Else Lasker-Schüler’s Performance of Disidentification

• In Event: Reading Jews in Drag: (Re)Interpreting Modern and Contemporary Performances of Jewish Gender-Bending

Abstract

German-Jewish poet, prose writer, playwright, and performer Else Lasker-Schüler is famous not only for challenging normative ideas of gender and sexuality in her work but also for publicly presenting as the male persona of Yussuf, Prince of Thebes—a figure between fantasy and real life, between an imaginary Orient and the Western experience of German-Jewish acculturation. While Lasker-Schüler’s biographical and narrative ‘drag’ is often read as a means to overcome the limitations of femaleness imposed by an oppressive environment, it is rarely considered in conversation with contemporary queer and trans studies methodology. In my talk, I focus on Lasker-Schüler’s experimental anti-patriarchal and gender-bending episodic prose works THE NIGHTS OF TINO VON BAGHDAD (1907), THE PRINCE OF THEBES (1914), and THE MALIK (1919) by putting them in dialogue with José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity: Shifting away from attempts to read her biographical and narrative performance as a means to evoke an androgynie aimed at suspending femaleness, I identify practices of transformation such as performative repetition, dance, and drawing/tattoo in Lasker-Schüler as a utopian hope to expand gendered identification and sexual desire. This yearning for a future community built on solidarity among outsiders also redefines the possibilities of Jewish identification beyond the limitations set by the historical moment of Lasker-Schüler’s life.

Author

• Rafael Balling, Stanford University