"Transing" Jewish Gender Roles: The Potentials of Emasculation and Deviance

By Theo Peierls '20E

Thesis Advisor: Professor Krupa Shandilya

Abstract: What are the radical potentials of how Jewish gender is understood, and of Jewish gender deviance? What fears prevent embracing these potentials? In this thesis, I explore these questions through a historical and contemporary framework, and by engaging with Biblical texts, trans theory, and Jewish gender theory, as well as through personal interviews with people navigating these questions and questions of Jewish gender roles. I ultimately connect this question of Jewish gender’s radical potentials to trans inclusion in Jewish spaces. To further examine these questions, I involved myself in three Jewish communities and conducted several interviews in which I asked questions about personal experiences with gender, transness, and Judaism across different movements. In addition to the people I interviewed, I connected with online Jewish communities, and drew from public discussions on Jewish gender, Jewish masculinity, and transgender inclusion in Jewish communities.

I explore the ways in which assimilation threatens this Jewish gender nonconformity. Embracing a deviant Jewish gender expression and embracing trans inclusion in Jewish spaces can and should go hand in hand, as deviant masculinities hold the potential to disrupt the toxic cisheteropatriarchy that targets marginalized genders. I contextualize this exploration of Jewish masculinity within the field of Jewish feminist theory, and examine how Jewish feminist women approach questions of access and value in Jewish spaces. I argue that resisting assimilation is vital to this potential disruption, regardless of where one stands on accepting or rejecting stereotypes of Jewish gender, and that this resistance, and recognition of the power in gender exploration and deviation, is a radical and freeing act; one that I hope to support with my scholarship.

Over the course of seven chapters, I show that Jewish masculinity is inherently “transed,” and that there are significant overlaps between a transgender identity and a Jewish male identity due to both external forces of antisemitic stereotypes and internal forces of gender deviation from gentile norms. I explore “Jewish masculinity” as a form of masculinity that is distinct from mainstream understandings of what constitutes manhood, and is structured around the ways in which the Jewish patriarchy creates a manhood built on something other than gentile masculinity, and at times contains aspects of what is often coded as emasculated or feminine. In addition, Jewish men exist in the context of a nebulous understanding of gender, with several significant biblical figures going through “transing” moments, and with a major ritual premised on the idea of devoting oneself to God through an alteration of the genitals. God themself is understood as existing beyond male and female, and holds a “transed” relationship to humanity through this rejection of binaries. Jewish men are made deviant in a gentile context for both their bodies and their gender expressions, and hold the potential to serve as a tool in breaking down binary patriarchal gender assumptions.