Shortly after Black Lives Matter protests broke out around the United States in the spring of 2020, a curious protest took place in the state of Texas. Organized in response to the Texas governor's coronavirus-related order to close businesses devoted primarily to the serving of alcohol, some Texas bar owners staged a “Bar Lives Matter” protest outside of the Texas State Capitol building in the city of Austin and others coordinated a lawsuit challenging the governor's order in U.S. federal court. This lawsuit instigated by the Texas Bar and Nightclub Alliance followed in the footsteps of other lawsuits brought by Christian churches around the nation challenging pandemic-related limitations on in-person religious services. In July 2020, responding in apparent disgust to the activities of devoted drinkers in Texas and elsewhere, the wellknown economist and liberal columnist Paul Krugman lamented the potentially deadly reopening situation facing U.S. schools and students in the coming fall, opining in The New York Times that “the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children's future.”

In this concluding chapter on future directions in queer and religious political alliances, I aim to explore the pandemic pitting of bars against babies, and then too churches against children. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the constellation of competing interests present in the coronavirus pandemic—one of the defining moments of the Trump presidency— cannot be broken down along neat political affiliations or dispersed across predictable camps on either the left or right. Rather, what we have witnessed again is the crisscrossing of political, religious, and sexual interests defying easy categorization. During these times, indeed, it seems almost as if queer theorist Gayle Rubin's 1980s-era “bar dykes” managed to commandeer Texan nightlife and that Paul Krugman was writing for Phyllis Schlafly's conservative Eagle Forum rather than for The New York Times.

In this topsy-turvy situation, the possibility of new alliances between queer and religious groups has emerged. Indeed, as this chapter discusses, recent viruses—notably, HIV and coronavirus—have raised existential issues for queer and religious folk alike and instigated converging debates about sustaining community in the midst of mass human death.

In 1890, British media mogul Alfred Harmsworth launched the halfpenny comic magazine. By reducing the page size and opting for the cheapest paper and ink, Harmsworth was able to undersell his competitors’ penny-priced output and created a publishing success that was widely imitated and ushered in the age of comics as a mass medium. In 2002, DC Comics started its Absolute Edition series, which reprints popular titles that originally appeared as pamphlets in oversized hardcover books (complete with dust jacket, slipcase, and ribbon) that cost between $50 and $100. Evidently, something has changed in the way that comics are produced and marketed, and one may well surmise that this change of formats is linked to the change in the cultural status they have experienced in the past few decades. At the turn of the twentieth century, comics “came at or near the bottom […] in the pantheon of […] literature,” a judgment of taste that finds its material equivalent in their disposable nature. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, comic books—especially deluxe editions like DC's Absolute series—are more likely to find themselves displayed in a bookcase than placed in the dustbin. And, with Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986/1991) winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) being included in Time magazine's 2005 list of the “All-TIME 100 Novels,” their position in the pantheon has clearly been revised. Yet interestingly, Maus and Watchmen only received these accolades after they had been repackaged as graphic novels, both having previously been published in magazine or pamphlet format. To tell the story of comics’ establishment as a “legitimate” art form is, among other things, also to tell the story of their shifting publication formats.

In this chapter, I propose to look at the curious evolution of comics through the lens of a series that harks back to the late-Victorian media landscape that British comics emerged from and that simultaneously embodies and questions the current state of the medium. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1991-2019) relates the adventures of a superhero team made up of characters from nineteenth-century classics, such as Mina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885). In the first volume (1999) they face Sherlock Holmes's archenemy Professor Moriarty along with a “yellow peril” in London's East End.

I now switch my gaze from the particular to the general. In this chapter,I explore the ways in which literary texts may act as points of transformation in the face of the grief, loss and despair so eloquently expression in this poem by William Carlos Williams. Having considered in detail how Leo Tolstoy and Gerard Manley Hopkins each wrestled with the dilemma of their existence, including their profound though radically differing religious experiences, I broaden my horizons to reflect on themes and perspectives that have emerged from my own reading over the past five decades, with the help of some contemporary literary criticism.

Starting with James Joyce's portrayal of suicide as an everyday temptation, I discuss Al Alvarez's ambivalence towards the act and his conclusion that it is nothing more than a denial of experience. With Peter Porter, I reflect on the cost of seriousness and consider what other options there may be for us when life seems too difficult to continue: perhaps the gritty endurance of Stevie Smith and my mother; perhaps the political awareness of Zbigniew Herbert and Seamus Heaney; or perhaps the creative fiction of Nick Hornby and Matt Haig. With reference to David Foster Wallace and my patient Leigh, I discuss the inexplicability of suicide to those bereft by it and consider – with the help of Graham Swift and Maggie O’Farrell – how new ways of living may emerge for those who are left behind.

In one of the most condensed revelations in his mystical diary Megid Meisharim, R. Karo was addressed and promised thus:

This is a highly charged revelation, encompassing the major themes of R. Karo's intellectual and public activities: leadership over the entire Eastern Diaspora (Arabistan), the composition of Beit Yosef and Shulchan ‘Arukh, constant expectations of martyrdom, daily ecstatic contact with the divine figure, and, finally, all these as a reward for his commitment to re-establishment of Semikhah.

This last theme provoked a lively and highly charged polemic in late sixteenth-century Safed. The competing parties were the local rabbis, headed by the dominant and prestigious R. Jacob Beirav, versus a Jerusalem rabbi, R. Levi ben-Haviv. Accordingly, this polemic has hitherto been discussed in the literature as an internal affair between scholars and experts of Talmudic law. While this dimension is fundamental to illuminate some aspects of the affair, it disregards the Ottoman setting and the urgent considerations that motivated both parties as they shaped Jewish life under Ottoman rule. The non-Jewish context relates further to the grand vision of R. Karo establishing a Jewish legal guild.

The preamble to Beit Yosef, and to a lesser extent the complementary and shorter one to Shulchan ‘Arukh, are among the constitutive Jewish documents of the early modern period. Even during his own life, R. Karo clearly considered the preamble an important manifesto for his entire codification project. He insisted on attaching it to all four parts of his books, printed at various times and in different printing presses. The introduction indicates how deeply these double codes are inserted in the rabbinical and post-Talmudic fabric, preserved in a growing number of past books and writings, expanding even further following the deep impact of the print revolution on Jewish culture. The perception of Karo's preamble as exclusively rooted in this Jewish past has come to be taken for granted in Jewish erudition. I seek to show here that this traditionalist perspective leaves too many gaps and cannot by itself explain the full scope of Karo's life project. It is no less essential to examine his text against the background of Ottoman legal history. The important codes introduced by the Ottomans in various parts of their expanding empire included detailed preambles in which they defined the role of law for political control, the Sultan as guarantor of justice and just law, and the contribution of legal mechanisms to the bureaucratic system needed to sustain the empire's ongoing functioning. These preambles reaching the entire empire essentially constituted an Ottoman manifesto of law and rule. As the Jewish minority had a profound acquaintance with the Ottoman law and its courts, they were exposed to these messages, conveyed in the preambles to codes of law (Kanunnameler).

Reading a Preamble to a Legal Code

The attempt to explore the personal world of rabbinical figures throughout the Middle Ages is a frustrating task for contemporary historian. The individual composers hide themselves behind the collective “we” of the chain of past generations and their literary productions. The wide rabbinical literature at our disposal is saturated with paraphrases and allusions to previous compositions or to the canonical literature. One of the channels that allow us to delve beyond this collectivist screen is found in the introductions to books, where authors often propose their motivations for writing or reveal their personal circumstances.

The descent of Donald J. Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania, down the escalator into the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York on June 16, 2015, to announce his candidacy for President of United States marks the beginning of what became—by its own outlandish gambit and, arguably, by any objective measure—the most visible icon, the biggest BRAND, and the most intensely debated, era-defining force in all media throughout the world in the five years that followed (Fig. 8.1). The moment when this extraordinary phenomenon began to shrink can be dated with equal precision. On November 5, two days after the 2020 Presidential election, as votes were being counted across the nation and the prospect that he might lose office became real, President Donald J. Trump gave a press conference in the White House briefing room that was timed to capture attention on the evening news broadcasts of the major TV networks (Fig. 8.2). As his misstatements, distortions, and outright lies about the election process mounted, and his accusations of fraud against his opponents grew strident, ABC, CBS, and NBC cut away to anchors who rebutted his claims, directly characterized them as lies, and went on to other news. MSNBC did so within one minute, and even at Fox News, his most committed media backers (to the extent of having become a de facto propaganda department during his Presidency), the White House correspondent noted that there was no evidence to back up the president's claims of electoral fraud.

This moment had been prefigured on other media. The Washington Post had been running a fact-checker column devoted to Trump since the early days of his candidacy. In the month leading up to the election, the volume of false or misleading claims averaged by 50 a day, more than 20,000 in total since he began campaigning. On May 27, two days after George Floyd died, Twitter labelled as “unsubstantiated” a Trump tweet that Mail-In ballots to the upcoming election would be “substantially fraudulent.” The company did the same for a few subsequent tweets that published false information about the pandemic and, by November 4, immediately after election day, joined the growing chorus of media tagging the President's statements about the results as fraudulent themselves.

Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage all underwent profound professional transformations when they trained, worked and networked overseas. Their international experiences played a key role in their ability to challenge male-centric hierarchies and infiltrate content domains fortified against women. By diving into broadcasting's transnational channels, they gained access to alliances and opportunities previously unavailable to them, assets which helped them compete as equals, and even as superiors, to their locally based male peers.

When Kay, Catherine, Therése and Joyce became active members of the global community of public broadcasters they were endowed with an authority and respectability that nourished their professional and political agendas; doors were opened, trust was given and their confidence grew. They took part in industry scholarships and producers’ exchanges and formed collegial, supportive relationships with like-minded media practitioners. They immersed themselves in new production environments and gained greater insights into their own industrial cultures. The producers also took advantage of the imbalanced power dynamics between broadcasting nations and absorbed the identities and characteristics of stronger production environments. With their new connections and knowledge, their status and value in the eyes of the ABC was subsequently magnified; they wielded these new skillsets back in Australia, at times with a ruthless purpose.

According to ABC producer and programme officer Mungo MacCallum, early prime-time television – both commercial and public – was a highly contested field; it was a ‘male-ordered world’ that worked to exclude capable and talented women. In his 1965 Nation article, MacCallum praised the few female practitioners who managed to write, produce and compère sessions aimed at male viewers. Women such as Jean Battersby, Corinne Kirby, Ann Deveson, Suzanne Baker and Therése Denny. These ambitious producers, he said, were a ‘band of sisters’, united in their professional ambitions and more than capable of disproving the stereotype of female broadcasters being ill-suited to ‘serious’ programming. MacCallum was aggrieved that so many ambitious women found it necessary to seek a remedy overseas. He blamed the dominant cultural identity at the time, that of the white male: ‘the fact is, though they may love or need them, Australian men don't like women’.

The canonization of sacred texts has accompanied Jewish history from its beginning: the Bible, the Mishnah, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, Gaonic monographs, and the medieval “Books of Rulings” (Sifrei Pesiqah). At first glance, R. Karo's codes of law Beit Yosef and Shulchan ‘Arukh might seem to be no more than two more names in this long list. Even if we take into consideration the high value of Talmudic erudition in Jewish culture, was this enough to motivate R. Karo to dedicate so many years of his life to this project? Moreover, in what sense were these double codes of law canonical; how did they differ from other Talmudic and post-Talmudic compositions, especially of the early modern period?

Legal canons, or codifications, were common to all three monotheistic religions. Codification implied an attempt to standardize law and legal discussions around several books of major importance. This chapter will shift the main focus of discussion from the textual aspect—that is the content and legalistic assertions—to the social and cultural scene in which they crystallized. More concretely, in respect to R. Karo, beyond the issue of the legalistic-halakhic components of his works, I wish to discuss their function and their response to both Jewish and Muslim surroundings. As we will see, codification is a dynamic process that does not halt once the composition of a text has been finalized. It is rather a product negotiated between legal experts and their “lay” community; between central political authorities and the legal-professional milieu; and between the text and the interpretations woven around it. Clarifying the use of the term codification, its main characteristics, and their history in all three monotheistic religions will provide the starting point for this chapter and indeed this entire book.

Canon: History and General Meaning

The term canon refers to texts of exceptional importance, especially of a religious character, serving as a source of inspiration and emulation for the group considering them as canonical. The semantic history of canonization and modern research on the term in Western civilization have revolved around major religious texts, such as the New and Old Testaments, examining their evolvement, philological aspects, the crystallization of their final form, the historical processes and institutional mechanisms behind the textual fixation, and their deep impact on cultural heritage.

The revised translation of the title of Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 essay—from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”—signaled a shift in its use value for those interested in understanding the kinds of work that images do within capitalist modernity. A more exact translation of “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit,” the new title also oriented English-language readers closer to Benjamin's major preoccupations in the essay, away from the cherry-picking within artworlds that had reduced its relevance for aesthetic inquiry to the commonplace idea that the widespread circulation of multiple photographs of individual works of art had caused them to lose the “aura” that they possessed when seen in their original niche in time and space.

Underlying this banality, however, was a concept of consequence for understanding that capitalism was building a new kind of engine room, a society-wide apparatus. Benjamin's insight was a major update of Plato's pairing of deceptive shadows and ideal Forms, Nikephoros’ icon/image double vision, and Marx's identification of the inner dynamic of commodification as the interplay of use and exchange value. Taking “art” to be the entirety of human visual representation, he introduced a distinction that constituted the next big step in thinking about image economies:

In modern times, icons produced during what were now seen as the primitive, ancient, and medieval eras were everywhere abstracted from their millennia-long grounding in ritual practices and valued as independent works of art. In Nikephoros’ terms, they become images. Not natural, nor spiritual, but aesthetic images. Suitable above all for display among other images that have been similarly transposed. All classified according to their place within a transcendent History of Art. This transvaluation occurs in museums, as it does in the museumization of churches and other sacred places.