The Femininity Puzzle

In the Hobsbawmian long 19th century, gender and processes of sexualisation and feminisation have been crucial in the construction of the "Jewish Other". Ulrike Brunotte explores how these processes came about by addressing imaginative, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. She analyses how literature, psychoanalysis and the performing arts traverse and react to the ambivalence of racialised stereotypes. The "femininity puzzle" presents itself in two ways: first in the role of effeminisation of the male Jew in antisemitic discourse, and then in the transgressive forms of femininity connected to Jewish women, especially the allosemitic Orientalisation in the figure of the "Beautiful Jewess".