Transgender Day of Remembrance

This documentary is the first in our sequence of LGBTQI-Jewish ‘ritual year’ films. The film consists of a series of short discussions with the two people participating in the ritual service of remembrance (Surat-Shaan Knan a trans man and community activist and Rabbi Janet Darley, a progressive Jewish Rabbi who is a member of Liberal Judaism, the community partner faith organisation which has collaborated on the Ritual Reconstructed project) and contains footage of elements of the actual ritual. The film takes place within a specifically interfaith ritual space which has been created in a London church for the purposes of this event. The film includes a pre-enactment (occurring in advance of the service which took place later that day) of the specifically Jewish elements within a unique Inter-faith Transgender Day of Remembrance. The ritual shown on film has never before taken place in an inter-faith setting and is a clear example of the blending of both age-old Jewish ritual practice and commemoration of Trans people’s history and past and present traumas

Reconstructing Rituals: Using bricolage to (re) negotiate faith based rituals with the Jewish LGBT+ community.

In Judaism, hetero-normative expectations which reify the binary of male/female exist in cultural and religious life. These presumptions of the centrality of heterosexuality to Judaism can create both psycho-social exclusion (Takács, 2006; Mendes, undated) and a sense of detachment from ritual and practice (Schneer & Aviv, 2002; Alpert, 1997) for those who do not ‘fit’ this binary model. Accordingly, some Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning and Intersex (LGBT+) Jewish people perceive themselves as ‘doubly other’ (Rose & Balka, 1989) experiencing a sense of cultural loss, religious exclusion and discrimination in key ritual settings. This problem of ‘double-othering’ (exclusion by virtue of both LGBT+ identity and as a result of religio-cultural practice) can be particularly acute for Trans-Jews who report that they can be confined to a ‘limbo’ situation, even in contexts where lesbian and gay co-religionists are accepted as full members of a congregation (see Dzmura, 2011). In a community-driven initiative, members of the UK Jewish LGBT+ community codesigned and participated in an Arts and Humanities Research Council UK funded project “Ritual Reconstructed: Challenges to Disconnection, Division and Exclusion in the Jewish LGBT+ Community”. It explored participants’ relationships to faith through the use of film and bricolage which (re)created public and personal rituals incorporating both Jewish and queer identities alongside and through the medium of art, storytelling, poetry, music and performance. The Community project has taken as a starting point Mary’s (2005) definition of bricolage - a dialogue between ‘meaningful material that one borrows’ and ‘incarnated forms one inherits’, through which we contemplate Savastano’s (2007) argument that LGBT+ persons are forced to create our own sacred or alternative myths in order to create a new way of bringing together queer spiritual identities

World Aids Day

This film is the second in our sequence of LGBTQI-Jewish ‘ritual year’ documentaries. The film consists of a clips of a memorialisation service and ritual activities, interspersed with short discussions with LGBTQI Jewish activists (including a Gay Rabbi) who participate in a memorialisation event which is explicitly Jewish in format and which was designed to offer an opportunity to mourn, remember our dead and have hope for the future in a specifically Jewish context. One key element of this film consists of the incorporation of the ‘Aids Quilt’ into the ritual process. This beautifully made object was created by a Jewish gay man and is curated and preserved by Rabbi Mark Solomon who is a key discussant in this film along with other Gay Jews. The quilt incorporates embroidered and appliqued richly coloured Jewish symbols, Hebrew text and symbolic representations which enable both Gay and Jewish identities to be publicly displayed and celebrated including (as discussed) within inter-faith World Aids Day events

Purim Spiel and Purim Group Talk

These documentaries are the third and fourth in our sequence of LGBTQI-Jewish ‘ritual year’ films. The third film captures a re-production of a musical ‘Purim Spiel’, replete with references to London topography and gay (male) life. The Purim Spiel shown in this film was first written and performed by a group of Gay Jewish men at the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis and as such it can be seen as an act of defiant laughter which incorporates both Jewish and Gay (predominantly camp) performative identities, subverting still further the transgressive, subversive Festival of Purim in which the world is turned ‘upside down’ and during which cross-dressing is permitted, an act which in traditional Judaism is usually completely forbidden

Pride Seder

This film is the fifth and final in our sequence of LGBTQI-Jewish ‘ritual year’ documentary programmes. It was the only programme made by filming as the ritual took place, rather than ‘pre-creating’ elements of ritual activity, prior to the actual service. In itself, the process of filming at the service during the Seder was not unproblematic, in terms of team members being able to gather visual and audio recording permissions from people who arrived late, or who changed their minds about being seen or heard having reached a decision on participation on the spur of the moment

Confronting Gender and Faith

Despite generations of feminist and queer deconstructions of gender and sexual binarisms in diverse disciplines, the modern/colonial belief in the heteronormative sexual (and thus gender) binary between &#8216;man&#8217; and &#8216;woman&#8217; seems to still be strongly held in contemporary society. In this conference, we ask if the binary gender system works as a kind of belief, a question that leads us to explore the relationship between ‘gender’ and systems of &#8216;faith&#8217; by focusing on three different relations between the two: &#8216;gender as faith&#8217;, &#8216;gender against faith&#8217;, and &#8216;gender in faith&#8217;. The convergences and conflicts between gender and faith also ask us to look more closely at the complex and diverse articulations of gender within different religious &#8216;faiths&#8217;. Questions to be addressed by the conference include the following: Is the analogy of gender heteornormativity and &#8216;faith&#8217; still relevant in a cultural and religious context not focused on faith?  Are &#8216;queerness&#8217; and &#8216;faith&#8217; compatible? How do actual non-heteronormative gender positions within religious traditions contradict conservative religious demonizations of gender theory as &#8216;gender ideology&#8217;?Confronting Gender and Faith, conference, ICI Berlin, 10–11 December 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e151210