“She Laughs at the Future” (Prov. 31

LEE EDELMAN AND THE QUEER STUDY OF RELIGION. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 280. Hardback, $160.00. BAD EDUCATION: WHY QUEER THEORY TEACHES US NOTHING. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $28.95. SEX, OR THE UNBEARABLE. By Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 168. Paperback, $24.95. NO FUTURE: QUEER THEORY AND THE DEATH DRIVE. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 208. Paperback, $25.95. Laughter is, as the study of Bakhtinian carnival reminds us, a queer and dangerous act. So what do we make of the biblical matriarch Sarah's recurring laughter? This is the question that Lee Edelman helped me investigate. I was recently invited to teach a class on “Queer Hermeneutics” for a course on “Women, Gender, and the Hebrew Bible” taught by my friend and colleague, Hanne Løland Levinson. Although my work and teaching have engaged frequently with queer hermeneutics, this was my first guest lecture focused on the subject, and it took me a surprisingly long time to settle on a topic. I finally decided on examining Sarah as a figure of queerness and passing, inspired particularly by the work of Jo Henderson-Merrygold and Gil Rosenberg on the topic, and dove into preparation (See Henderson-Merrygold 2024 and Rosenberg 2019). As I reread the stories that featured Sarah, I was struck by a particular Hebrew word that kept recurring: ṢḤQ, a verb that means “to laugh.” Sarah laughs when a divine visitor predicts her pregnancy (Gen 18:12), and she names her son Isaac (Yitzḥaq, “he laughs”), proclaiming that “‘laughter’ has God made for me; all who hear will laugh with/for me” (Gen 21:6, my translation). But just a few verses later, when she sees Ishmael “making laughter” (meṣaḥeq), the sight infuriates her enough to demand that Abraham cast him out with his mother, Hagar. So far, this wordplay is no new insight; virtually every commentary observes the connection between Sarah's laughter and Isaac's name. But with queer interpretation on my mind, and specifically Lee Edelman's No Future, the laughter took on a new light. Could Sarah be an example of a sinthomosexual? Could this laughter embody a sort of jouissance? Jouissance, a term originating with Jacques Lacan, is a key term in No Future. Edelman describes it as a “fantasmatic escape from the alienation intrinsic to meaning” (24); it is wild and uncontrollable pleasure, so intense that it fractures categories and merges with pain and annihilation, and it is tied closely to queerness and the queer, antisocial figure of the sinthomosexual. In Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion, jouissance appears in several contexts; in particular, Caryn Tamber-Rosenau links it to Daniel's laughter in Bel and the Dragon, noting that “[w]e can connect Bataille's laughter to Edelman's jouissance and sinthomosexuality through negativity, the power of the unknown, the unknowable, and the death drive” (2023, 96). Laughter can sometimes be reduced to a reaction of delight and amusement, but associating it with jouissance adds a serious and unsettling note that seemed appropriate for Sarah's ambiguous situation. While I am not the first to connect these ideas, I was unable to find an existing analysis that satisfyingly connected Sarah's laughter through jouissance with Sarah's queerness. Roberta Sabbath has published an article on “Jouissance and Trauma in Sarah's Laugh and Aporia: The Construction of Collective Identity in the Parshat VaYera” (2020), which curiously does not mention jouissance anywhere outside its title; Manya Steinkoler has published “Sarah's Laughter: Where Babies and Humor Come From,” (2016) which analyzes Sarah's laughter/jouissance from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Neither article mentions Edelman or queerness—an unfortunate omission, given that Sarah's genderqueerness was visible as far back as the Babylonian Talmud, which identified both Abraham and Sarah as tumtumim and Sarah as an ayalonit (rabbinic categories of intersex/genderqueer identity).1 Conversely, while Henderson-Merrygold and Rosenberg's treatments of Sarah draw on Edelman to interpret her childlessness, neither mentions the concept of jouissance. In light of this gap in scholarship, I took advantage of my teaching—as I often do—as a way to work out theory in conversation with students. I summarized Sarah's stories, noting the recurring laughter in each, then introduced the students to the concept of jouissance as conceived by Edelman. What does Sarah's laughter signify? I asked. What complicated emotions does it contain, and what function does it perform? In what way is her laughter, which questions God's promises and yet contains a seed of stubborn hope, a queer act? From there, we shifted to an apparently distinct topic: Sarah as a figure of passing. Passing—that is, appearing to fit within a more normative identity than you actually possess—is a daily struggle for many LGBTQI+ folk. Bisexual/pansexual individuals in heterosexual relationships deal with inaccurate and harmful assumptions from straight and queer people alike, while individuals in same-sex and polyamorous relationships may feel pressure to pass by allowing family to introduce their partners as “friends.” Trans individuals debate whether passing as cis (“going stealth”) is a goal or a cisnormatively imposed pressure; non-binary and intersex individuals often have the questionable “privilege” of passing as a binary gender, with all the attendant pressure that it entails. In short, inasmuch as queer theory connects to the real struggles of queer and gender-diverse people, it can and should engage with theories of passing. In Ancestral Queerness: The Normal and the Deviant in the Abraham and Sarah Narratives, Gil Rosenberg takes up this challenge, spending a chapter focusing on how the “wife/sister” narratives of Abraham and Sarah parallel the challenges of contemporary queer persons. In these stories, Abraham and Sarah pass off their marital (and possibly incestuous?) relationship as that of mere siblings due to some combination of fear, shame, and social vulnerability. Sarah's experience of passing is just one of the many ways that her character can be read as queer-coded; she also embodies sexual alterity through her age and childlessness, relies on a reproductive surrogate, and (as noted above) expresses jouissance on multiple occasions. Yet is there a connection between Sarah's jouissance and her passing, beyond their general connection to queerness? In our class, we explored that question by turning to a deeply ambiguous artwork by Marc Chagall: his 1960 lithograph, “Sarah und Abimelech.” In this piece, Sarah and Abimelech lie in bed together, both awake. Abimelech is clothed and focused on Sarah, reaching toward her body with a smile on his lips. Sarah is nude, her breast prominently exposed; she looks away with a distant expression on her face, beautiful and unreadable. Chagall's piece is a profound depiction of the complexity of passing. Sarah lies in bed with a good man, a man who desires her honorably, but the deception between them leaves her unsettled and emotionally inaccessible. When I asked the students to describe what Sarah was thinking in the painting, their responses were nuanced and complex, but none read her as happy. Sarah's laughter, like her gaze, was far, far away. Yet jouissance is not mere happiness or laughter. To the contrary, it “evokes the death drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject” (Edelman 2004, 24); the void is “replete, paradoxically, with jouissance” (Edelman 2004, 22). In fact, in No Future, jouissance is associated specifically with the “humorless” figure of the sinthomosexual. Edelman's sinthomosexual is a queer figure who, drawing from Lacan's sinthome, resists the social and specifically reproductive norms of society. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, the sinthomosexual refuses to find joy in the cisheteronormative ideals of their peers; they are, to borrow a term from a very different critical theorist, an “affect alien” (Ahmed 2010, 49), someone whose emotional reactions diverge starkly from societal norms. Affect aliens are not always easy to be around. They are killjoys in a literal sense: Sara Ahmed's “feminist killjoy” is someone who “‘spoils’ the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness” (2010, 65). If Sarah is a sinthomosexual, a killjoy, then her negative reaction to Ishmael's youthful laughter (which commentators have interpreted variously as mockery, bullying, or even sexual abuse) gains a new dimension. Of course, that does not excuse the cruelty of Sarah's response. In a modern midrash, Tamar Biala imagines various biblical women reflecting on Sarah's role in the Binding of Isaac, a text that canonically makes no mention of Sarah. My students, like most writers I have read, tend to picture Sarah as brimming with motherly love, devoted to her son; in his commentary on Genesis 23:3, Rashi famously said that Sarah died when she learned of the threat to Isaac's life. But Biala takes a different approach by imagining Hagar's perspective on the situation. In her midrash, Hagar says, “Sarah did not go looking for her husband Abraham or her son Isaac at all, and God knew it would be like that. When the Holy Blessed One saw that she sought to send away Abraham's first son to the desert, mercilessly, He feared that she wouldn't have mercy on her own son either, her only one, and so He spoke to Abraham with precision: take your son, yours, and not hers, for through Isaac, seed will be called by your name (Gen 21:12). By your name, yours and not by hers" (Biala 2022, 40). This Sarah, seen through Hagar's eyes, is the opposite of maternal. She is willing to commit one child to death, and God assumes that she would be similarly unfeeling toward another. One can almost imagine her saying Lee Edelman's famous stream of invectives in No Future: “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (2004, 29). We can imagine this Sarah laughing in relief when she hears the prophecy of childbearing: “now that I am withered, could such a ‘pleasure’ even be possible for me? My husband is old!” (Gen 18:12, my translation). Perhaps her jouissance signals her freedom from the fear of all that a child would entail.2 This is the aspect of the sinthomosexual that Jared Beverly draws out in “Qohelet's Queer Negativity,” also in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion. Beverly underlines Qohelet's various statements against reproductive futurism, arguing that “Qohelet rejects the child and the future and thus says no to this reality . . . that will always steal from one generation to found the next” (2023, 75), What is the alternative to that reality? It is, in Qohelet's words, to “eat, drink, and take pleasure” (Ecc 8:15), or in Beverly's, to “[e]mbrace the jouissance of the sinthomosexual's ‘narcissistic satisfaction’” (2023, 76). It is to laugh. Like Beverly, I am not suggesting a sexual orientation for my character. As Beverly notes, “A queer reading of the text need not divine the gender preferences of this figure—there is more to be said in thinking of his figural status as the queer over against the norm” (2023, 71). Whether Sarah was attracted to women or uncomfortable with the label of “woman” is unknown and indeed unknowable; all we can know is the scant glimpses of a rudimentary character written by androcentric authors. Yet when those glimpses resonate with queer readers, perhaps we can read a lesson for ourselves in them. To read Sarah as a figure of jouissance, and not merely of happiness, is to embrace her full, queer complexity: the layered pain of passing; the roller-coaster of infertility and then geriatric pregnancy; the jealous resentment at watching another's child seize your joy. The jouissant Sarah is no saint; neither was Scrooge. But by using Lee Edelman's concepts to open her up to queer interpretation, we can make her more accessible and identifiable to students with their own experiences of passing, of alienation, and of queer joy

Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Development, Ethics, and Society · Philosophy · Psychology · Theological Perspectives and Practices

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