gender in Jewish female people

[balmofgilead]

I'm reading an essay in an anthology called Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, and the author

Comments

[jehanna]

Well, I'm Jewish (from a typically unobservant American family)and genderqueer. I have never considered myself femme, although I sometimes present in a way that reads as somewhat femme. But sometimes not.

Of course, I have PCOS so I've been dealing with excessive amounts of testosterone forever, so other people's mileage no doubt varies.

I've always hated both the princess stereotype and the domineering one that get applied to Jewish women. That's really a whole dissertation, though.

I'm not sure I really agree with the stated theory. In my experience, Jewish women have been all over the spectrum of gender, just like everybody else.

Not My Experience

[zeza3]

In my experience Jewish queer women don't lean femme more than queer women from other backgrounds. I (and many of my close friends) are masculine/butch. Still, I know many queer Jewish women with very strong femme identities. I think our culture/religion's presentation of strong women is much more than a drop in the bucket and in my reform upbringing provided many role models for me. Though I didn't think of any of them as femme. Well, maybe Esther.

Re: Not My Experience

[balmofgilead]

Heh. I think I'm starting to feel like my Orthodox upbringing cheated me out of my Jewish (cultural/ethnic) heritage, which is pretty hilarious.

Out of curiosity, when you say strong role models, do you mean contemporary famous-ish people, people you grew up around, or historical figures? (Or all three?)

Re: Not My Experience

[zeza3]

I have a strong bias on this because the rabbi in my childhood congregation was a woman and a family friend. So, in a lot of ways, her close mentorship demonstrated that strong and literate women play an important role in Judaism. But aside from her my understanding came mostly from biblical women, not contemporary culture. My religious school highlighted the role and complexity of our foremothers and other biblical women.

Re: Not My Experience

[omster]

and Tamar (the one in Exodus, not the later one)!

[twostepsfwd]

This is not my experience at all. When we go to Jewish LGBT events I've often been one of the only visible butches and my partner one of the only femmes. Everyone else has been pretty andro/inbetween. Because I don't present in the as masculine a way as I did when I was younger (I have long hair now and sometimes wear women's clothes, which I never did before), I'm more aware now that some people may identify in ways that I can't see just by looking at them - But in general, I don't find most Jewish lesbians to be butch or femme. But in terms of butch/femme, I do personally know more Jewish femmes than butches. I doubt that's somehow representative of the whole community, though. I do agree with the assertion that there is not a lot of emphasis on masculinity in the Jewish world, however - At least not the kind of blue-collar white macho masculinity that a lot of non-Jewish butches seem to gravitate towards (even if they're not blue collar or white, in fact). The type of masculinity that is more prevalent is more middle class,

[balmofgilead]

Hmm. Now that I think about it some more, I think the author was probably talking about femmes in a butch/femme sense, in part because she was basing it on her experience in San Francisco. I think her observation was more that lots of the femmes she sees are Jewish, rather than that most of the Jewish queer women she meets are femme. Which makes a sort of weak basis for her hypothesis, I guess.

Thinking about the lack of emphasis on certain kinds of masculinity in the Frum world is kind of fascinating to me. Thinking back, the first time I realized I did not want to grow up to marry some yeshiva guy, I think it was partly spurred by the lack of masculinity I observed in them (from afar.) Obviously that wasn't the only reason, but the irony in that (given that my answer to it was that I'd rather marry one of my more tomboyish female classmates) hadn't hit me until just now.

[iddewes]

that's interesting...I am a straight woman but very LGBT supportive, by the way - the Jewish lesbians I know are not very butch, but not very femme either. (well, now I think of it, actually I do know one really butch one and one really femme one...but most are kind of in between, I guess...).
To me coming in as a convert to Reform/Liberal Judaism rather than Orthodox, I get the impression that Jewish women ARE pretty strong and to me, Progressive Judaism at least seems a lot less patriarchal than Christianity. I don't know enough about Orthodoxy or especially Charedi Orthodoxy to know much about how it is for those women.

[ruakh]

Is it possible that by "femme" she means something different, or perhaps something broader, than what we normally think of as "femme"?

I mean, on the face of it, "many Jewish queer women gravitate toward femme identity" is true, but so is "many non-Jewish queer women gravitate toward femme identity." It doesn't seem like a very meaningful statement.

[balmofgilead]

I should probably re-read the essay, but I think if anything the author uses "femme" in a narrower sense than some might think; I think earlier in the essay she was proposing femme as a genderqueer identity that someone almost transitions into because it's different from just being a straight feminine woman.

I guess I should add that the author also says this idea was spawned by someone's joking comment "are all the femmes in San Francisco Jewish?" Which kind of adds some perspective, both about tone and about what she might mean by "femme." Overall the essay and her commentary were serious, though.