Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini Read Free Book Online

gentleness of a woman” (Considine, 344). On screen, Patinkin’s Avigdor is at first horrified, then attracted, as is the norm in contemporary cross-dressing films (compare James Garner’s King Marchand
    in Victor / Victoria ). “I should have known,” he says, as he admits his love for her. An active, learned, acceptably transgressive figure (as contrasted with the unliberated Hadass, who cooks, bakes, and smilingly serves the men their fa- vorite dishes), Yentl is the “new woman” of the eighties, a fit partner for a scholar—if she will only renounce her ambitions.
    But the mechanism of substitution that is almost always a textual or dra- matic effect of the transvestite in literature is again in force. Streisand as Yentl declines to marry Avigdor because she wants to be a scholar more than she wants to be anyone’s wife. Happily, however, Avigdor’s first love Hadass is still around, now educated through her “romantic friendship” or homoerotic transferential reading experiences with “Anshel.” As the film ends, the trans- vestite “vanishes” and is dispersed; Avigdor and Hadass will marry and have a better—i.e., more modern and more equal—marriage than they would have if both had not fallen in love with “Anshel.” Yentl herself, now dressed like a woman, is on a boat going to America, where she can presumably live the life of a scholar without disguising her gender identity.
    Thus, instead of class substituting for gender, national culture does so. The transvestite is a sign of the category crisis of the immigrant, between nations, forced out of one role that no longer fits (here, on the surface, because a woman can’t be a scholar; but not very far beneath the surface, because of poverty, anti-Semitism, and pogrom, Jewish as well as female) and into an- other role, that of a stranger in a strange land. Streisand’s own cultural iden- tity as a Jewish musical star, with unWASPy looks, a big nose, and a reputa- tion in the business for shrewdness (read, in the ethnic stereotype, “pushy”), redoubles this already doubled story. As a Jewish woman in a star category usually occupied by gentiles (despite—or because of—the fact that many male movie moguls were Jews) she is Yentl/Anshel in another sense as well, “masquerading” as a regular movie star when in fact she differs from them in an important way.
    Critics of the film have wished that it could be more progressively femi- nist than it is, given its date. “It is not,” writes one observer, “so much a film about women’s right to an education as it is a personal statement by Streisand about her own determination to exert influence in a world still dominated by male power structures.” 4 The glee in certain quarters when Streisand was “stiffed” in the Oscar nominations, nominated for neither Best Actress nor Best Director (though she had campaigned for the attention of both Jewish and women voters in the Motion Picture Academy, and had earlier been given the Golden Globe award for Best Director), seemed to reinforce this male ambivalence about her career path, and to emphasize her insider-outsider po- sition. “The Oscar nominations are out and Barbra Streisand didn’t get any,”
    gloated Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show . “Today she found out the true meaning of The Big Chill .” 5
    Yet this analysis leaves out her Jewishness, which, in a plot line chosen presumably for its at least glancing relevance to her personal situation, is ex- tremely striking. The unusual spelling of Streisand’s first name, “Barbra” with- out the conventional third “a,” is a kind of marker of her implicitly defiant difference. Nor is it surprising that the expression of difference should mani- fest itself in a transvestite vehicle. In fact, that transvestism here should be not only a sign of itself, and its attendant anxieties, including pan-eroticism (both Avigdor and Hadass fall in love with “Anshel,” the transferential