Religious Life Is Life Together: Ritual, Liminality, and Communitas among Queer Jews in Postsecular Britain
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Abstract
For some, the early hours of the morning are a time when few are awake, the city quiet, and the streets empty. In London’s East End, however, the dimly lit alleyways are teaming with late- night revelers. Historically characterized as largely working- class neighborhoods, districts like Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Whitechapel have undergone a rapid process of gentrification in recent years and are now synonymous with trendy clubs, pubs, and wine bars.1 The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, located just off Pollard Square, has been a cultural, political, and social hub of the East End since 1887. In recent years, the venue has become popular among students at the nearby Queen Mary, University of London, and a new wave of young urban professionals who are spatially segregated from the club regulars: Downstairs, the octogenarians still have their cards and gambling machine. But upstairs, the space is used for concerts, burlesque shows, voga (a dynamic fusion of yoga and vogueing), a pop- up Chinese restaurant and . . . “wild, unhinged good times.”2 Now and again, the walkways crossing Weavers Fields and the A1209 from the Bethnal Green Underground Station become a threshold to the United 148 Matthew Richardson Kingdom’s first queer Jewish club night. Organized around special and transitory dates in the Hebraic calendar, Buttmitzvah is a camp, erotic, playful, and satirical celebration of queer Jewish identities in postsecular Britain. The evening is centered around the backstory of the Rimmer family, pun intended, hosting their daughter Becky’s Bat Mitzvah. Facilitated by a troupe of dedicated actors, dancers, and drag kings and queens, the night is more than just a raunchy get-together. In this chapter, I explore the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah as an ethnographic case study to argue that the evening functions as an aspirational and motivational platform from which partygoers construct, demarcate, and celebrate an affirming identity politics. To do so, I use Turnerian anthropology of experience as a key analytical , methodological, and theoretical heuristic tool to explore the affective , anti- structural, collectivizing, and subversive qualities of the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah. First, I situate Buttmitzvah in the socio- cultural- geographic context of postsecular Bethnal Green and identify it as liminal space providing the ideal settings for the generation of communitas, a special type of ritualized space- time whereby all those present enjoy an intense sense of belonging and identification with each other. Next, I explore the ritualization needed to generate this social state of communitas by drawing on what I call the ritual complex, an intricate system involving myths, symbols, and rituals functioning as media through which selves and others are formed, mobilized, and resisted. Finally, I unpack the anti- structural qualities of communitas by characterizing Buttmitzvah as a liminoid phenomenon in a liminal space, providing those in attendance with a platform for subverting antisemitic, heterosexist, and postsecular social structures. As such, I argue that religious life is life together because it is only when people come together and generate the collective electricity of communitas that the aspirational and motivational forces for constructing, demarcating, and celebrating religious selves and others becomes possible. It is through ritual performance, in other words, that an imagined community is actualized in an intense emotional state of social belonging. I conclude this chapter by highlighting the benefits of engaging with Turnerian anthropology of experience when researching alongside minoritized religious communities in postsecular contexts. The findings in this chapter are grounded in fifteen months of narrative ethnographic research (April 2020 to July 2021) with eighteen queer Religious Life Is Life Together 149 Jews who were living, or had previously lived, in postsecular Britain (their selected profiles are included in the appendix for context).
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Page Number / Article Number
147-178
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9780814350881
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Link to book (paywalled), Religious Life Is Life Together: Ritual, Liminality, and Communitas among Queer Jews in Postsecular Britain
Bibliographic Information
Religious Life Is Life Together: Ritual, Liminality, and Communitas among Queer Jews in Postsecular Britain. 2024: 147-178. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/object-4242
