This panel revisits the elements of gender and sexuality in Isaac Bashevis Singer's work from the critical perspectives of feminist, trans, and queer studies. The participants will discuss how narrative form, temporality, translation and Bashevis's particular vision of Yiddish literature shape the potentials and limitations of his narrative treatment of gender and sexuality. Agi Legutko reads Bashevis’s depiction of women, gender, and sex in his autobiographical work Di Mishpokhe (The Family) in light of his aspiration to capture in writing the multitude of experiences associated with sexual desire. Rafael Balling investigates how Bashevis’s self-understanding as a Yiddish writer who migrated from his native Poland to the US sets the stakes for narrating gender variance in his short story “Yentl der Yeshive Bokher” (“Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”). Chloë Zisl Piazza explores what tensions and possibilities emerge through the use of queer and trans readings of Bashevis's life and work and critically investigates how they align with or contradict historical readings thereof. Through this constellation of readings, the often neglected aspects of non-normative sexuality and gender variance in Bashevis’s prose become visible as an abiding motive of his work. By foregrounding his engagement with sexuality and gender from feminist, queer, and trans studies, this panel will show how Bashevis’s oeuvre at large does not easily fit labels such as ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive.’ It reveals, by contrast, a complex negotiation of patriarchal norms, sexual experience, and gender identity. The three speakers will speak for about 50 minutes total, with the rest of the time dedicated to discussion.

The ‘queer turn’ in scholarship on Isaac Bashevis Singer has shed light on previously dismissed or marginalized aspects of his work. Legutko shows how, while often criticized for producing “pornographic filth," Bashevis in fact closely examined various aspects of sexuality in his works. Significantly, Bashevis cites his aspiration to capture in writing the multitude of experiences associated with sexual desire as something that got him into literature in the first place, since he found depictions of sexual desire to be lacking in both world literature Yiddish literature in. Legutko focuses on the novel Di Mishpokhe, which was written after Bashevis had received the Nobel Prize and and was never published in English; it offers fascinating insights into his depiction of women, gender, and sex. Drawing on queer studies, and employing gender as an analytical lens, Legutko examines Bashevis’s—in several cases unprecedented—exploration of women, sexual desire, and sexuality in this relatively unknown and understudied text.

Putting the “Yentl” story in dialogue with the writer’s essayistic work on the function of a Yiddish literature that, after the 1940s, he saw as being geographically, culturally, and temporally divorced from its Eastern European ‘home,’ Balling links questions of literary form and temporality to the possibility of a trans reading of the Yentl/Anshel character. Balling discusses how Bashevis’s narrative construction of an imaginative Yiddish ‘old world’ is anachronistically intertwined with sexological and popular discourses around LGBTQI issues that belong to Bashevis’s present. Balling shows how the narrative entanglement of different times and epistemologies makes it ultimately impossible for the reader to categorize trans characters, and so restores a sense of opacity to transness in a time when ‘transsexuality’ became increasingly an object of medical and psychological scrutiny and policing.

Employing a queer lens to look at several of Bashevis’s short stories, including “Yentl,” as well as the lesser-known stories “Two” and “Disguised,” Piazza also focuses on transgender narratives in Bashevis’s work. When taken together, these stories reveal his steadfast fascination with themes of gender and sexuality, complicating narratives of Bashevis’s biography, which often stress his conservative views. Scholarly reception of these works has tended to obscure the central trans themes on display, dismissing the possibility of an historical exploration of trans experience by anyone, let alone by Bashevis, opting instead for feminist readings to account for the themes of gender in the texts, for which Piazza argues there is no basis. Moreover, by manipulating the narratives to accommodate critics’ trans-exclusionary feminist agendas, less critical attention is paid to the patriarchal violence on display throughout Bashevis’s works. Piazza explores what tensions and possibilities emerge through the use of queer and trans readings of Bashevis’s life and work, how they align with or contradict historical readings thereof, and what value there is in “disidentifying” (Muñoz) with this corner of Yiddish literature in order to reclaim and rewrite a “history of the present” (Hartman), to borrow the useful frameworks offered by Black feminism and queer of color critique.