Emilia Writes

For once, I was on the other side of the microphone recently, being interviewed by the wonderful Chally of Zero at the Bone, about feminism and Judaism. 

This interview is with my dear friend Emily Manuel, who is the editor at Global Comment. A scholar, she’s always had a lot to say about theology, and we’ve been having the most wonderful conversations as long as I’ve known her. Emily has recently made the plunge into the conversion process for the Reform branch of Judaism. So, with my congratulations, here I present her answers to the Feminists of Faith questions. You can check out the rest of this series, and its purposes, through the Feminists of Faith tag.

1. Tell us about the formation and constitution of your feminist identity, and your faith one.

I’ve been a feminist for as long as I can remember, really.  I was very aware of the ways in which women are materially and symbolically devalued from a young age and that knowledge spurred feminist commitments.

My faith, on the other hand, has been a much longer, more complicated road.  I was raised in a pretty fringey form of Protestant Christianity, which didn’t have a lot of space for women’s participation and denied the very existence of LGBT people.  It didn’t work for me in any way whatsoever, so I lost my childhood faith and left it in my teens.

Then I went to university and did my degrees in Literature and learned about textual analysis, historical materialism, all that good stuff, and then moved onto academic writing on the religious elements in literature and media in my postgrad years.  Religion remained a pressing concern, but it was mostly critical, distant from me.  Over the past couple years however, I’ve moved towards Judaism, started reading Torah regularly as well as much rabbinical commentary and recently theology as I could.  This year I began converting to Judaism so it’s still quite new to me.  As I offer my opinions here, I’m sort of painfully aware how much of the tradition I don’t know, as well as the diversity of opinion among Jews. But it’s exciting.

2. How is your feminism tied to your faith? Perhaps aspects of your faith inspire your feminism?

Aspects of my faith definitely inspire my feminism.  There’s a strong current within Judaism that demands social justice, that suggests we have an infinite responsibility to one another.  Kyriarchical capitalism does such tremendous damage to us and the world we live in, and so the Jewish idea of tikkun o’lam, repairing the world, is really powerful for me in motivating activism.

3. Have you experienced conflicts between your faith and your feminism? Have you had to make compromises? If so, from where did the pressure come, and was one aspect more difficult to compromise on than another?

I sometimes experience a conflict in Judaism in terms of the way we’re interpollated (to use Althusser’s term) as subjects, in relation to Israel and Palestine, as well as the heteronormativity involved in the imagining of the Jewish people.  I do tend to stay away from talking Israeli policy (the humanitarian aspects which I think are a feminist issue) with most people, which obviously engenders a lot of passion among Jews.  As someone very new to the religion, it’s something I’m quite aware of not knowing enough about the history and politics of to talk about properly.  It’s something I’m still thinking over a lot.

4. What kinds of responses to your being a feminist of faith have you received? From feminists, your faith community, or others?

Well, I’ve mostly gotten support in both communities.  Reform Jews do pride themselves on being liberal, and so many people do have an explicit commitment towards gender justice.  My rabbi is great on that.  On the other hand, there’s still the same everyday quotidian sexism you encounter in all communities.  One time I suggested we read from a women’s Torah commentary and some men were pretty hostile about that.  De-centreing male perspectives on the tradition is still an on-going project, as we saw recently with the controversy around the Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englader edited New American Haggadah where women were completely absent from the text.

A lot of the feminists I know have been very positive about my conversion to Judaism, though there’s been some reticence and anger.  So many people have been traumatised by the faith traditions they were raised in, including myself.  There are definitely distinctly religious forms of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc – religion is a filter – but then there are distinctly atheist forms, too (as people like Melissa McEwan have written about).  So I understand the hostility, but I think that any religion is just a system of thought.  Anything can be used as a tool for subjugation, and most have elements that can be used for liberation, too.  I don’t think there’s anything necessarily oppressive about religion qua religion, and there’s a lot of women who join me in that.

5. What are the challenges you encounter as a feminist in your faith community and/or tradition, and vice versa?

I think that the real challenge for me lays in front of me – what type of a Jewish woman do I want to be?  What can I add, in my own small way?  It’s less in the communities than in the responsibility itself, to be faithful to the tradition and to the call of justice.  When we see grown Charedim men spitting on little girls in Israel, is that justice?  Is that faith?  What about our tradition has led them to that place?  Are we implicated, too?  There aren’t always easy answers, or easy-to-hear ones, but confronting the difficult questions of belief and practice is what gives our faith life.  But I think Torah is strong enough to handle it.

6. How can feminism and faith usefully work together?

Well, I think at the very least we need to be able to start from a position of basic respect.  Atheists shouldn’t assume that women of faith are brainwashed, and women of faith shouldn’t look at atheists as sinful, damned, in need of conversion, or whatever.  This is, I should point out, more a problem of Christianity than Judaism (Jews don’t actively recruit, in fact the Talmud says a rabbi should turn a convert away three times), but it remains a problem that Jewish women have to grapple with too because of the way Christian-centric ideas of “religion” circulate.  A lot of the time when people say “religion” they really mean “Christianity.”  Like when the Catholic bishops talked about the war on religion with the contraception debate – well, actually, no, it’s not a war onmy religion.  In cases like that, atheist feminists could amplify the voices of feminists of faith in making the argument that conservative versions of Christianity do not stand in for the whole of religious experience and practice, and that actually a lot of the way conservative Christians seek to conflatetheir church with the American state in fact tramples all over the rights of other faiths as well as atheists.  The cultural heritage of the Abrahamic faiths is too precious to leave to the most extreme, poorly thought-out versions of faith in the U.S.

Belle & Sebastian - “I Didn’t See It Coming”

“Make me dance, I want to surrender”

Outkast - “Hey Ya”

Ice cold.

This was my presentation delivered at Girl Talk: A Trans and Cis Woman Dialogue, at the LGBT Center in San Francisco in March 2012.

Hello Wisconsin. 

At the start of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud, he of cigars and cocaine fame, asked the famous question “what do women want?” And of course he just as equally famously found no answer to this question, in part of feminine mystery etc and in part because he couldn’t comprehend what women would get out of being women in a patriarchy.

While Freud certainly did not include trans women in his question, it seems to me that this is a question we are rarely asked: what do we want? Gatekeepers ask us this question and then supply their own answers, while the media in general ventriloquises us based on their own feverish imagination. And radical feminists, well, you know how that goes…

And in our discourse, so much is occupied – as it must be – with survival, with the necessary fight for hormones and housing and education and work. And documents and treatment for HIV and on and on…. Our thinking and activism is triage, and so many of us are street medics in a certain sense, quite literally in Elena’s case, healing up the wounds of transphobia, sexism, homophobia, racism, classism and ableism. The tremendous damage done to us by kyriarchy.

Last Friday night, I was at a Shabbos dinner at my synagogue when I choked on a piece of beef about this big [makes gesture of about an inch]. I was suffocating, very close to passing out, when my friend Nicki performed the Heimlich on me and dislodged the meat. She saved my life. Sometimes the line between life and death is as small as a piece of beef, as a doctor’s appointment, a couch on a cold night. I don’t want to demean the first aid that we engage in for ourselves and for others by any means. Because we must, we must. And when you fight for survival, even just a small reduction in pain is a luxury. But what do we want, beyond survival?

We certainly need far more space for sexual self-determination, all of us. Over the last few months, we’ve seen quite starkly the desire of the right-wing in particular to remove contraception, which becomes this material evidence of women’s fucking (sorry trans guys and non-binaries, you don’t exist). As though if you could remove the Pill, from bedside tables, medicine cabinets, and purses, you could remove the desire itself, the threatening abyss of women’s desire.

And again, when the Occupy movement arose last year, there was the repeated invocation for the movement to narrow itself to one demand, as though the multiplicity on display on signs and in chants weren’t obvious – let’s call it the heteronormativity of political desire. Because if you have one demand, then you only have one problem, and the evidence of systemic failure can be airbrushed from the frame.

The English Conservative Member of Parliament Louise Mensch argued that the fact that some protesters could purchase Starbucks coffee was evidence for the natural superiority of the capitalist system they were protesting against. Well, I’m sorry, but personally I want a little bit more than a bloody cup of coffee.

As amazing as coffee is, and evidence of a benevolent and loving divinity etc, I want more. I don’t want to merely survive, I want to thrive in a just world.

And so, I have prepared a list of things that I want, which should be taken primarily as lines of flights, escape from oppressive systems rather than prescriptions for new ones (even though I have some ideas for concrete ways). If we can’t see the path yet, we can at least look together to find one. But here is what I, Emily Manuel, desire today:

Actually, I do want a cup of coffee. Could you sort that out, Rose?

I want that strappy 50s style dress I can’t afford. I want to not have to worry that the breeze will lift my dress, that to wear short skirts and not feel like I’m putting myself in danger.

I want to not have a migraine every week, and to have a painkiller that actually works, and my partner to not have to work through excruciating pain five days a week.

I want my in-laws to use the right pro-nouns for me, all the time.

I want free access to hormones and surgery, without gatekeeping. I want easy access to the right documents, to the correct bathrooms, changing bathrooms, changing rooms, public facilities, without fear. I want the next generation of trans children to grow up without being as traumatised as so many of us were.

I want a decent living wage. No fuck it, I want a decent global minimum wage.

I want universal heathcare, and universal education, and better education that engages with how we actually learn through play without coercion. And free housing and meaningful work, and universal access to the means and knowledge to produce our own food, and our own clothes, and our own art and theory and the tools to disseminate them. And universal socialised childcare and universal bloody homecleaning – oh dear God I do not want to have to clean a house by myself ever again.

If there’s a field of human endeavour where we can do it together, and make each other’s lives better, I want to socialise that.

I want to live my life without contributing to the oppressions of others at every step of the reified production, distribution and consumption chain of commodity purchase. I don’t want my life built off misery.

But that is not all that I want.

I want the salty warmth between your legs,
to search you out
like a diver swimming for pearls

I want the strangeness of dragons
and the familiarity of tea

I want scratch and caress,
clenched fist and open palm

six am and noon,
New Year’s and Tuesdays

eucalyptus and red dirt,
the mystery of the Sphinx
and the order of the Acropolis

I want tears and blood
and sweat and snot

I want heaven and hell between these legs,
these arms, these lips, these ventricles

I want totality
and infinity

the possible
and impossible
at once

and this,
only this

just one hair,
one molecule,
one electron,
one tiny breath.

I want just one word from you,
“yes.”

So what do you want?

Chairlift - “I Belong in Your Arms”

What would you do if I stole you?

Aaliyah - “Rock the Boat”

work the middle, work the middle…

Junior Boys - “Banana Ripple”