RT Article
T1 Esther, Drag, and Agency: Gender, Ethnicity, Power, and Queer Time in the Book of Esther and its Jewish Interpretations
JF Hebrew studies
VO 63
SP 99
OP 118
A1 Tamber-Rosenau, Caryn
LA English
PB The National Association of Professors of Hebrew
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1830733249
AB The character of Esther in the biblical book named for her is often read in scholarship as passive, overshadowed by her relative Mordechai, merely complying with his directives. This essay uses queer-theoretical vocabularies of drag and passing to allow for a different reading of Esther, one in which she acts intentionally and at great personal risk to save herself and her people. I examine the Hebrew Masoretic text of Esther, as well as early Jewish interpretations of the story, for clues about Esther's ethnic and sexual passing. In addition to arguing that Esther the character engages in drag and passing, I contend that Esther the book does temporal drag, playing with notions of time to make an important argument about how Jewish history works. While acknowledging that the book was almost certainly written to legitimate nationalist counter-reading strategies can produce more liberatory understandings.
DO 10.1353/hbr.2022.0005