This dissertation is based on nearly two years of multi-sited ethnographic observations and seventy-two semi-structured interviews documenting the religious lives of queer and transgender Jews in Boston and Los Angeles. My primary analytic interest is in how LGBTQ Jews adapt their religious lives in response to the privileging of heterosexuality and cisgender (non-transgender) identity, or even homophobia/transphobia, in normative Judaism. I explore how queer and transgender Jews are assimilated, or not, into normative frameworks of Jewish law, theology, ritual/liturgy, and religious spaces. Previous ethnographic research on queer religious communities within the field of Religious Studies has sometimes given minimal attention to queer and transgender theory and to gender nonconforming and transgender participants; in contrast, my work asserts the central importance of transgender participants and queer/transgender theory to such projects. My first chapter focuses on the function of LGBTQ and/or Jewish organizations as well as synagogues in fostering LGBTQ community and inclusion in Jewish spaces. The second chapter explores the interplay between Jewish and LGBTQ identity in politics and activism with regard to Israel and Palestine, a topic that can be polarizing in both LGBTQ and Jewish communities. The third and fourth chapters analyze the disparate ways actors within normative institutional Judaism, as well as transgender Jews, address inclusion. I consider a conversation amongst rabbis on inclusion for transgender converts as well as transgender-affirming rituals created by and for transgender Jews, arguing that institutional Judaism’s normative framework, which values cisgender bodies and binary gender, may result in assimilating transgender Jews into normative Judaism, or more radically, ostracizing them. In contrast to this assimilative approach for incorporating transgender Jews, I map the ways transgender Jews have created affirmation for themselves within Judaism through innovating rituals that engage Jewish tradition to celebrate transgender identities and lives.

Women’s mixed martial arts (WMMA) is among the fastest growing sports in the world. Long existing on the margins of combat sports, women are now routinely punching, kicking, kneeing, elbowing, and strangling opponents into submission in front of sold-out crowds in the United States and around the world, as women’s “cage fighting” has suddenly become a very lucrative business for combat sports promoters. Despite this, there is currently scant sociological literature on WMMA. Who are these new female subjects? In what ways are they challenging and reproducing gender? And to what extent should we characterize their participation in this new sport as empowering? My dissertation addresses these questions through a critical ethnography of WMMA. Drawing from more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of WMMA media, and 40 semistructured interviews with professional WMMA athletes, I offer the most thorough sociological account of WMMA to date and assess WMMA’s potential as a site for the empowerment of women. I find that although women’s participation in combat sports offers potential to challenge patriarchal constructions of gender and influence feminist social change, this potential is not currently being realized in WMMA. Rather, women’s experiences in WMMA only seem to strengthen their beliefs in “natural” sexual difference and male superiority, as well as instill in them an ideology of individualism that blinds them to social inequality. I argue, therefore, that women’s participation in WMMA does not produce outcomes consistent with feminist conceptions of empowerment. I conclude by discussing the implications of my research for women’s empowerment in sport and call for a reconceptualization of empowerment that centers intersectional concerns with capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.

This article analyzes the “trans military ban” through the lens of activist-director Fiona Dawson’s 2015 New York Times op-doc Transgender, At War and In Love and her 2018 feature film TransMilitary. Using the theories of “pinkwashing” and Derrick Bell’s “interest convergence,” the article argues that some LGBT rights advocates responded to the ban in a way that promoted an agenda of global militarism. In doing so, they also made pro-LGBT sentiment contingent on increased militarism. The article concludes by arguing that discourses of pinkwashing absolve the military-industrial complex of its role in creating the conditions that lead many in the LGBT community to enlist in the first place: poverty, organized abandonment, and anti-LGBT violence.