jew's “black-yellow” skin color with disease (qtd. in Gilman 1993a, 20).Additionally, as Gilman points out, the Jew was also represented as a Mischling, or “half-breed” (1991, ro1-2, 175-76; 1993a, 21-22). Gilman does not himself pursue what seems to me the fascinating contradictions and ambivalences between the Jew as “black” and the Jew as “mulatto.” However, this mixed characterization necessarily complicates and destabilizes the terms of the black-white dyad. Perhaps it is possible to make only this qualified claim, then: the Jew was not “white;” but was rather-to borrow Daniel Boyarin's term— “off-white.”¹³ As a kind of third term, Jewishness may thus represent the crisis of racial definition. Moreover, to the extent that management of the male Jew's difference was carried out, in large part, by assimilating him to the category “woman,” the wishful containment of his racial difference potentially provokes other anxieties and category crises-of gender and sexuality, for example.¹⁴

Fascinatingly, at the same time (and often by the same people) that Jews were accused of too much crossing racial lines, they were also held to exemplify the perils of in-breeding.¹⁵ In her study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British animal husbandry, Harriet Ritvo points to the stress set on maintaining just the right balance between going outside and staying within “family” lines. Ritvo suggests that the anxious attention taxonomists and animal breeders gave to the question of demarcating, managing, and naming “variety” may represent the displacement of broader cultural concerns over (and fascination with) differences within the “races of man” (1994). The parallels Ritvo identifies may provide some interpretive leverage for understanding how it is that Jews could be held to represent the dangers at once of too much and too little race-mixing. At both poles—hybridization (exogamy) and conservation (endogamy)—Jews were conceptualized as exceeding the norm. They were a “people” too much of extremes.

The problematics of racialized Jewishness provide the subtext for much of Freud's case studies. Freud, the Jewish scientist, was crucially implicated in medical narratives that placed the Jew, particularly the male Jew, at special risk for such diseases as syphilis and hysteria.¹⁶ As Jay Geller has noted, the new bio-politics of anti-Semitism were shaped by—and adapted to—the changing economic, political, and social landscapes of nineteenth-century Central Europe. The emergence of political anti-Semitism with its often biologistic frame, Geller explains, coincided with the rapid development and advancement of syphilogical discourses (1992a, 22–23). Syphilology was harnessed to a political program whose aim was as much the management and containment of socially marginal(ized) populations-among them prostitutes, first generation feminists, and Jews (24)—as it was t...