UC Berkeley

Stealth Stamma: Queer Time and Affect in the Babylonian Talmud uses queer theory to tease out overlooked aspects of the Babylonian Talmud, shedding light on specific discursive impulses for meaning-making and, especially, subversion of Torah law. The queer Talmudic methods I draw out and discuss are the stamma’s stealth argumentation, a non-linear orientation to temporality, and the use of affective interruption for complicating the discourse. I argue that, in turn, the Talmud and its methods can serve as a cultural case study useful to queer theorists via the practice of discursive subversion as a response to oppressive power structures. Alongside textual analysis and theory, I also incorporate autoethnography toward a reading of Talmud that is queerly embodied and a reading of queer that is, in part, constituted by my deviant relationship to the Talmud. I argue that the interpretive possibilities for understanding this critical cultural text can only be expanded by upending the exclusivity that has defined Talmud study for centuries.

The dissertation is comprised of an introduction, three chapters, and an epilogue. My introduction first lays the foundation for my usage of the term “queer” throughout the dissertation and the ways that it is and is not bound to identity. Then, I argue that queer readings of Talmud must strive to attune to the pre-institutional charismatic impulses that characterized the rabbinic project before the Talmud’s cultural ascendance and canonization. Chapter 1, “Stealth Subversion in the Talmud: The Case for Queer Readership,” utilizes queer theories about visibility, performativity, and especially, the trans notion of "stealth" in order to construct a model queer Talmud reader whose orientation to vulnerability and attunement to the stakes of visibility make them more sensitive to the radical “stealth” innovations being made in the stamma’s construction of the discourse. Chapter 2, “The Talmud as Queer Archive: Claiming Power through Discourse,” uses theories of queer historiography and queer temporality to look at the Talmud's orientation to time and history, arguing that alternative relationships to time, such as non-linear, nonbiological inheritance and inter-generational dialogue, are themselves queer expressions of resistance, comprising a particular discursive strategy for undermining hegemonic power structures whose authority and legitimacy are endowed by a particular imagined past. Chapter 3, “Affective Pedagogy and Discursive Prosthesis in the Bavli,” looks at one strategy in the Talmud that I term the "affective interrupter," as an overlooked method for meaning-making that interrupts a more “objective,” detached discourse in favor of a more holistic approach accounting for the lived consequences of the topic at hand and the insufficiency of reason and language alone to account for the whole of human experience. The discussion in this chapter is organized primarily around Talmudic excerpts related to disability, as affective interruption is a Talmudic pattern that in some cases interferes with ableist discussions, and it is in these cases that affective interruption holds the most liberatory potential for subversive readings. I discuss the Talmud’s use of disability as a kind of "discursive prosthesis" that pushes argumentation forward but which neglects the lived experiences of disabled people and the impacts of Talmudic legal discourse on the lives of disabled people. The Epilogue zooms out to argue that subverting discourse evolved as a method extracted from the Talmud to become a characteristically Jewish way of responding to unjust power structures.