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211 Vivian Sobchack Assimilating Streisand When Too Much Is Not Enough I want to do everything. . . . I like to know everything. . . . There are a lot of things I want. . . . I’ll have them all, you know. bArbrA streisAnd to sidney sKoLsKy You push too hard. You expect too much. HubbeLL GArdner to KAtie MorosKy in The Way We Were (1973) Let me pose a troubling question: Why do so many people in our culture (Jews and non-Jews alike) hate Barbra Streisand? Certainly, no other major “star of David” has been so celebrated and yet so reviled as she of the voice like “buttah” and “she, who must be obeyed.” Although Streisand’s fans are legion, their adoration in no way matches the virulence of those who can’t stand her. Their hatred is excessive—that is, highly disproportionate not only to the star’s achievements as a singer, actor, producer, and director but also to the various social and political pronouncements of her self-admitted big mouth. What follows, then, is, an exploration of the social and emotional terrain of this hatred, an exploration that will result in not a rational and static cartography, but rather, as Giuliana Bruno suggests, a “kind of spiraling journey of understanding” whose twists and turns involve encounters not only with others but also with oneself (“Cultural” 160). Interested in journeys across a “terrain of affects” that generate both history and selfdiscovery , Bruno sees emotion as a form of transport, and thus intimately linked to movement (Atlas vii). Etymologically and historically, emotion 212 Vivian Sobchack has also been associated “with a moving out, migration, transference from one place to another” (Atlas 6); and, as Bruno suggests, “this ‘moving out’ is exactly what one does as one crosses a border, which can be the territory of a nation,” or—important here—“a culture” (“Cultural” 159). Hatred, then, can be considered a negative form of transport or transference, a heightened response to, among other provocations, transgressive migration across territorial and cultural borders. Often in concert with fear of invasion on one side and the push for free movement on the other, hatred accompanies the desire not only to exclude or evict cultural “others” but also to escape and leave “behind” or move “beyond” the perceived constraints and limits of one’s own cultural community. Furthermore, and particularly important in Streisand’s case, hatred is also an affective response to expansion —to a transgression of a border achieved not merely by crossing it, but, rather, by changing its contours, “taking it over” in what is perceived as an invasive assimilation of the “other’s” own cultural territory. Thus, in the context of traditional critiques of assimilation as a disavowal of one’s own cultural terrain, this is assimilation writ in reverse—as threatening to overwhelm the “other’s” cultural terrain rather than disappear into it. Certainly there are also positive affective responses to the moving possibilities of cultural migration across borders, to the liberating act of “moving out.” Take, for example, the unadulterated adoration of Streisand apotheosized by Linda Richman, a fictional character conceived and played by comedian Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live and modeled after his New York Jewish mother-in-law.1 In a recurrent skit during the 1990s, middleclass and middle-aged Linda, with big hair, big rhinestone-studded glasses, and big gold jewelry, hosted a show called “Coffee Talk” dedicated to Streisand , whom she praises to her Jewish women friends and guests as “the best entertainer in the history of show business”—and, she says, “a god.” In the inaugural skit, Linda asks her friend Sheila, “Why do we love Barbra Streisand so much? Is it because she’s so vaulty and brash?” Sheila’s response: “No, it isn’t. The reason is, she got out. Now, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina, and my mother told me, ‘Sheila, you’re . . . from Brooklyn with a hook nose. You will never, ever be a ballerina.’ And like a schmuck, I listened. Barbra, no, she got out. Excuse me, I’m a little emotional about this right now.” Also choked with emotion, Linda says to Sheila: “Listening to your story, I’m a little verklempt myself. Give me a second,” and, claiming a moment to regain her composure, she tells her guests (and the audience) to “talk amongst yourselves” (Myers). So, let’s talk amongst ourselves (if only rhetorically). Up front, at the beginning of this circuitous affective...

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