gender in Jewish female people
I'm reading an essay in an anthology called Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, and the author:
1.Observes that "many Jewish queer women gravitate toward femme identity."
2. Theorizes why that might be so - she says "I was thinking about the archetype of strength in femininity. In Jewish culture, the archetype of the strong female is fairly ubiquitous. My theory is that women who grow up Jewish, and who are exposed to that archetype, have a sense of the power of femme identity, even prior to coming out as queer or constructing a femme identity for themselves." (and then she says that her Jewish identity has shaped her femme identity.)
Do you guys (er, people) find #1 to be true? And regardless, do you agree with #2 What's been your experience?
My thoughts under a cut so other people can think their own thoughts first:
I found this really surprising. Jewish women tending toward femme made sense to me and jibes with my experience, but I don't quite get her theory about why. To me Jewish + femme is a nod to being a JAP (apologies to people who find that an offensive term), and I don't really find JAP to be positive or feel like it would be an empowered identity at all. I have difficulty appreciating or admiring (and sometimes even respecting) femme-ness or maybe even femininity, actually, and I think a lot of that harks back to growing up around women who were kind of JAP-y and feminine. (I'm actually trying to get rid of that way of thinking, because it feels unfairly biased, but it's slow.)
There are those few biblical heroines, like Devorah, but that's kind of a drop in the bucket - and I'd probably project butch rather than femme onto those if I had to. Maybe the author was talking about modern Jewish culture, regardless of whether it has religious roots.
I grew up black hat-ish Orthodox, and while maybe I can pick out some ways that women seem strong in that world, there are lots of ways in which they don't seem strong. I guess in the Orthodox world masculinity isn't particularly valued, just maleness (the simple XY chromosome deal, in that world), so there's that.
1.Observes that "many Jewish queer women gravitate toward femme identity."
2. Theorizes why that might be so - she says "I was thinking about the archetype of strength in femininity. In Jewish culture, the archetype of the strong female is fairly ubiquitous. My theory is that women who grow up Jewish, and who are exposed to that archetype, have a sense of the power of femme identity, even prior to coming out as queer or constructing a femme identity for themselves." (and then she says that her Jewish identity has shaped her femme identity.)
Do you guys (er, people) find #1 to be true? And regardless, do you agree with #2 What's been your experience?
My thoughts under a cut so other people can think their own thoughts first:
I found this really surprising. Jewish women tending toward femme made sense to me and jibes with my experience, but I don't quite get her theory about why. To me Jewish + femme is a nod to being a JAP (apologies to people who find that an offensive term), and I don't really find JAP to be positive or feel like it would be an empowered identity at all. I have difficulty appreciating or admiring (and sometimes even respecting) femme-ness or maybe even femininity, actually, and I think a lot of that harks back to growing up around women who were kind of JAP-y and feminine. (I'm actually trying to get rid of that way of thinking, because it feels unfairly biased, but it's slow.)
There are those few biblical heroines, like Devorah, but that's kind of a drop in the bucket - and I'd probably project butch rather than femme onto those if I had to. Maybe the author was talking about modern Jewish culture, regardless of whether it has religious roots.
I grew up black hat-ish Orthodox, and while maybe I can pick out some ways that women seem strong in that world, there are lots of ways in which they don't seem strong. I guess in the Orthodox world masculinity isn't particularly valued, just maleness (the simple XY chromosome deal, in that world), so there's that.