Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television (Chapter 6: Sandra Bernhard)

6

Mimicking Whiteness

Sandra Bernhard—comedian, actor, model, writer, television presenter,chanteuse and celebrity—opened her live one-woman show at London’s

Royal Albert Hall in 1994 by referring to herself as an “intense provocativeJewess.” Born in Flint, Michigan in 1955, she was catapulted into main-stream English-speaking culture worldwide by appearing as bisexual Nancy,a regular character on Roseanne’s sitcom from 1991 to 1997. Bernhardimplied in an interview that the experience wasn’t entirely satisfying froma creative standpoint: “Even though I reached a larger audience with therole, it doesn’t mean they know what I do as me.”1 Those “in the know”would recognize Bernhard as the comedian who cut her teeth at LA’sComedy Store; who appeared on Letterman in the 1980s, splaying her legsand singing Wham! tunes while pretending to be a pregnant guest; who per-formed her cult one-woman show Without You I’m Nothing long past itsoriginal engagement at the Orpheum Theatre in New York to rave reviewsin 1988; and who toured extensively with her band, the Strap-Ons, through-out the 1990s in Giving Till It Hurts, Excuses for Bad Behaviour Part I, andI’m Still Here. . .Damn It! She may also be recognized as the actor whoappeared in such movies such as The King of Comedy (1983), Hudson Hawk(1991), Dallas Doll (1994), and Dinner Rush (2000), or as the presenter ofher own television talk show, The Sandra Bernhard Experience (2001).

In this chapter I will concentrate mainly on the film version of WithoutYou I’m Nothing (1990), in which she uses the context of a fictional liveperformance to both underline and undermine the fame and recognitionshe received for her Off-Off Broadway production of the same name (sansthe additional emphasis on “you”). It is a film that has garnered a greatdeal of academic attention, especially from feminist and queer theorists,most of whom have celebrated its complexity while criticizing some of itsstrategies and ambiguities. At the center of Bernhard’s work as an enter-tainer and cultural critic is always a display of her own performativity, one

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146 JEWISH WOMEN ON STAGE, FILM,AND TELEVISION / ROBERTA MOCK

which is perceived as both narcissistic and contradictory. The followingreview sums this up nicely: “Her journey to stardom, from manicurist tomannequin, has always been informed by her acute sense of herself as atonce an insider and an outsider—you might call it glambivalence.”2

In Without You I’m Nothing, the nightclub MC twice (mis)introducesBernhard as “Sarah Bernhardt,” deliberately directing her audience’s atten-tion to the tradition of theatrical lineage I have been tracing in this book.As Ann Pellegrini notes, Sandra can “point to the Jewishness, considerabletalent for self-invention, and ‘notorious’ sexual life of her predecessor withan assumed family resemblance.”3 Sarah Bernhardt, however, could like-wise point to the same characteristics in her predecessor, Rachel (and alsoto a great extent, Adah Isaacs Menken). As Jews, artists, celebrities, socialites,fashion-makers, activists, bisexuals, and unmarried mothers, all can beseen to manipulate multiple stereotypes in order to construct public per-sonae that span both the stage and “real” life. It is significant that Bernhard’sfilmography and television listings include a large number of guest appear-ances playing her celebrity self within both documentary and fictionalframeworks. She performed “herself,” for example, in the movies In BedWith Madonna (1991) and also Catwalk (1996). Particularly relevant hereis one of the appearances she made on the sitcom Will and Grace (which,notably in light of the history of associations revealed throughout thisstudy, is about a heterosexual Jewish woman who lives with a gay man). Inthis episode, Grace (played by Jewish actor Debra Messing) tells Sandrathat she was recently featured in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper.Bernhard responds, “I love that paper. It’s genius. Do you know that I waslast year’s cover Jewess? Me in a bikini on Fyvush Finkel’s lap. Hot.”4

Bernhard is clear about the relationship she has constructed betweenstereotype, public persona, and staged performance. Asked about the mostcommon misconception people have of her, she responds:

That I’m just going to eat them alive. That I’m this really tough, hard, impos-sible, dramatic, larger than life bitch. Which is certainly part of my personaand something I’ve used on stage to grab people’s attention. It’s very power-ful. And I think it’s very important. Women should be able to project thatpart of themselves without being labelled a bitch. Unfortunately, we seem tohave come full circle in our views of women. If you’re a woman today you’resupposed to just lay back and play stupid. That’s not who I am.5

There are still few dramatic vehicles that both coalesce with this image(that is, can simultaneously exploit and expel the myth of the dangerousfemme fatale) and can additionally be controlled by the performer herself.Bernhard’s performance as Masha in Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy

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opposite Robert DeNiro and Jerry Lewis is considered by many to be hermost striking and accomplished as an actor. However, in a BBC documen-tary Scorsese confesses that Bernhard was offered the part because she“was” Masha: “defiant and frightening,” “totally in control,” “comfortablewith being in command.” She could represent “the flip of the coin, the ado-ration and hostility. . . . It’s all there in her,” he says,“And that’s what’s so fas-cinating about her.”6 Later movies in which Bernhard does not obviouslyplay “herself” have proved far less successful. It seems that the distancing ofcharacter through a dramatic medium is inappropriate for those whoseperformativity relies so heavily on both their subjectivity and their distinc-tive (Jewish) bodies.

One of the central issues surrounding Bernhard’s work, like so manyof her predecessors’, is who she really is—or, to put it another way echo-ing her own concerns, what she really does as “me.” This appears to beinevitable, expressing a tension arising from a body of work that relies onthe elision of public personality and private “self ” through displays ofartifice in a variety of genres. “Ambiguity,” Bernhard has acknowledged,“is kind of my signature tune,”7 and there can be no doubt that it is centralto her strategy in Without You I’m Nothing. The film juxtaposes Bernhard’sstage routines (some of which are characterizations, others in her “own”voice) with interviews and other more artistic film representations thatpotentially comment on the “authenticity” of the staged material it frames.Furthermore, despite basing the film on her live cabaret performance, sheforces issues of critical distancing through the removal of a “real” audiencewith which to interact. The fictional context in which Bernhard chooses toset her cabaret is a seedy cocktail bar in front of a small, nearly all-blackaudience who obviously find her performance ridiculous, inappropriate,and not particularly worthy of attention.8

In her “real” live performances, Bernhard relishes absolute control overher audience. Challenging assumptions that this audience will be male andheterosexual,9 she often uses the opportunity to transform traditionalstand-up comedy’s male gaze into a lesbian gaze, which she courts and crit-icizes in equal measure when directed at herself, and then applies to heraudience members (“As long as I have a face, you have someplace to sit,honey,” she informs select individuals). By removing this dynamic from thefilm, Bernhard is deliberately re-casting herself in a role that demandsobjectification by the fictional audience. The “real” audience (those watch-ing the film) is expected to understand Bernhard’s claim to subjectivitythrough this “strangeness.” Her vulnerability, her lack of control, and herinappropriateness are meant to be recognized as ironically artificial, even

MIMICKING WHITENESS 147


as she sings the anthemic “You Make Me Feel . . . Mighty Real” and “con-fesses” her fantasies on stage in autobiographical anecdotes.

It could be said that Bernhard’s career has been spent educating heraudience in how to find her performances funny or, at the very least, howto “get” the point. Her intertextual turning point came sometime duringthe run of Without You I’m Nothing at the Orpheum. Before that moment,Bernhard’s irony rested on her pretense to be a celebrity when she wasn’t.To fully appreciate the movie, one has to know that the celebrity statusBernhard is undermining came about through an (ironic?) appropriationof the Warholian technique of claiming that she was one. It is no wonderthat one of Bernhard’s film manifestations pays (again ironic?) homage toAndy Warhol and his “superstars” while fetishizing a Native Americanblanket bought at an auction after his death. Whether Bernhard is “mock-ing her way into sham stardom or a stardom made explicit as sham”10 isless important in this particular context than the recognition that the cruxof her performance strategy relies on this ambiguity.

And here we need to return to

what Sandra Bernhard actually does—that strange talent she demonstratesthrough whatever medium she happens to be working in, that peculiar abil-ity she has for blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, but neverquite losing the plot in the process. To put it bluntly, Sandra makes up self-aggrandising, highly entertaining stories—little lies that tell the truth—about the cult of celebrity, about the strange, scary nature of sexuality, aboutthe pain of growing up an ugly duckling in a world full of swans.11

If we primarily consider her books, live performances, and the films thateither document or recontextualize her live work (such as Confessions of aPretty Lady, I’m Still Here . . . Damn It! and Without You I’m Nothing,respectively), Bernhard is a storyteller. However, as Paul Burston goes on topoint out,“The trouble is, however much Sandra Bernhard chooses to con-fess to you, you can never be entirely sure that what she is confessing is theabsolute truth.” In Without You I’m Nothing, this is reinforced by the inser-tions of (wholly?) fictitious interviews with Bernhard’s “friends” and“manager,” which pretend to offer insight into her personality through therevelation of intimate anecdotes.

Bernhard’s own stories, as part of her “act,” generally take two forms,both of which are “autobiographical.” The first are private associations andanecdotes, and these mainly concern Bernhard’s reminiscences of a Jewishadolescence. In one she describes her fantasies of “WASP life,” in which sheis a big, sexy blonde called Babe who plays high school volleyball and wantsto “fuck her brother Chip” because he’s so cute. The anecdote ends, in the



movie, with a multi-racial choir of children wearing “Freddy Krueger” steelgloves singing “Joy to the World” in a near-blizzard of fake snow. Bernhardseems to be declaring her fantasies, based on 1960s television myths ofnuclear families and borne of difference, to be perverse and artificial. Therainbow coalition of children is a utopian desire corrupted by mainstreamnightmares (symbolized by the gloves one is expected to recognize fromslasher movie iconography). It is not entirely clear whether Bernhard isdemanding an equality of difference within dominant culture or implyingthat the entire edifice should be destroyed.

The second type of story Bernhard tells is gossip involving her interac-tion with other celebrities, which asserts her own status while underminingthe other’s. Stevie Nicks (of Fleetwood Mac) is the object of a particularlydelicious and wicked lampoon in which she drinks two or three bottles ofwine and begs Sandra to be her best friend. This routine did not appear inthe film, presumably because Bernhard felt that future audiences wouldfind the reference dated (or possibly due to legal action). Two other anec-dotes, however, remained: Sandra flying from New York to LA to comfort asuicidal Warren Beatty by taking ecstasy with him and then demanding hewear a condom before they have sex; and the time she had to slap Madonnahard across the face because the poor woman was becoming so hysterical.Neither are mentioned by name, but the film’s audience is expected to rec-ognize to whom Bernhard is referring.

Furthermore, the act relies upon the intertextual knowledge of Bern-hard’s (again ambiguous) relationship with Madonna, which had just endedacrimoniously, in order to fully appreciate the significance of the peroxideblonde stripper who appears between Bernhard’s “turns” in the film. This“act you’ve all been waiting for, the one, the original, Shoshanna,” Bernhardimplies bitterly, is not particularly “original” at all; and she receives theapplause and attention from the fictional audience which Bernhard isdenied (and also, significantly, denies herself through her self-positioning).This seemingly harsh self-parody becomes egotistical glorification, pre-cisely what it purports to be critiquing. The anecdote about Stevie Nickswas almost certainly untrue. However, by the time the film was madeand it was well known that Bernhard socialized with the likes of Beatty andMadonna, it became impossible to know whether her celebrity storieswere fact or fiction.12 In creating this uncertainty, she draws attention tothe constructedness of both autobiographical narratives and performa-tive self identities.

A similar sense of ambiguity surrounded issues of Bernhard’s sexuality.At the time of Without You I’m Nothing, her refusal to make a public admis-sion about her sexual preferences caused a backlash in the gay community



which accused Bernhard of “not being there” for them. Even after shebecame more explicit about her sexuality (“Out Me! Reveal me as a totaldyke,” she sings in Giving Till It Hurts to the tune of “Fever”), Bernhardrefused to be pigeon-holed as a lesbian.“I’ve sucked cocks, fucked men, andyou’re just going to have to digest that,” she informs a predominantly gayaudience in 1994 after ordering them to visualize her giving a blowjob. AsJudith Butler has pointed out, bisexuality has traditionally been inter-preted “as a kind of failure of loyalty or lack of commitment” as an iden-tity position.13

Bernhard’s bisexuality was signaled clearly in Without You I’m Nothing,mainly through the interjection of images from outside the context of thenightclub. One of these is a long pan of women soaping each other in acommunal shower; another is a short glimpse of Sandra fucking a man(presumably the “boyfriend” mentioned in one of the fictional interviews)and the fact that he is black can certainly be interpreted as yet anotherdeliberate dissolution of categorization on Bernhard’s part. Most signifi-cant, however, are the scenes featuring a black woman, “Roxanne,” whichserve to connect and punctuate the various stage acts. Her specific purposein the film is open to interpretation and will be returned to later in thischapter. For now, it is fair to say that Roxanne can be seen to serve as ametaphor for desire, longing, and fantasy identification.14 The hybridity orduality expressed in Bernhard’s refusal to singularly define her own sexual-ity or to offer coherently categorized objects of desire once again echoesRachel and Sarah Bernhardt in their resistance to categorization.

There is no explicit lesbian imagery that includes Bernhard herself inthe movie, but it is suggested in her turn as a lounge singer: “Me and MrsJones,” she belts, “we’ve got a thing going on.” However, Bernhard createscharacters to perform songs such as these, borrowing from recognizablepopular traditions. Her lesbian chanteuse, perched on a stool, demandingRemy Martins, exposes the fake sentimentality, the self-importance, andfaux intimacy of lounge singing. The songs themselves are drawn from dif-ferent periods and styles. Occasionally Bernhard changes the words, butmore often she adds monologues which expose their limitations and hid-den agendae. She spells out the connection between gay culture and disco,at that time minimized by the mainstream, in “You Make Me Feel . . .Mighty Real” (“Pretend it’s 1978 and you’re straight,” she advises, surroun-ded by Castro clones).

Bernhard recognizes that her live audiences have a large gay constituency.At the start of Giving Till It Hurts, she turns a torch on the auditorium inorder to break her punters down “into three basic food groups.”“Who is gayin NYC?” she demands, and, after a huge roar from the crowd, comments,



“A rather disappointing turn-out. What has happened to my core audi-ence?” This core audience is fully aware, for example, of the connectionbetween disco and gay culture, and the humor rests with this recognition.Bernhard’s strategy is based on identification with her audience and herarticulation of a lifestyle that had long been marginalized. It is not discothat is being parodied but the intolerance and stupidity of the straightmainstream that (mis)appropriated it. Bernhard’s treatment of the songsthemselves is, in her own words, “an homage.”

However, the nature and implications of this type of tribute change whenBernhard camps up the kitsch aspect of straight mass culture. Bernhard’sBurt Bacharach medley, performed on an overly elaborate, spangly set withflamboyant back-up singers, is treated with a seriousness and reverencewhich (nearly?) belies the irony. She is a San Francisco “career girl” who isdetermined not to become a statistic (that is, unmarried at the age of thirty-five). Her attention to the details of a consumer lifestyle is minute: shereads Cosmo, soaks in Calgon Bouquet, splashes on Loves Fresh Lemon,uses Fieldcrest towels, buys her furniture at Pier One, applies RubbermaidDaisies. The object of the critique is clear, the link between commodityfetishism and mass-produced easy-listening music well established. AsCalinescu notes, “the aesthetic charm of kitsch is transparently commer-cial.”15 And yet Bernhard has stated that “recontextualizing a cover tune” byBacharach, André Previn, or Herb Alpert is not an intellectual exercise forher, but the reconstruction of an “emotional era” that she “loves the most,”provoking “memory and feeling” for her. “I take the nostalgia of it and tryto recreate it,” she says in the documentary Confessions of a Pretty Lady(1993). This revelation throws some doubt onto the critical strategy behindthe accompanying monologues.

Bernhard’s nostalgic associations are personal and romantic—and heraudience is expected to understand the significance of her appropriations.The appreciation of consumer products is not only ironic connoisseurshipbut a way into a society that Bernhard feels has excluded her. Her relation-ship with the fashion industry is particularly ambivalent. While she spendslarge portions of her live performances criticizing the narcissistic, superfi-cial environments which surround the modeling scene, she herself mod-eled (with combative attitude, it must be said) for Isaac Mizrahi, Commedes Garçon, and Chanel: “Why look like a schlub if you have access to won-derful clothes the way I do? A woman who’s put together is bound to getmore of what she wants than if you’re wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.”16

The same ambivalence is evident in Bernhard’s treatment of the beautymyth. She recognizes that such aesthetic consciousnesses are entirely con-structed and false, but the methods by which she draws attention to this



can often be seen to support rather than subvert the operation of a binarygender system and the projects that benefit financially from it.

In 1977, Barbra Streisand became the first female celebrity to appear onthe cover of Playboy magazine; the caption read “What’s a nice Jewish girllike me doing on the cover of Playboy?”17 Fifteen years later, Bernhard alsomodeled for the magazine because she felt a “real” woman needed to berepresented from a subjective position. Unlike Streisand, Bernhard appearednude on the inside pages and, in contrast to Streisand’s “in depth inter-view,” she wrote her own accompanying copy. “I feel I’m the spokeswomanfor women,” she said on the photo shoot.

This is not the place to go into a full analysis of the implications ofBernhard’s strategy. What I’d like to draw out is that Bernhard, claiming tobe “real,” chose to present herself as “Sandi” to Playboy readers.18 It onlyseems possible to read the text she wrote to accompany the photographsas ironic:

I can remember as if it were yesterday sitting in my brothers’ bedroom,thumbing through those illustrious PLAYBOY pages, staring at the pendu-lous breasts, the neatly trimmed crotches, the innuendos, the dashing menwho wore women like chic accessories draped around their shoulders. . . . Igrew up on this stuff, longed to be it. All that the American dream was madeof, I loved. I loved the women, the men, the tiny eternally giggling girl bal-ancing on the martini glass, the saggy-titted old broad in the cartoons: Iwanted to be a part of it. Every inch of the jazzy, smoky, James Bond, Vegas-lounge, international sexcapade that was PLAYBOY in those days. . . . I wantto resurrect those moments. Here I am, big, bold, naked and all turned onfor you.19

The language and the tone are consistent with her approaches to fashionand popular music, emphasizing that the female body has been consid-ered a commodity that can be bought and sold like Diana Ross albumsand Gucci shoes. Certainly the text hints at parody (“Is this too obscure foryou? Sorry, it’s my life, and you want the truth, don’t you?”), the photos arepositive celebrations of (bi)sexuality with a woman in control, and the cap-tions allude to the artifice (“Do you think it was fun getting painted gold?The make-up artist promised it would wash right off. It took five people toget me clean”). But the messages being sent and potentially received,revolving around issues of social inclusion through nostalgic revision, arecomplex ones.

The consumer of Playboy is expected to understand the intertextualityof Bernhard’s self (re)presentation in the same way as audiences of the filmWithout You I’m Nothing. Sandra invites us into the movie personally: “I’m



so glad that you can see how truly beautiful I am right now,” she tells us andwe have no reason to disbelieve her. She then presents us with a series ofparodic appropriations that confirm her multiplicity. However, the finalscene of the film is introduced by Bernhard claiming that everything shehad previously presented was a lie and a sham, implying that what is to fol-low is “real.” She performs an erotic dance in which she disrobes from alarge American flag to reveal herself in star-spangled g-string, nipple tas-sels, and high heels.

This dance originated in the live performance of the show but hasbeen recontextualized to the fictional cocktail bar, empty now except forRoxanne, who writes “Fuck Sandra Bernhard” in lipstick on a white table-cloth before disappearing. Bernhard seems to be simultaneously ridiculingand celebrating her medium, her parodic models (which are often aspectsof her own stage show), and herself—in particular, her undesirability, herlack of “realness.” The only audience that does not explicitly or necessarilyreject Bernhard’s performance is the audience watching the film, one thatBernhard assumes will not do so, as they did not reject her “smash hitone-woman show” off-off Broadway (to which she refers throughout themovie). This acceptance (via spectacles of rejection) is a fundamental prin-ciple of construction of the film.

The ambiguities, multiplicities and apparent challenges to authenticityin Without You I’m Nothing have led many to analyse it in terms of its post-modernism. For me, there are two main problems with this approach. Thefirst is evident in Philip Auslander’s reading; he analyzes Bernhard’s workin terms of a “style” or performance strategy which is potentially politicallyresistant, but does not make it clear what she is resisting or why specificallyshe is resisting it.20 While I am not denying that she is constructing her audi-ence’s subject position, like her own, as multiple, protean, and elusive—andthat how she does so is important and interesting—this is an approachwhich ironically objectifies rather than subjectifies both artist and reader.It ignores the specific identity construction which results in multiplicityand tends, either implicitly or explicitly, to allow each aspect of fragmentedidentity an equal weighting. The second concern I have with some forms ofpostmodern analysis is that the experience and knowledge of the reader isprivileged over the text being read. This is especially problematic when thetext is a “real” body, even one which is being deliberately re-presented andmanipulated. This approach is evident in bell hooks’s analysis of WithoutYou I’m Nothing. In Black Looks, hooks reads the film self-consciously fromthe perspective of a black woman.21 To her, Bernhard is exclusively white(and fundamentally heterosexual) and here the reader and the “text” are



fundamentally at odds. “I never relate myself as a white person,” Bernhardhas stated, “because I’m not a gentile; I’m a Jew.”22

This is a statement which is reinforced and exemplified throughoutWithout You I’m Nothing and serves as its unifying principle. It seemsblindingly obvious to me—but, of course, it would and should; as a Jewishwoman writing a book on female Jewish performers, this is my perspective.At least hooks acknowledges Bernhard’s “Jewish heritage” insofar as it “aswell as her sexually ambiguous erotic practices are experiences that placeher outside of the mainstream.”23 Most critics do not, primarily becausethey are almost exclusively concerned with the postmodern “centricities”of their own specific studies. We have valuable analyses of Without You I’mNothing which focus on blackness (hooks, Probyn, Robertson), queerness(Walton, Berlant & Freeman), and feminism (Schneider), none of whichrecognize the Jewishness which informs, delineates and contains these cat-egorizations. Rather than embrace the potentials of multiplicity, thesetheorizations tend to erase this difference through totalization. In some(but certainly not all) ways, Bernhard has more in common with Jewishmale performers than non-Jewish female ones, and more in commonwith “straight” Jewish performers of both sexes than non-Jewish queerperformers. By insisting that she is “white,” one is rejecting Sandra’s ownrejection of “whiteness”—let alone a self-conception as a “generic whitewoman-identified-woman.”24 It is no wonder all the critics above developinconclusive and contradictory arguments about Bernhard’s projectedidentity, finally shrugging off their frustration with a grateful nod towards“postmodernism.”

I am indebted to the work of Ann Pellegrini for enabling me to articu-late my dissatisfaction with readings that do not interrogate Bernhard’sJewishness by introducing the concept of Jewishness as the “excluded mid-dle term which resembles both” whiteness and blackness, but is “identicalto neither.”25 However, I would go further than saying, as Pellegrini does,that Jewishness is being “articulated through multiple terms of difference.”Rather, it both constructs and is constructed through these multiple termsof difference. “Self”(-reflexivity) is essentially “Jewish”(-reflexivity) andthis is what defines Bernhard’s “race,”“queerness,” and “womanliness.” Theperformer herself has commented on this essentialism:

If I am going to defend any minority part of myself, it is going to be Judaism.It’s something that has formed my personality much more than my sexual-ity has. . . . You are born Jewish. It is not something you can deny or run awayfrom. You can pretend you’re not. You can get your nose fixed and play allkinds of games, but. . . .26



We don’t find out what the “but” specifically represents. Nevertheless, it isclear that Jewishness here is not a presented as a “choice”; it is a given, incontrast to sexuality and the body which can be reconstructed.

According to Bernhard, Without You I’m Nothing is

about me, to a great extent. It’s also about me as a device to reflect much ofthe manipulation of society as we’ve known it for the past twenty years, allthat I’ve been very aware and conscious of. It’s a journey, it’s rites of passage.It’s a woman coming to terms with all her personas and her sexuality andfears and acceptance and how she feels as a result of the way she was raisedin her family. It’s a tornado of ideas, it’s a whirlpool, it’s the eye of the hurri-cane. It’s whirling, like life always is.27

It is through the “text” as a whole, as sum of its constituent parts, that sheis expressing who she “really” is. Importantly, this “realness” needs tobe understood as “Jewishness” in Bernhard’s self-conception. “I’ve alwaysbeen a spokesperson for realness,” she said in an interview,“I have a respon-sibility to tell the truth. When I do that, light is revealed.” Her commentsappeared in the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California under the headline“Kaballah hasn’t dulled Sandra Bernhard’s rough edge.” Bernhard beganstudying kabbalah in 1995 and claims that it was by “doing all the spiri-tual work” that she began to clarify her role and responsibilities as a pub-lic figure:

I speak out about injustices, and I have a lot of opinions about the world. Idon’t accept things just the way they are. Especially being Jewish, we have abigger vessel to handle to be more just and righteous in a positive way—tikkun olam [healing the world].28

For Bernhard, kabbalah helps her to “be” what she “really” is. The fact thatshe began studying kabbalah some years after Without You I’m Nothinginforms my reading of the film, in which her Jewishness is equated withrealness (or, at least, her Jewishness with her realness), by indicating thatthis was a search upon which she had embarked some time earlier.

Thus the film can be read as an exploration of what Jewishness “really”is, and this, by extension, becomes an exploration of who Sandra “really” is.She claims that her interest in kabbalah came out of “looking for a deeperspiritual context for being a Jew.”29 As both Without You I’m Nothing and,even more extensively, her contemporaneous book Confessions of a PrettyLady (first published in 1988) discuss the Jewishness of her childhood, itis clear that Bernhard felt she “really” was a Jew before studying kabbalah.She grew up in a Conservative Jewish household, went to Hebrew school,



had a bat mitzvah, and was confirmed. For many Jews—especially secularJews—it is unclear whether Jewishness (as opposed to Judaism) is a religion,a culture, a race, a nationality, an ancestral heritage, or a form of spiritual-ity.30 Furthermore, it is possible to define one’s Jewishness based on one,all, some, or even a partial acceptance of a single definition on this list.Knowing that you are “really” a Jew but not knowing what a Jew “really” iscan easily result in a self-construction based on what it is not (that is, not“non-Jewish”), as well as an identity rooted in contradiction and multiplicity.

This is apparent in the one visual reference to the kabbalah in WithoutYou I’m Nothing. In a brief shot, Roxanne is seen leaning against a kosherbutcher shop, reading a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Kabbalah and Criticism.Here the black woman both is and is not a Jew, just as Sandra both is andis not black. Each woman can perform the “other” without actually becom-ing her, and there are enough similarities to enable confusion between theframes of reference. Bernhard’s black characterizations are never claimingthat she is “really” black, any more than the whiteface coon songs per-formed by Anna Held, Sophie Tucker, or Fanny Brice were meant to sug-gest that they were “really” black. Rather, she is positioning herself outsideclassification as either black or white and destabilizing concepts of bothgeneric blackness and whiteness. Bernhard’s first stage turn in the movieis a performance of Nina Simone’s “Four Women.” She is wearing a dashiki,an “African” print wrap-around headdress, and many layers of paddingaround her middle. The lyrics are as follows:

My skin is black.My arms are long.My hair is woolly.My back is strong.Strong enough to take the painafflicted again, and again, and again.What do they call me?They call me: Aunt Sarah. . . .My skin is tan.My hair is fine (whichever way I fix it).My hips invite you, DaddyMy mouth, like wine. . . .

All the descriptions of her body in the first verse of the song are observableexcept the blackness of her skin. Even then, the lyrics later note that someblack skin is really “tan,” which is applicable to “Semitic” women as well. Asan embodiment of an archetypal “Jewish Woman,” her hair is woolly, herback has carried affliction. She too signals at least four different versions



of multiple stereotypes, some based on the maternal, some based on over-burdened sexuality, all based on the exotic. Many Jewish women have beencalled “Aunt Sarah,” as it is a traditional biblical name.31

Bernhard never appears in traditional blackface, implying that the “fact”that her skin is black is meant to be interpreted symbolically, an affinitysupported by her synecdochical identification of lips to represent bothblackness and herself. Images of lips are the most common motif associ-ated with Bernhard, and she uses them as her “unique selling point” as anartist.32 Her personal welcome to the film audience features a prominent,full, extended kiss to the camera. Pellegrini notes that in a visual citation ofearlier close-ups of her male all-black band members’ lips, the cameracloses in on Sandra’s lips at the moment she sings “my mouth like wine.”33

Bernhard herself has made the connection even more explicit. “They usedto call me nigger lips in school,” she said in an interview.34 As we haveseen in the cases of Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, many female Jewishperformers developed their personal signatures through identificationwith blackness.

When she appears next in the film as the “real” Sandra, telling autobio-graphical anecdotes about her upbringing, the content of her monologuescathingly contrasts gentiles and Jews using the same referents. Her father’ssecond wife is a “gentile woman with a little blond hair-do and no lipsnamed Brenda.” Blond, tidy hair and no lips are set opposite unruly, darkhair and full, large lips. “Bigness” can be seen to represent a joy of lifeshared by blacks and Jews. Her father and Brenda come to pick her up in aThunderbird, and Sandra asks him why he didn’t bring a bigger car. “Don’tbitch,” says Brenda in a closed-vowel whine, “We could’ve brought theTrans Am.” When they arrive at the house she shares with Sandra’s father,her three sons are introduced, sitting around in their bedroom scowling,“Fuck that, Jew man.” So Brenda the non-Jew contains the visible signifiersof “whiteness” (small, pinched, controlled, lip-less), and although shedoesn’t use this word, Sandra’s Jewish audience would almost certainly rec-ognize her as goyishe. This is not simply Yiddish for “gentile”; it has deroga-tory connotations: tacky, tasteless, lower class, lacking in education and/ormorality. There is no ethical value system or sense of pride in its continu-ity in Brenda’s household, in sharp relief to Sandra’s “liberal intellectualJewish household with three sensitive older brothers,” which she has justdescribed. And thus, Jewishness for Bernhard becomes not just an indica-tor of race but also of class. “My father’s a proctologist. My mother’s anabstract artist. That’s how I view the world,” she tells us at the start of thesame monologue. Sandra’s Jewishness is middle-class.



Bernhard is explicit about how she conceived her presumption of black-ness in the film:

We [director John Boskovitch and Bernhard] just thought it was really funnyto have this deluded white performer, who thought she was a black diva, per-form for a black audience. It was like letting her know that she not only wasnot a black diva, but she had no idea what it was like to suffer, you know inthat skin. And of course, at the end, the black woman—the beautiful blackwoman—has the final word, which is ‘Fuck you, bitch. You may think you’reblack, but I’m the one who’s paid the dues.’35

Besides reminding us that her work is primarily meant to make peoplelaugh, Bernhard is suggesting that Jewishness is a form of nearly “invisible”difference. The ability to “pass” is a privilege. It is also clear from the filmthat Bernhard (and many other liberal Jews) may fantasize about a Black-Jewish alliance but that she considers it a myth.36 When Sandra appears asa presumably black lounge singer, a characterization remarkable for itsinsincerity and falseness, she promptly tells us how she had to sit her “big,fat, tired, lazy ass down.” A large ass, like large lips, is a physical attributeJewish and black women are perceived to share. She knowingly refers to therelationship between “Me and my Jewish piano player” (actually a blackwoman): “You know how we people get along so well.” The unresponsive-ness of the black textual audience ensures that we do know, although shemechanically thanks them for their non-existent applause. According toPellegrini, this visible gulf not only sends up claims of interethnic solidar-ity but also “ironically undercuts claims to intraethnic solidarity amongJews” through her reference to “we people.”37 Pellegrini does not elaboratefurther on the latter point, although I believe there is another example inthe film that simultaneously fulfils these two functions.

The first time Sandra appears on stage (as opposed to in the film) as“Sandra,” she is tastefully dressed and standing very still in front of themicrophone. She immediately launches into an attempt to lead the audi-ence in “a round of Israeli folk songs.” “Heenay ma tov u manayim,” shesings on her own, clapping her hands to a decidedly unfunky rhythm,“sheket achim gam yachad.” The black audience is bemused and embar-rassed. “Join in,” she cries with mock enthusiasm (in the same way herlounge singer assumptively says “Thank you,” regardless of the responseshe receives) and isolates her position further. The fascinating aspect of thisroutine, though, is that she gets the lyrics wrong in Hebrew. The actualwords of this traditional song are “Heenay ma tov u manayim, shevet achimgam yachad” which roughly translate to mean “Here we are, how good andpleasant, a tribe of brothers together.” The way Sandra sings it, the words



mean “Here we are, how good and pleasant, quiet all together.” The mistakecould certainly be intentional as it is a literal description of what is hap-pening in the club (the audience is indeed silent) and there is every reasonto believe that Bernhard knows that much Hebrew. She even puts her fin-ger over her lips and says “shhhh” between lines of the song. However, thereis another potential reading of this “mistake” available that highlightsthe difficulties in establishing a Jewish identity in an assimilated context.American Jews feel the need to sing Hebrew folk songs despite the fact thatthey do not speak or understand Hebrew. If, as Pellegrini states, “Bernhardis all mouth as she ventriloquizes the black,”38 she is also showing howAmerican Jewishness is rooted in ventriloquism. This is an internalizedprojection of “race” that is not displayed but performed.

This routine is sharply contrasted to the gyrations of the blond goy-ishe Shoshanna that precede it. Bernhard has replaced the Catholic nameMadonna with a Jewish one which rhymes. Pellegrini refers to her as a“dancing fool,” her ineptitude and inappropriateness emphasized by thecut-aways to Roxanne gracefully walking in front of the Watts Tower inLA.39 Again, there are multiple possible interpretations for why this parodyof Sandra’s erstwhile “galpal” (as they called each other on Late Night withDavid Letterman) was given a Jewish name. The first is that Shoshanna is aJewish girl who is pretending to be gentile and failing miserably. (“You canget your nose fixed and play all kinds of games, but. . . .”) This would be arallying call for Jewish women to be what they “really” are (that is, notwhite). The second is that Shoshanna is claiming her Jewishness solelythrough her name—all strippers use pseudonyms—and that there is a per-formance of Jewishness which cannot simply be assumed. (“You are bornJewish. . . .”) Jews and blacks are “beautiful” and sexy; in Bernhard’s stageworld gentiles are repressed, awkward and lacking in taste.

The film audience is meant to respond to Shoshanna the way the night-club audience in the film responds to Sandra—with a difference, of course.We cannot forget the primary function of this parody is a jibe at Madonna,a woman who has portrayed herself as an agency for black (and gay) cul-ture continuously throughout her career by re-processing and selling it tothe mainstream with little sense of irony or self-critique. There is certainlya possibility that Bernhard is accusing Madonna of attempting to stealher identity in order to replace heterosexual, white Christianity with some-thing more exciting and fashionable. An interesting later development isworth commenting on here; the study of kabbalah also became fashion-able, and Madonna began to do so at about the same time as Bernhard.Bernhard’s response was much gentler than her lampoon in Without YouI’m Nothing: “People make changes. I don’t really keep track of what other


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people are doing. Only time will tell whether it’s a trend or not.”40 Bernhardattributes her newfound compassion and patience to her “spiritual work,”but she still makes jokes about Madonna in I’m Still Here . . . Damn It! Itis clear that she does not feel that, in itself, studying kabbalah, like taking aJewish name, makes a person a Jew.

What also arises through the character of Shoshanna is an indicationthat “whiteness,” if it can be imitated (however badly), can also be consid-ered a construction. It cannot have escaped Bernhard’s attention that mostblacks are not Jewish, and yet they do not display the fundamental char-acteristics she ascribes to “gentiles.” So again religion (Christianity ratherthan Judaism) is acting as a metaphor for, as opposed to a determinant of,essence (gentile rather than Jewish) through a signifier of race (whiterather than black). If Jewish Sandra performs her blackness, then a gentilewoman must also perform her whiteness. Bernhard demonstrates thisagain when she recollects her “romance of being gentile” like the sexyblonde Babe. Babe’s falseness is made apparent by Bernhard’s revelationswhile in character, deliberately destabilizing ideals of model Christianwhite family life by displaying what has usually been missing from theirpresentation.

Earlier in the routine Sandra tells us about watching a neighbor beingtaken away by ambulance while having a nervous breakdown and herchildhood “thrill of knowing someone in an all-American family was los-ing her grip.” Sandra quite explicitly does not consider herself to be “all”American. Babe wants to fuck her brother; her parents are getting adivorce, just like Sandra’s parents. Bernhard is exposing what she suspectsgentiles hide or repress as “different,” both from themselves and those who“really” are “different.” Not only does she redress these exclusions, but sheincludes herself as well—watching, fantasizing, serving as their point ofreference. Bernhard is constructing whiteness based on what is concealed,lacking, and repudiated.

This sheds a great deal of light on her use of nostalgia, for hers is notprimarily regret for simpler, lost times nor recollection of rose-tintedmemories. She is restoring silenced voices and inserting the position of theJew in the collective text. There is certainly longing and anger involved, butBernhard is also drawing attention to the partiality and artificiality of thenarrative itself. Jewishness not only informs her response to dominant ide-ology but also is seen as complicit in producing it. This is why the storiesshe tells are ambivalent about mainstream culture:

A lot of my work is a eulogy to what people lose in their lives, what peoplearen’t allowed to experience. Instead of banging heads with them, critiquingthem, or tearing them apart, I’m—in a weird way—paying last respects to


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the things they weren’t allowed to experience because they were crushed bythese confines and limitations put on them by religion and their family.41

The results are complex dynamics of identities based on abjected opposi-tions that mirror each other. “May all your Christmases be white,” she saysat the end of her “fantasy” that explodes myths of Christian values, accom-panied by a multi-racial group of children imitating a fictional mass mur-derer. “White Christmas,” of course, was a song written by a Jew, IrvingBerlin, just as her fantasies of being a gentile heterosexual career girl wereaccompanied by the songs of another Jew, Burt Bacharach.

It was often Jewish entertainers who created the most popular culturalartifacts of “gentility,” establishing patterns of respectability and expecta-tion in the process.42 Their interpretation of their own exclusion practicallybecame wish-fulfilment. They invented American whiteness based on whatthey were not. The fashion designer Ralph Lauren (a second-generationJewish immigrant, born Ralph Lifschitz) condensed a number of symbolsof the identity of upper-middle-class American gentile culture into his“classic” preppy clothing range. According to Pajaczkowski and Curtis,this was enabled by his “sensitivity to the yearning for the status of belong-ing.”43 His designs sold equally well to those who “belonged” by presentingtheir idealized identity as a coherent package, and to the Jews who wantedto “belong.”

In 1994 visual artist Rhonda Lieberman created a work entitled “Pushy/Cushy/Tushy (Sandra Bernhard triptych from the series ‘Purse Pictures’),”a collection of three elaborately glittered and beaded faux Chanel shoppingbags, displayed together, each featuring a different image of Bernhard andincorporating a prominent adjective. Each is remarkable for its self-conscious portrayal of glamour. On the “Pushy” bag, Bernhard appears incut-off denim shorts holding a spurting hose, presumably watering a lushsuburban lawn. Accompanying the photo of Bernhard on her Playboycover is “Tushy,” the diminutive Yiddish word for buttocks. This is a soften-ing of the word tuchus, the equivalent of her lounge singer’s “big fat tiredlazy ass.”“Cushy” is illustrated by Bernhard lounging on an inflatable mat-tress wearing a shiny skintight catsuit, high heels and dark sunglasses. AsRiv-Ellen Prell has pointed out, Lieberman’s work juxtaposes the themes ofdifference, commercial culture, authenticity, and gender against visualobjects that position Jewishness in relation to middle-class American cul-ture. The artist describes this world as “secularized, ethnically thick andcoded as Jewish” but lacking in “overt content.”44

Lieberman’s triptych perceptively echoes the representation of Jewishself-identity in Bernhard’s performance work. Affluence, aggression, and thefemale body are not only conflated but define each other. The complexity,



which as in Bernhard’s work often plays with contradiction, lies in theinterplay that results in self-conceptualization based on internalized pro-jections and stereotypes. This is exemplified by the juxtaposition on the“Pushy” bag, which seems to be commenting on the logic that claims thatJews have somehow colonized suburban America inappropriately throughtheir “pushiness.” The Jewish woman does not belong here anymore thanshe belongs on the cover of Playboy. Identity is being constructed on boththe reclamation and repudiation of a negative. Similarly, this very “real”identity is situated within a framework of “falseness” (or, to draw closer par-allels with Without You I’m Nothing, a lack of “realness”); the Chanel bagsare fake and manipulated. Prell summarizes the contradictions:

Jews, therefore, continue to create and recreate themselves at least in part inresponse to the American mirror in which they gaze to find themselves por-trayed simultaneously as outsiders and powerful insiders, as excessive con-sumers and tight-fisted misers, as arbiters of upper-class taste and tackymarginals who believe that more is better.45

Lacking in “overt content,” middle-class American Jewishness cannot sim-ply “be seen.” It is performed through symbolic action using (re)appropri-ated props that they played a large part in creating, hence the centrality ofcelebrity and consumption in its representation. What Leiberman’s workalso points to is the conscious use of an artistic “tradition,” one that is con-tinuously absorbing and commenting on itself. In the case of performerslike Bernhard, it is a tradition, not so much of performing, but performingat performing.46

Included along with the Sandra Bernhard triptych in the 1996 TooJewish: Challenging Traditional Identities exhibition at the Jewish Museumin New York was another Leiberman artwork entitled “Barbra Bush.” Thiswas originally created as a Christmas window display at Barneys, a NewYork department store. Nearly named after the President’s wife, it fea-tures a fake Christmas tree decorated with Barbra Streisand ornaments (thespelling ensures that it is clear Streisand rather than Barbara Bush is the realAmerican “first lady”). Each six-pointed star of David contains an identicalimage of Streisand wearing a tiara and holding her hands in (Christian)prayer. Bernhard echoes this juxtaposition in Without You I’m Nothing;Streisand features in her recollections of a family trip to New York to goto the 1965 World’s Fair.47 Sandra begs her father to take her to see (theJewish) Streisand in Funny Girl and is disappointed when she has to watch(the white, gentile) Sandy Dennis instead. Streisand is described as “SimplyBarbra with the Egyptian eyeliner, long red fingernails, and pageboy.”What is made clear is that Sandra feels Barbra stopped being interesting(that is, “real” and “Jewish”) when she moved west to Hollywood, claiming



that Streisand needs to come “home” (specifically “to the five and dime”).48

Throughout this routine, Bernhard emphasizes the fact that she is fromthe “East,” in contrast to the way she situates Streisand. The distinctionsbetween Jewish “East” and Gentile “West” are important, as is the fact thatStreisand was “simply” herself at this successful stage in her career. It is alsosignificant that once again Bernhard is placing herself in a tradition offemale Jewish performance, as Streisand did when she played Fanny Bricein Funny Girl and later Funny Lady.

It is here that we can return to the climax of Without You I’m Nothing,Bernhard’s disrobing and erotic dance as “simply herself.” As we have seenthroughout this book, the sexuality of the Jewess has always been a funda-mental constituent of the stereotype. It is, equally, an aspect of dominantrepresentation that has been exploited by many female Jewish performers,supported by performances of nudity, or else its simulation or suggestion.In the case of Sarah Bernhardt, the nude photos of her taken by Félix Nadarwhen she was a young aspiring actor were probably a matter of economicnecessity. Her pose, however is confident; one eye peeps over the fan sheholds across her face, gazing suggestively at the viewer. Adah Isaacs Menkenshocked and delighted international audiences during the 1860s by flash-ing across the stage on horseback in flesh-coloured tights as Mazeppa.Anna Held’s celebrity was sealed by supposedly greeting reporters in abathtub. Hedy Lamarr gained notoriety for her nude scenes in the filmEcstasy in 1933. Gypsy Rose Lee (the inspiration for the 1959 musicalGypsy) was probably the most famous striptease artist of the twentieth cen-tury. Xaviera Hollander became notorious in the 1970s as “The HappyHooker,” a prostitute, madam, and adult film star. Furthermore, manyfemale Jewish avant-garde theater-makers and performance artists (forexample, Judith Malina, Carolee Schneemann, Anna Halprin, EleanorAntin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Annie Sprinkle) have used the naked bodyas a political medium. Sandra Bernhard has said about her use of nudityin performance:

For me, any time I’ve used nudity in my work, I’ve always felt strangelydetached from it, and it’s always been on a lot of different levels that it’sworked for me, and had sort of a multipurpose emotional and cultural ref-erence. So I’ve never felt in any way, shape or form exploited or used, becauseit’s always been pretty much my decision. . . . It’s always been, I don’t know,kind of a kick for me—having grown up being really skinny and, like, notparticularly confident, for me it has always felt really liberating.49

Bernhard presents her real body as an act of defiant spectacle, the productof both cultural specificity and difference.



What is emphasized in Bernhard’s strip scene is certainly the fact that,although she is not black, she feels she has, as a Jew, been identified withblackness. She reverses and subverts dominant expectations of blacknesswhile still distancing and excluding herself from this identification. Rox-anne is presented within a sophisticated, “closed body,” high-art frame-work; Sandra presents herself as open, vulgar, and working in a “popular”tradition. However, Bernhard is also presenting herself as a contrast towhiteness, and this must be read against the previous images of Shoshannaand Babe. The opposition Sandra is presenting through her body is notsimply to blackness but also to whiteness; in fact, as a counterpoint to herperformance of spectacularized eroticism, her preceding monologue con-nects her closely to Roxanne’s middle-class control and “gentility.”

If Bernhard is presenting an identity that represents a longing for asimple, stable essentialism, as Walton suggests,50 she is surely rejecting itthrough her celebration of complex, fluid performativity. This is the per-formativity of the Jewess. She surrounds herself with camp imagery (achunky male Dionysian dancer who looks like he failed an audition withNijinsky and a gaggle of silly ethereal female hippies playing tambourines).Her “I” and “eye” is queer: flexible, bisexual, ambiguous. The foreground-ing of her performativity draws attention to artifice (“I’m a total phoneyand a fraud, and I will cut the fame shit out for one moment,” she says) butthis artifice is evidently central to her performativity.

Bernhard, like the belle juive at the fin de siècle, performs projections ofduality that illustrate the reappropriated schism of multiple personalitiesand hidden sexuality. Her song “Manic Superstar,” which she was perform-ing live in 1994 and appears on the CD Excuses for Bad Behavior Part 1, isa medley of “Everything’s All Right” from Jesus Christ Superstar and“Manic Depression” by Jimi Hendrix. She begins it sweetly, singing MaryMagdalene’s lines from the musical: “Try not to get worried, / try not toturn on to problems that upset you, / (oh) because everything’s all rightnow. / Everything’s fine and we want you to sleep well tonight.” Thisis Woman as coy seductress, offering solace with her body. Abruptly sheswitches from lyrical pop to hard(ish) rock: “Woman, so weary, your sweetcause in vain. / You make love, you break love, it’s all the same. / Music,sweet music, I wish I could caress. / Manic depression’s just a frustratingmess.” This, she is implying, is what’s perceived to be hiding beneath thecomfort of a woman’s body. For this part of the song, she chooses to usethe “man’s voice” (or else, a butch lesbian one), conflating gender crossover,religious imagery of temptation and redemption, as well as duplicity andhysteria, remarkably similar to Bernhardt’s performance in her Eastercrowd-pleaser, La Samaritaine.



However, unlike Sarah Bernhardt or Anna Held, Sandra Bernhard isnot only identified as a Jew but identifies as a Jew. Her work often drawsattention to the embourgeoisement of Jewishness as a means for assimila-tion. Before stripping at the end of Without You I’m Nothing, she tells usthat she always wanted to be the “kind of person who always took chancesin life.” She wanted “to learn to change my own damn tires and live life tothe fullest.” She emphasizes her middle-class distance from other ethnicminorities (wanting to pick strawberries with her Chicano brothers andsisters, watching Korean grocers stack their salad bars) but wants to incor-porate them into her own world view. She is expressing an awareness thatshe is “passing as white” by mimicking whiteness, and this is largely dueto the bourgeois environment in which she is situated.

In 2006, Bernhard quoted the driving imagery of this routine in anextended advertising video she made for MAC Cosmetics’ lip gloss. “Yes, Iget it, it’s about my lips,” she begins before launching into the followingmonologue:

These are lips that reflect the sixties; Flint, Michigan; hotness; sexiness. Yougot in your Pontiac station wagon and you drove cross-country and you sawthe world as it was as you took the highways, the byways. . . . Can you handlethese lips? There I am, with this mouth, with these lips. Lips represent sexu-ality first and foremost.

Bernhard then moves into the third person —“Oh, she’s freaking me out,she’s scaring me,”—before contrasting herself to the sort of person whowould make such a comment—that is, “a little, freaked out, intimidated,frightened, right wing, Republican thin-lipped bitch.” In the interveningperiod, and in particular during the presidency of George W. Bush, whichwas supported strongly by conservative Christians, Bernhard’s goyishe tar-gets have conflated with right-wing Republicanism. Importantly, however,the signifiers remain constant. For Sandra, big lips still mean Jewish, lib-eral, ethical, and sexy: “If I had thin lips, I could never express myself theway I am able to express myself—with a kind of passion.”51

All this, including her ambiguous relationship with consumerism, wasestablished and foreshadowed in Without You I’m Nothing. Its final stripand erotic dance can be read as another example of the hysterical perform-ance I have discussed throughout this book. It is bisexual, unrestrained, andcarnivalesque. Her choice of music by Prince—one of the first black per-formers to cross over to the white mainstream with mass success, as wellas one who presented himself as ambiguously gendered—and the use ofthe American flag are significant. According to Berlant and Freeman,



stripping down from flag to sequined red, white, and blue G-string andpasties, Bernhard

exposes a national body, her body. This national body does not address amass or abstract audience of generic Americans, nor does it campily evoke a“typical” American citizen’s nostalgia for collective memory, ritual, andaffect. Bernhard flags her body to mark a fantasy of erotic identification withsomeone present, in the intimate room: it is a national fantasy, displayed asa spectacle of desire.52

The personal becomes political. As indicated throughout this study, there isa long tradition of the female Jewish body representing the body of thenation by drawing attention to categories of inclusion through the abjectedaspects it signifies. Roseanne’s rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” atapproximately the same time as Without You I’m Nothing was released as amovie indicates the potential pitfalls of this as a deliberate strategy. BothRachel and Sarah Bernhardt, however, wrapped themselves in the Frenchflag more than once and, at specific historical moments, came to representFrance itself. Bette Midler inserted herself into overt symbols of Americannational identity nearly a decade earlier than Bernhard. Like many per-forming Jewesses before her, Sandra Bernhard can be seen to represent theeroticization of national identity through the racial ambiguity of her veryreal body.



Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television (Chapter 6: Sandra Bernhard)

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