Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (15 page)

The Right scapegoated “sexual perverts” during the McCarthy era. Eisen- hower imposed a total ban on the employment of gay women and men by the federal government and government contractors. Purges of les- bians and homosexuals from the military rose sharply. The FBI institut- ed widespread surveillance of organizations, such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. The Post Office placed tracers on the correspondence of gay men and passed evidence of homosexual activity on to employers. Urban vice squads invaded private homes, made sweeps of lesbian and gay male bars, entrapped gay men in public places, and fo- mented local witch hunts.
(108)

What connects these various sites of antihomosexual activity into what could accurately be called an antihomosexual
discourse
is the role that repression of gays plays across these various institutions. Specifically, antihomosexuality is constructed as a legitimate site of widespread government concern in part through its connection with anticommunism in the McCarthy era (note, for example, the language of “purges” that D’Emilio uses). Homosexuals are po- sitioned as a fundamental internal security threat that is connected to the threat of communism.

To understand “capitalism and gay identity,” then, we must also under- stand anticommunism and the homosexual threat. What makes this issue par-

ticularly relevant is, of course, that in 1950s anticommunist rhetoric this threat is, in fact, triune, with the unholy linkage of “godlessness, communism and homosexuality” articulating the parameters of the enemies of the Ameri- can nation. Insofar as
godlessness
serves as a code word for secular Judaism in this context, it places homosexuals (at least in antisemitic and antihomosexu- al terms) in a particular relation to Jews. Thus, as D’Emilio points out, the development of “gay identity” as described in this period occurs not only in relation to mobility, urbanization, and freedom from the “family,” as a unit of economic production, but in relation to an antihomosexual discourse con- nected to anticommunist and antisemitic conspiracy theory.

We now have a sense of a context that extends beyond queers and Jews to a network of discursive relations between capitalism, antisemitism, and gay identity. But, just as we must explore homosexuality as articulated in the post- war form of “gay identity,” we must also consider the specifically modern form of antisemitism. Moishe Postone (1980) has provided a synopsis that is at once brilliant and devastating in his reading of the ongoing cultural effects of the Nazi Holocaust. In the modern period, Postone argues, the long-standing as- sociation of Jews with money is articulated with capitalism in a specific way. Under capitalism “value” names both a
concrete
relation between (in the sim- plest terms) an object and its use and an
abstract
relation represented through money as the value of an object when it can be exchanged. Postone argues that in modern antisemitism Jews, a group that was supposedly mobile, transna- tional, and related to international finance, become identified with the abstract side of the binary. Jews came to embody “the abstract domination of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, [this abstract domination] be- came perceived as the domination of International Jewry” (107).

Yet National Socialism was able to harness this antimodern impulse and maintain its own commitment to capitalism and to industrial production by splitting the double meaning of value into its abstract and concrete compo- nents. National Socialism could react against capital in antisemitic discourse and simultaneously embrace industrial production by reifying the concrete side of this double valence as good, healthy, natural, and, most important, as opposed to the abstraction of capitalism in the form of finance.
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By focusing on industrial production as the “good” (because concrete) site of capitalism, Nazi discourse could, in fact, locate Jews as the source of all abstract threats to industrial production. Thus, in a crucial twist, Jews were not only the agents of an abstract and threatening finance capitalism, they were also locat- ed as the conspiracy behind the other threat to industrial production, inter- national socialism. To demonstrate how Jews could be placed on both these

seemingly opposed positions, Postone provides the example of a Nazi poster in which a Jew is shown pulling the strings of both a threatening finance cap- italism and a menacing socialism.

Postwar America presents us with both certain continuations of the dy- namic that Postone describes and some important differences and complica- tions. First the continuations: it seems clear that the American cold war dis- course of the 1950s that connected “godlessness, communism, and homosexuality” as the description of both the external threat opposed to the United States and the threat of subversion from within the United States, is, in part, a continuation of precisely the ideology that Postone describes. The naming of communism in relation to godlessness plays on the double nature of antisemitism analyzed by Postone. When placed in relation to communism
godlessness
can name those Jews who are not communists, but rather represent the international finance conspiracy. At the same time
godlessness
in the Amer- ican cold war formulation can work as a code word for the type of secular Jew- ish socialism that was targeted by National Socialism. Postone argues that the culture the Nazis sought to destroy in the Holocaust was in part designated specifically as eastern European Judaism because of the ways in which eastern European Jewish culture was frequently both secular and socialist.
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Thus it is no accident that it was the Rosenbergs who embodied this threat in the Amer- ican context.

The addition of homosexuality to this list served a particular purpose in the postwar U.S. by providing an embodied site for the conspiracy theory to operate that could pose a threat in alliance with the international Jewish con- spiracy so as to maintain the sense of threat even in the post-Holocaust situ- ation. Homosexuals and the discourses that form them are constructed not only on the basis of analogy to Jews but as the crucial allies of Jews in the post- Holocaust moment. Moreover, these connections mean that both Jews and communists could also be accused of being homosexual. The intertwining of the alliance could also lead to identity. In a never ending circle of identifica- tion, communists could be (identified as) Jews could be (identified as) ho- mosexuals could be (identified as) communists.

What, then, are the differences between the U.S. and the historical situa- tion that grounds Postone’s analysis? In the U.S. context antisemitic and an- tihomosexual discourse does work to manage the double discourse of value as described by Postone, but it does so in a different manner. National Socialists located themselves on one side of the binary between abstract and concrete value. They extolled the concrete as a site of liberation. This liberation was possible through the absolute destruction of the other side—the abstract—as embodied by Jews. Postone thus reads the “work will make you free” inscrip-

tion over the gates of Auschwitz as not a nonsensical or hypocritical claim but as the ideology of liberation espoused by those who established the camp. The embrace of the concrete, and of an ideology of concrete labor in particular, was the site of liberation. U.S. ideology, however—particularly in its cold war form—rejected a full embrace of either the abstract or the concrete sides of the binary.

Concrete work in this American schema is necessary, but is good only if it is also associated with the freedom of mobility (in both class and geographic terms) and the abstraction of capital. Abstraction is good, but only so long as it is under U.S. control. For America to embrace the concrete would be to give up some benefits of association with abstract capital and with finance in particular. It would be to think of America as a site fully determined by in- dustrial production, while the profits of the stock market might go elsewhere. To be identified only with industry would be to hold America in place, not allowing it to grow with capital. To move completely toward the abstraction of capital, however, would make America subject to the whims of financial markets, unable to fall back on the moral claims of working for a living as a justification for the expectation that the market will serve American’s interests. If Americans work hard, they deserve a good standard of living, and inter- ventions in the market to “protect” America are justifiable on these grounds. The move to reject both full abstraction and full concretization, to keep America hovering between these two poles, is part of an effort to protect America from any form of determination—either abstract or concrete—by capitalism. The fundamental U.S. ideology, then, is to protect capitalism as freedom—freedom from determination.

Within this ideology Jews and homosexuals (or Jewish homosexuals/ho- mosexual Jews) might represent the
abstract
threats, but the threat of being trapped in the
concrete
was crystallized in the postwar period in relation to ongoing contestation of that quintessentially American form of hatred, white supremacy, specifically as manifested in the domination of African Ameri- cans. Various forms of white supremacist retrenchment were underway through the 1950s. In particular, relations between “white America,” and African Americans were being reworked, in part as a response to the effects of social changes wrought by the war and the integration of the military. If military service is central to citizenship in the modern nation (Meyer 1996), then the racial integration of the military posed the possibility of wide- ranging social effects. Renewed racial discrimination, signaled by changes such as the addition of the Confederate “Stars and Bars” to the flags of sev- eral Southern states in the 1950s and 1960s, was the response to this and other moves toward racial integration.

Although antisemitism and white supremacy in the United States have often functioned together historically, in the postwar period they could also function as the splitting of different forms of hate, separated and projected onto different sites. This differentiated hate provides enemies that are, in the case of African Americans, presumed to be visibly identifiable and that, in the case of Jews, could be invisible enemies to white Christian society. The two oppositions—Christian-Jewish and black-white—work differently from each other, but they are also articulated so that they materialize an opposition be- tween Jews and blacks that connects Christianity and whiteness and then lo- cates this configuration—Christian-whiteness—as the middle or center. Thus, this network of relations works to fix “Jews” in the postwar period as white, at least insofar as they are made distinct from black, a shift from some previous imaginations of Jew. With Christian-whiteness at the center of this network, both African American Christianity and non-Christian whiteness are marginalized, but in different ways so as to do different work in the net- work as a whole.

The main work of the invisible threat is to posit a site of threatening power in excess of any visible power relations in U.S. society.
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Thus, even if American world dominance or Christian and white dominance within the United States appears secure, there is a continuing need for vigilance, and even the extension of domination, because “America” can never know the full extent of the threat. The discourses of visibility and invisibility can also inter- act, where the “surplus visibility” ascribed to particular persons, like African Americans, is “seen” as a sign of the ever threatening inordinate power of the invisible conspiracy. If white America can see what a threat African Americans are, how ever much more threatening must be the conspirators that are invis- ible. Jews and African Americans might join forces. They could be configured as allies. But they might also be separated as opponents, a schema in conso- nance with the historical fluctuations in “black-Jewish” relations.

Because homosexuals took up a position that could in the post-Holocaust moment stand in for Jews, the invisible threat of “homosexuality” could be considered similarly abstract and in need of surveillance so as to rout out pos- sible subversives. In the postwar moment it would have been difficult to see Jews alone as the site of an international conspiracy of inordinate power, but when tied to their coconspirators the seriousness of threat to the United States was a different matter. Importantly, homosexuals in their alliance (and/or identity) with Jews also form an invisible threat—you can’t always tell who they are just by looking—and become associated with whiteness. Thus ho- mosexuals along with Jews could become opposed to African Americans. As should be unsurprising after Foucault, these assumptions grounded in anti-

homosexual discourse often carry over into the elaboration of a discourse called homosexuality. In fact, as various critiques have demonstrated, coming- out stories and other cornerstones of “gay identity” often carry with them the assumption of whiteness (Martin 1988; Pellegrini 1998).
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The importance of considering this history is that it provides the rela- tional context that is invoked in the claim to analogy as well as in the hope for alliance. Homosexuals are like Jews in antisemitic and antihomosexual discourse. Like Jews, you can’t tell who they are just by looking; like Jews they are associated with capitalism (are, in fact, if D’Emilio is right, a product of capitalism), and they appear to have economic power not accorded to “visi- ble” minorities; like Jews they are geographically mobile (hence the sense of the otherwise nonsensical proclamation that homosexuals should “go back where they came from”); like Jews they appear to have inordinate political power in comparison to their numbers (hence the importance of right-wing arguments that Kinsey’s “10 percent” must be an inflated estimate).

I have suggested, however, that if this relation is taken up in progressive politics in terms of analogy it might not produce an alliance. It is true that if homosexuals and Jews are allied or even identified in antisemitic and antiho- mosexual discourse, then that alliance can become part of the elaboration of homosexuality or Jewishness as a discourse. But such a transfer will not nec- essarily happen. Moreover, if homosexuals and Jews are allies because they are analogized in discourses of social hierarchy and domination, then the alliance can easily break down, once the analogy shifts. Jews and African Americans were sometimes allied in a discourse of common enmity. During the Jim Crow era signs in front of establishments that were segregated for “whites” might read, “No Blacks or Jews.” And, yet, when the historical conditions of enmity changed, as Jim Crow was undermined and, crucially, as Jews “became white” over the course of the twentieth century, the positive basis for alliance had not been established strongly enough for it to hold.
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Here the alliance broke down because the ways in which Jews and African Americans were dif- ferent could be exploited to undermine any connection based on the ways in which they were similar. Thus analogy provides a shaky basis for alliance pre- cisely because it does not imagine a connection in which
both
likeness
and
dif- ference could be the basis for connection and collaboration.