Zipporah, Queen of the Desert

Introduction

This book is the culmination of half a decade of research, interviews, and immersion in the internal, relational, and sociopolitical lives of queer Jewish people living in so-called Australia. It began as an extension of my research work into queer and trans peoples’ experiences of sexuality, gender, relationships, and health, which I melded with my ongoing interest in Jewish culture, community, and spirituality. As part of this research I spoke with 17 queer and trans Jews from across so-called Australia about their experiences as Jews living in the Australian colony. I was incredibly fortunate to interview Jews of Colour, Jews who had moved states or countries in part due to their queerness, older Jews, younger Jews, Orthodox Jews, and atheist Jews. I spoke to queer and trans Jews who had left religious communities, left LGBT+ communities, found G-d, or felt like G-d needed to be left alone. I spoke with people who lived in queer and Jewish hubs, and people who lived in one shul towns (just about). Rather than trying to create a singular image from this wide range of experiences, I have chosen to let interviewees’ words speak for them and to respond to them in the ways I felt most appropriate.

In this book you will find discussions of failure and growth, community abandonment and formation, relationships to Jewish traditions and culture, and history and contemporary life which have been thoroughly queered. These discussions were only as deep, meaningful, and honest as they were due to my shared experiences with those I interviewed. Therefore, before I begin this book in earnest, it is also important that the reader gets some understanding of how I am situated, and how I situate myself, in the world. I’m not interested in providing a chronological history or some kind of expanded biography. Instead I find myself compelled to explain things in metaphors or analogies or (most often) jokes, to revel in ambiguity, to hint at the multitudinous and densely layered nature of experience rather than try to concretely assert this or that aspect of my life. This book is about intersecting experiences, just like it says on the box. But in the same way you might proverbially¹ ask two Jews and get three opinions, a convergence of experiences produces excess, rather than an algebraic outcome. And so it is with this book as a whole, especially my lived experiences.

The “I” in Academia

This book is the result of a nearly five-year-long Doctoral process. Perhaps a pertinent thing to address right off the bat then is the use of first-person language throughout this Very Serious and Important Academic Product™. Here, already, there is excess. In the Neo-Liberal academic landscape I find myself in, Doctoral theses have been reduced to yet another milestone which increases your employability. Your thesis is a marker of your capacity to conduct and publish research in your field, but more importantly, its completion shows that you can produce viable work while employed at a full-time job that pays $14/hour. It is a flagellation, but I am not a Flagellant. It can feel undignified to talk about money, especially in an academic context where I am either seen as biting the hand that feeds or, worse, as someone who is exaggerating the truth of their circumstances. So for the sake of transparency, here are some of the other jobs (paid and unpaid) I held during my time as a Doctoral student:

• • Lecturer,
• • Tutor,
• • Consultant,
• • Research officer,
• • Evaluation officer,
• • Academic writer,
• • Non-academic writer,
• • Associate editor,
• • Musician, and
• • Leather maker.

This list is not exhaustive; it does not include all the labour required to keep me alive, safe, and as well as I can be. We will get to that later. So what does this have to do with the “I” in this book? Well firstly, to be blunt, this is my book. I do not believe in a kind of gun-toting, segregationist model of ownership so favoured by colonizers and oppressors, but I do believe that the Academy and its residents tend to forget who all this knowledge production belongs to. My work, and the work of other queer, trans, Jewish, and/or otherwise marginalized folk, does not belong to the Academy. It is not meant to be a singular hardcover gathering dust in a supervisor’s office, or a collection of pay-walled articles only accessible to a privileged few. This “I” is more than it seems: it is not simply a matter of inserting myself into the Academy, of sticking my ugly little flag in its well-manicured lawn. The way “I” exists and persists, both in the realm of knowledge production and outside it², returns us to this matter of excess. It would be a radical oversimplification to view my existence as a multiply-marginalized person in several exclusionary spaces as just a matter of what I have previously described as “nominal visibility” [1]. That is to say, it is often the inclination of those who actively seek to defuse radical or contradictory voices in their field (and those who don’t know any better) to reduce the presence of societal Others in these spaces to a mere matter of counting, of keeping any notion of diversity or progress restricted to what is materially present. The “I” scattered throughout the writing in this book becomes flattened through this lens, seen as a statement of personal perseverance and resilience or, perhaps more likely, a triumph on the part of my employers and publishers for supporting diversity amongst their ranks³. This book-long conversation between myself and the Academy does not produce some kind of accord, a marriage between my capacity to rise to the challenge of the pursuit of knowledge and the Academy’s progressive inclusion policies and strategies. It produces much more, and perhaps not what you think.

We are deep in bitten feeding-hand territory here. I am not as grateful as I should be, even as I am personally given access to an incredible slew of resources, a meagre but liveable income, and arguably some kind of social capital⁴. That is because in this context, “I” represents much more than a number on a university’s payroll, whether I like it or not. “I” am the product of a dense milieu of chance, a modicum of privilege, mentorship experiences ranging from tearjerkingly formative to negatively exemplary, and years of exhaustion-inducing and often degrading labour both within and outside the Academy. At a personal level, I find the flattening of this narrative either into some kind of individual queer/Jewish success story or, increasingly, the story of just another gay Jew working in academia, to be a significant disservice to myself and to those who have helped me get here.

More importantly, though, is the deep resonance I feel with Stephen Jay Gould’s assessment of the myth of individual genius: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”[2]. I, too, am much less interested in exalting my so-called “personal achievements” and would rather spend my time acknowledging and meaningfully showing gratitude to the peoples, places, and phenomena who have landed me in this position⁵. I am not going to produce a laundry list of those who deserve the credit given to me like someone diagnosed with a terminal case of Imposter Syndrome, though of course their names and ideas will be cited and acknowledged throughout the thesis. Instead, I would like to acknowledge that “I” stands where I am largely because I have been a privileged witness to experiences, secrets, writings, and art made by people who will never see the proverbial inside of a Doctoral programme, or perhaps even a university classroom. There is nothing I have or know that was not developed through sharing, vulnerability, collaboration, and mutuality – this is the difference between I and “I”, between what I consider to be a truly personal experience or achievement and what I consider to be the manifestation of all of that collective effort. I use this spelling as a way to humble myself, to express gratitude, and to recognize that “I” have only arrived here because so many others couldn’t.