Bodies are historically constructed, so bodily difference cannot index essential difference.

Evidence

The error inherent in this question is that bodies both in fantasy and in reality themselves are historically constructed objects. Suffering and success shape the body as do hunger and affluence. The fantasy about the uniqueness of the “Jew’s Body,” however, postulates that the difference of the body reflects an essential difference in the mind or soul. What happens when such tropes are used, if only ironically, in contemporary multicultural literature? To ask with Audre Lorde, can such texts dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools? — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 730

The core concepts that shape the image of the “Jew” are the age-old ones: the Jew as oriental and foreign and the victim of oppression; the “Jew” as cosmopolitan and successful. It is how these concepts function in a multicultural context as expressed in the age-old fantasy about Jewish physical difference that is the subject of the present question: What happens when a writer self-consciously representing her or his work as the voice of “multicultural” writer needs to define difference? Are Jews “inherently” different? That is, can there be a difference beyond history and culture that is inscribed on the body? The error inherent in this question is that bodies both in fantasy and in reality themselves are historically constructed objects. Suffering and success shape the body as do hunger and affluence. The fantasy about the uniqueness of the “Jew’s Body,” however, postulates that the difference of the body reflects an essential difference in the mind or soul. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 733

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The master’s-tools question — can texts built on the very trope they critique dismantle it? — is a genuinely paradigm-level framing worth revisiting.
• SEED: Angles on literary irony: can a writer deploy an essentialist trope ‘ironically’ without reproducing it? Compare with satire of hate speech.
• XREF: Ties to the volume’s orientalism framework and to general theory of the body as social construction (Foucault, Bourdieu’s habitus). — connects to: The body is a permanent structure of being, not a contingent addition. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 870; Universalising models of conviviality inevitably exclude those who cannot embody them. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 82
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 730; Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 733