#zombie post

@hellocutenerd4life first of all, THANK YOU for the kind words. For new kids, this is the original post @hellocutenerd4life is referring to. There are multiple versions going around, some with really good commentary, some with commentary that makes me want to claw my eyes out, and one that @neil-gaiman​ penned and he doesn’t know it yet but he’s going to be endorsing my book. Look through the notes. Second of all [this got really really long because it raised a lot of fascinating historiographic and methodological questions and concerns]…..this ^ commentary brings up a really interesting set of points and questions. For example:

-how does the culture/society/nation in question define gender, and how, according to the available sources, did ordinary people living in that context define it for themselves?

-is the gender binary a historical constant, or a quirk of contemporary western society?

-how do we look for genderqueer and trans identities in societies which conceived of gender differently than we do now?

-How did members of the culture/society/nation in question understand genitalia, and its relationship (or lack thereof) to gender

-If members of the culture/nation/and society were gender nonconforming, how would they have expressed that in the available sources? How did they use language?

The best work I've seen which truly questions and investigates sources with genderqueer and trans identities is The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America by Margot Canaday.

Now, let's apply your concerns to a. Jewish women and migration in late 1930s Germany, and b. young Polish Jewish women who were at least in their teens by 1939.

First, Germany. The Weimar Republic had an active and well documented queer* scene. I can only assume that Jewish people engaged in that world--I can't give you definite statements here, because I've never done that specific research and asked those questions. But, I do know enough about the history of 1930s German Jewry to make several assumptions.

The women the original post was about were generally upper/middle class women, whose husbands worked outside the home. Though Central European Jewish gender roles allowed for all kinds of fun--analytically speaking--we're still talking about a conservative heteronormative group.

So, how would we queer Marion Kaplan's work in Between Dignity and Despair? What questions do we need to ask of the available sources? What language do we need to look for? Can translations be of any service in this particular area, or will they inherently distort any turns of phrase which can give us clues to genderqueer identities in this period? I can’t answer any of these right now, but they’re the questions we need to ask should we attempt to look for these histories, expressions, and identities in upper middle class 1930s German Jewish households.

Now, interwar Polish Jewry in their teens and early 20s by 1939. This is a very cool, weird group. They were known as a "youth without a future," because they were coming of age at a time when heightened Polish anti-Semitism and the Great Depression were coming together to well and truly screw them out of jobs, universities, educational access, etc. They, by and large, felt that their parents were incapable of helping, let alone understanding, their situation, and so they turned to political youth groups for guidance and identity.

Interwar Poland had a fuckton of political youth groups in every political flavor imaginable: Orthodox anti-Zionist, Orthodox Zionist, Orthodox Neither, Bundism (anti-Zionist Polish nationalist in terms of working class solidarity across and beyond Polish ethnoreligious boundaries), Socialist, Communist, Socialist Zionist, Communist Zionist, Pioneering Zionist, Hardcore Right Wing Zionist that the other Zionists didn't fuck with, etc. Meaning, that these young people looked outside the construct of the nuclear family for guidance, morals, etc. 

It also happened that this generation rejected the traditional manner of Polish/Eastern European Jewish engagement in national politics. For quite a time in Eastern European Jewish communities, the way Jews got rights for themselves was basically like, by begging and scraping before the local governor. Like, humbly supplicating yourself before the local Polish magistrate to try to get protection from pogroms.

Interwar Polish Jewry (ie these political groups and the cultures they fostered) rejected these modes of political interaction, and instead moved to a space of demanding rights for Jews under their constitutionally given status as a National Polish Minority. No more begging, no more scraping, no more acting like the Polish Catholics would be doing them favors if they were to suddenly refrain from harassing Jewish university students.

So, what does that mean for gender and gender roles? Certainly you have the classic Eastern European Jewish gender roles and ideals: nuclear household, husband stays home and studies, wife raises children and makes money for the household in a public sphere kind of way (see Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women by Paula Hyman for more). BUT THEN you throw in the youth groups and their influence over young minds. What did they teach about gender and sexuality?

Well, we know that some were immensely puritanical when it came to issues of sex and sexuality. Some were pretty chill about sex, and were very into public health and sex education. Others encouraged romance between its young members, but didn't have an ideology in either direction. Where the youth groups really shine, though, is the very specific way they handled gender.

Like, yeah they did have strictly defined gender roles and conceptions of what men should be doing, and women should be doing. But what's interesting is that I do not see, in the sources, much straight-up misogyny. I actually see a lot of deep male respect for their female peers, in that these men perceived women as their equals, merely carrying out different functions. There was obviously patriarchy and sexism, but its presentation in these cultural groupings was just....different. It's wearing a very specific, complicated, and muted hat. The biggest Thing I see was that men consisted referred to their female peers as “girls,” in memoirs and such, but....so did the women. Like I said, it’s a very specific hat.

And that brings us to questions of sexuality, and gender presentation. How do we queer Interwar Polish Jewish youth? Do we look to gender role subversion, modes of dressing? How do we look at modes of dressing for members of ideological groups which dictate "androgynous," physical labor-ready clothes for everyone and look down on cosmetic usage [ie pioneering Zionism; like, Queen Zivia did not fuck with lipstick]? What language do we look for to find evidence of gender and sexual ID?

How does language impact these questions? Interwar Polish youth groups were extremely political about what language they and their members used to carry out their work, and the choice between Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish was a deeply political/ideological one. All of those languages have their own constructs and expressions and nuances in the context of gender, sex, and interwar Poland, so what should we look for when questioning the sources? Can we even attempt to ask these questions when it comes to translated sources?

This is very long and potentially boring, but what I'm trying to do here is illustrate all the questions we (as historians) have to ask, and contexts we have to understand, before we can approach the sources with questions regarding sex, sexuality, gender expression, etc. These constructs are in constant flux, so you need an in-depth understanding of where they stand in the exact time and place you're looking at before you can even begin your interrogation of the sources.

And to be clear, I don't have these answers for Interwar Central and Eastern European Jewry. I have a grasp on what the questions might look like, but certainly not the answers.

It makes me want to claw my eyes out (my second time using that turn of phrase in this post; I am both dramatic and unoriginal today), but Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is really good at demonstrating all of the questions we have to ask ourselves as historians before we even begin to question the sources. I'd also take a look at Joan Scott's works.

If this post reads to (general) you as "ummm there were no trans, genderqueer, or otherwise queer identities before 1970s k bye" then (general) you need to do a reread. There absolutely 100% most certainly were. But before historians can look for them, they HAVE to understand how that time/culture/place/etc understood gender. And in historiographic terms, the work being conducted to understand those questions--in my field and many others--is still fairly new.

There's still SO much work to be done, and I, for one, am extremely excited about it. One of my biggest regrets is that I struggle so much with languages, that I'll probably only ever be able to do this work outside of English-language (originally, not translated into English) sources.