ABSTRACT
The inconsistent conjunction of sin and sickness, nature and virtue, that characterizes heteronormativity and Christianormativity strikingly characterizes modern Western conceptions of subjectivity. This chapter focuses at "queering the centers" of heteronormativity and Christianormativity by juxtaposing two subject positions, neither of which makes sense in the respective normative terms: the transsexual and the secular Jew. The experiences of transsexual people tend to be quite different from the experiences of converts to Judaism, but that may be due to aspects of our sex/gender system that could be imagined otherwise. Strategies of "queering the center" will vary as the identities in question are variously constructed, policed, and transgressively lived, in particular, as one or the other side of the oxymoronic natural incapacity/willful refusal construction is dominant. Womanhood and Jewishness are illustrative of these differences. Jewishness is aberrant in a Christianormative culture in being paradigmatically a matter not of choice but, as Daniel Boyarin puts it, of "genealogy".
