Queeridescent Jewish Archetypes in the Works of a Few Contemporary Artists

• In Event: Antisemitism and Destigmatizing Counteractions in the Public Sphere: Affect, Power, and Performativity Post-October 7th 2023

Abstract

Focusing on qualitative interviews with a few selected contemporary artists whose positionalities navigate Jewish and Queer (dis)identifications, the paper discusses how they relate to dominant norms and performativity of Judaism or/and Jewishness both outside and inside Jewish worlds.
The paper asks how these artists’ processes and/or productions may, rather than simply opposing pervasive stereotypes or addressing and countering them, engage in the artistically richer, aesthetically and intellectually complex, and queerly reparative process of identifying Jewish archetypes – and contributing to their (re)emergence. This follows a “reparative reading”, rather than sticking to the critical power of a “paranoid reading” (after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), and thereby allows to reconstruct personae rather than only dismantle them. Queering archetypes revisit the stereotypes of a dominant normativity. These archetypes are informed by the antinormative critical insights born from looking into the shadows of a dominant normative order. The paper’s approach to the notion of “archetypes'' is borrowed from queer artist and sex educator Caffyn Jesse, who suggested that “[q]ueer resistance transforms wounding stereotypes into empowering archetypes that help us think differently, more radically, about our social function” (Jesse 2015: 162).

Further, the paper asks how the discussed artists may not only outline queering Jewish archetypes, but also highlight their iridescent qualities: An iridescent thing continues to show glimpses of various colors while it moves and we move about it; it changes as perspectives upon it shift, and it shimmers and diffracts the light. As an iridescent archetype (re)surfaces in living contexts, across social fields and societal agents, different aspects of its shifting and changing can be caught in ephemeral glimpses by a queered attention. How do the selected artists’ processes work with such glimpses?
Queeridescent archetypes use the resources of Jewish Heritage for queer becoming and agency. They open up identifications that are neither fixed, nor singular, nor closed, but multiple and whirling; neither clear-cut nor fluid, but archetypally indeterminate and complex. Artistic approaches may mobilize queeridescent Jewish archetypes in order to imagine transformed convivialities, and produce agency through de-stigmatization.

Author

• Sacha Kagan, University of Hildesheim