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We’re All Born Naked and the Rest is Performative Materiality: Drag, Gender, and Audiences.

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In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that media are not passive carriers of meaning but material processes that act upon bodies, shape subjects, and generate the conditions through which identities can emerge (Bollmer). Media, in this sense, does not simply represent; it performs. It intervenes in the world. It exerts force. It structures what bodies can do and how they appear.

The art of drag is a productive lens for understanding Bollmer’s notion of performative materiality. Rather than treating drag as an exceptional or marginal cultural form, I use it as a case that makes visible the broader media-ontological operations Bollmer attributes to all mediated identity. Drag helps us see, in concrete terms, how gender emerges from interactions among bodies, objects, technologies, and audiences. Drag exemplifies Bollmer’s core argument: Identity is the outcome of material practices, not an interior essence, and media such as prosthetics, language, and audiences participate in performing identity alongside us.

The Body as Medium

If media is performative, then the body is one of its primary sites of action. Bernadette Wegenstein describes the body as “our most fundamental medium,” a surface continuously shaped, rewritten, and extended through material practices (Wegenstein 2010). Drag performers make this process visible.

Egner & Maloney’s study documents performers who articulate gender not as a fixed inner truth but as something produced through embodied technique: padding, contouring, binding, layering, staging, and stylizing. These techniques are not superficial decorations; they are operations that actively reorganize the performer’s physical and social presence.

In Egner and Maloney’s study, performers consistently describe drag as something that operates beyond fixed categories of sex or gender. Performers move fluidly between masculine and feminine embodiments, sometimes within a single act, and anatomical exposure does not necessarily disrupt the gender being performed. What matters is not the visibility of the body’s “biological” markers, but the larger assemblage of gesture, costuming, movement, and audience orientation through which gender becomes legible.

Image Credits: BobTheDragQueen.com

Bollmer’s framework is useful here because these transformations are not simply symbolic gestures layered over an already-existing identity. They are material operations that actively reorganize how the body functions in space. Wigs, makeup, padding, and prosthetics act as media technologies that exert force on perception, movement, and social recognition. Drag performers, therefore, exemplify Bollmer’s argument that what we call “identity” is inseparable from “the material relations that allow subjects to be produced at all”. Gender is not expressed through media; it is generated through media.

Drag as Material Performance

Drag’s power lies not simply in its visual transformation, but in the convergence of materials, practices, and infrastructures that produce a performative body. As Egner and Maloney note, “acting in a way that disrupts expectations of how ‘normal’ people do gender allows drag performers to subvert gender expectations for both their everyday and on-stage gender presentation” (Egner and Maloney, 2016, p. 877). This disruption does not occur only at the level of meaning or representation. It happens through specific material actions such as costuming, makeup, bodily stylization, movement, and staging.

This is where Bollmer’s idea of performative materiality becomes especially useful. For Bollmer, media do not simply communicate identity after it already exists. Media are part of the process that brings identity into being. When drag performers alter their bodies through makeup, padding, wigs, and gestures, they are not expressing a pre-existing gender that lives inside them. They are using media technologies to actively produce gender as something that becomes visible and legible in the world.

From this perspective, the subversion that Egner and Maloney describe is not only cultural or symbolic. It is material. Disrupting how “normal” people do gender works because drag physically reorganizes bodies in space and changes how those bodies can be seen, interpreted, and responded to. What counts as masculine or feminine shifts because the material conditions that support those categories are being altered in real time. This is exactly what Bollmer means when he argues that identity emerges from material relations rather than from an inner essence. Drag does not represent gender. It participates in making gender possible in different ways.

Video Credits: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Audience as Medium: Interaction as Material Process

One of the most significant contributions of Egner and Maloney’s study is the claim that audience interaction is not supplemental to drag performance but constitutive of it. Performers report that their gender presentations shift depending on the audience present, the reactions they observe, and the boundaries they attempt to breach. What is being performed is therefore not a fixed gender identity but a relational process that only takes shape through response.

This is where Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality becomes especially clear. For Bollmer, media are environments that shape what actions can occur and what forms of identity can emerge. The audience functions as part of this media environment. Their reactions operate as material forces that influence how gender is performed in real time. Laughter, discomfort, silence, and shock are not just interpretations of drag. They actively condition what kinds of gender expressions become possible in that space.

Egner and Maloney show that performers adjust their performances depending on the setting. When performing for mixed or university audiences, performers often wear more clothing and reduce sexual content because less is required to breach dominant gender norms (Egner and Maloney, 2016, pp. 897 to 898). In queer venues, performers intensify their gender transgressions in order to generate the same disruptive effect. This demonstrates that subversion is not located in any single costume, gesture, or body. It is produced through a dynamic interaction between performer and audience.

From Bollmer’s perspective, this means that gender is not performed by an individual subject alone; it emerges from a media system composed of bodies, space, sound, attention, and reaction. Identity forms through ongoing material feedback rather than through internal psychological intent. Drag makes this process visible by showing how gender must be constantly adjusted in response to the media environment in which it appears.

Fluidity as a Media Condition

Drag performers in Egner and Maloney’s study frequently describe gender as fluid, shifting, and multiple. Rather than explaining this fluidity as a psychological experience or an inner truth of the self, Bollmer’s performative materiality allows us to understand it as something produced by media conditions themselves. Gender becomes fluid because the material relations that generate it are fluid.

Bodies become sites of repeated inscription through costume, makeup, gesture, and movement. Audiences function as interpretive infrastructures that change what kinds of gender presentations become legible or disruptive. Performance spaces shape how far gender can be pushed and in what direction. The result is that gender is not simply flexible in a personal sense. It is procedural. It is continuously built and rebuilt through interaction between bodies, materials, and environments.

Egner and Maloney describe this process as “gender bending,” rather than “gender acting” (Egner and Maloney, 2016). This wording emphasizes process over representation. Gender shifts within performance as performers respond to audience reaction. In some cases, new understandings of identity emerge through drag itself. Identity is therefore not something that exists first and is later expressed through performance. It takes shape through the material act of performing.

This directly mirrors Bollmer’s claim that identity is always produced through performances composed of material relations (Bollmer, 2020). Drag makes this visible by placing gender into a system where it must respond to bodies, media technologies, spatial conditions, and social reaction all at once.

Image Credits: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Gender as a Media Event

When viewed through Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality, drag becomes more than a genre of entertainment or a symbolic critique of gender norms. It becomes a system in which the material production of identity can be seen in real time. Gender does not appear in drag as an inner truth that is later expressed outward. It takes shape through concrete media operations such as makeup, costuming, bodily technique, spatial staging, and audience reaction. These elements do not decorate identity. They actively generate it.

Drag makes visible what Bollmer argues is always happening across media more broadly. Bodies become media surfaces through modification and stylization. Audiences become part of the media environment through their responses, which shape what kinds of gender expressions become legible, disruptive, or acceptable. Repeated performance turns gender into a process that must be continually recalibrated rather than a stable essence that simply endures. Identity, in this sense, is not located inside the performer and later communicated outward. It emerges through the material relations that connect performer, body, object, space, and audience.

Because drag requires constant adjustment to audience response, it makes clear that gender is not produced by individual intention alone. It is produced through feedback. The meaning and force of a performance change depending on who is watching, how they react, and what norms are already in place. This directly enacts Bollmer’s claim that media do not merely transmit meaning but operate as environments that shape what subjects can become. Gender in drag is therefore not just represented. It is materially organized through circulation, response, and repetition.

What drag ultimately reveals is that identity itself operates as a media process. The instability of gender in drag is not an exception to how identity normally works. It is an intensified version of the same material dynamics that structure identity in everyday mediated life. Drag shows with unusual clarity that subjects are not formed in isolation, but through ongoing interaction with media systems that exert force on bodies, perception, and social recognition. In this sense, drag does not only critique gender. It exposes the media conditions that make gender possible at all.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501337086. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Egner, Justine, and Patricia Maloney. ““It Has No Color , It Has No Gender , It’s Gender Bending”: Gender and Sexuality Fluidity and Subversiveness in Drag Performance.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 63, no. 7, 2016, pp. 875-903.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Header Image by Fernando Cysneiros (Taken at UBC!)

General Media Theory

What Papers, Please tells us about governed bodies and inscription

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By: Christine Choi

When trying to make sense of the oppressive systems and structures in place, video games may not be the first to come to mind when it comes to examining the system in place. Yet, the video game Papers, Please, provides an interesting insight and commentary on what it means to put in a position of performing that status quo. The concepts in Grant Bollmer’s book Materialist Media Theory provided foundational groundwork with relevant ideas in this game. As a result, it brought attention to the following: what kind of context do video games provide for us when it comes to understanding the representation of bodies as well as the inscription of such bodies? As much as Papers, Please exaggerates and parodizes the border control and immigration systems, it simultaneously reveals the biases of the immigration system as well as the player themselves. 

Papers, Please, is an indie game where you play as an immigration inspector for the fictional country “Arstotzka.” Throughout the game, you make decisions to let them cross the border based on people’s “validity” of their documentation, which determines whether they are permitted to enter the country. The laws that determine what counts as a valid document continue to grow more and more convoluted as the game progresses, which makes detecting discrepancies even more difficult. Depending on if their documentations are all correct, their passports get stamped with “approved” or “denied” accordingly. The premise itself already highlights how we, as bodies living under the legal institutions that define us, have forced us into the inscription of legal documents that indicate our right to exist as well as our subscription to performing such practices.  

Inscription Using Documents

As the immigration inspector, you are already assigned to the act of inscribing into each entrant’s document via stamping in their passports. However, each body and the inscriptions that represent said body (i.e. the passports, entry permits, etc.) have much more than what is inscribed (or is not inscribed) in their documents. For whatever reason each entrant was unable to provide the correct details in their documents, they each had their own lives that brought them to the border—details which cannot be inscribed within their very legal documents. It makes Bollmer’s argument about analyzing the “margins,” a space in which we can find “traces of a history that this barbarism worked to exclude from existence,” all the more relevant in contextualizing their presence at the border (54). You, the player, can make the decision on whether you do perform that very duty that this authoritarian institution has tasked you with through the institutional practices of inscribing. Doing so, however, means that you have made the inherent decision to push these people into the “margins.”

Performativity in Papers, Please

The game’s mechanic of finding “discrepancies” in the information in the documentation also happens to be one of the ways that illustrates how “legible bodies”—bodies that are “produced by legal, medical, and psychological practices of writing and documentation”—are rendered illegible by the immigration system (Bollmer, 67). The game appears to task the player with a relatively simple task: to carry out, or rather, “perform,” the laws that govern our bodies. As a result, the bodies perform the act of being a legal entrant to Arstotzka by carrying and presenting with valid documentation—or at least attempt to. Failing to find the discrepancy results in citations for violating protocol—get three of these, and it will be deducted from your salary. Even with the presence of the repressive state apparatus—the agreement to obey the laws due to the “threat of police violence, or in this case, the government representatives—the game incites as well as punishes the player for acting against them (Bollmer, 27). Throughout the gameplay, there will be several characters that ask you to approve the entry of those who do not carry valid documents and deny the entry of those who do, citing reasons such as wanting to stay with their family or the fear for their safety if certain individuals are let in. This is how the game presents the player with the agency of whether they want to perform within the legal and governmental practices or perform outside of them, even if that results in a protocol violation.

Game-sensing Systemic Marginalization of Bodies

But why analyze the legibility of bodies and the inscription of documentation through a video game? When trying to understand the systemic challenges that arise from the documentation of our very being, one helpful framework to understand it is through the perspective of “game-sensing.” “Game-sensing” refers to how gamers “attune to a game system” which often takes form in navigating through the game’s mechanics and environments (Guillermo 156-157). Kawika Guillermo, in their book Of Floating Isles, described how video games are able to show the ways in which we game-sense the racialized systems that we co-exist in (157). The game-sensing of Papers, Please, as stated by Guillermo, “attunes us to the violences of nationalist othering by revealing the overlapping practices of border security with state-enforced racism” (162). Despite the seemingly immateriality of the bodies in digital video games, Papers, Please exemplified how studying these media objects through the media theoretical lens.

The notion that video games, as media that are viewed as inherently self-serving and pleasure-seeking, are unable to delve deeper into the real-world oppression that are inscribed within society, has been frequently countered with the recent emergence of indie games such as Papers, Please. It shows us how games can in fact materialize the immateriality of systemic marginalization of immigrants. In the game, the laws behind who gets to enter Arstotzka quickly change following a terrorist attack at the border. We see this parallel real-life events, such as the formation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a response to the terrorist attack that occurred on September 11th, 2001 throughout the United States (“TSA History”). Games such as these can illuminate on how the TSA operates has been racialized by using the actions of extremist groups as reason to further marginalize racial groups. By contextualizing these games to the media theories that we continue to study, we can do more than just game-sense the systemic racialized injustices: we can challenge the existing hegemony in place and maybe eventually, see it lead to political change (Bollmer, 32). 

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction Grant Bollmer. Zed Books, 2021.

Guillermo, Kawika. Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025.

Papers, Please. Directed by Lucas Pope, 3909, 2013.

“TSA History | Transportation Security Administration.” Transportation Security Administration, www.tsa.gov/history. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025. 

General Media Theory

Oxford Word Of The Year In 2025 Is “Rage Bait” — And What?

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

Sometimes I think human thoughts and patterns are strange — sometimes even blatantly strange and intellectually-defunct. My mind often circles back to this wild statement after much observation as a new generation person breed by perpetual online content.

Quite recently, Oxford University Press has chosen the term "rage bait" as the Word of the Year of 2025. The term "rage bait" is "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content" as defined by their given explanation. Their presented graphic showed that the usage of the term has been sharply rising since around June of 2024.

This wasn’t the first time that Oxford UP decided to bring in significant attention to rapidly developing internet jargons. Last year, the term "brain rot" was selected as the Word of the Year in 2024. A technical definition for this term would be about meaningless pieces of low-effort content circulating on the internet, yet a figurative definition would be an alarming symbolism that marks the downfall of communications and record-keeping of the humanity.

My growth as a 2005-born Millennial defined my intertwining love-hate relationship with the internet, and now my current identity as a media studies student is adding a touch of sour taste to recognizing the reality. My early days of internet exploration around 2016 opened myself up to the massive culmination of mankind knowledge (whether it’s good or bad); the sense of novelty was lingering among the majority of good-faith online communities (I missed the days watching DanTDM as a child). Yet now coming to the end of 2025 as a (questionable) self-functioning adult after learning three years of formal media jargons, this sense of novelty was eventually replaced with subtle nausea on overwhelming effects of emotions transmitting throughout the internet.

On a deeper reflective level, this feeling now feels more like a side effect of internet or mass communication as expected from media richness theory, which was developed by Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel in the 1980s. The theory developed a framework to assess different means of communications depending on their "richness" — the ability to accurately convey information with as minimum misintepretations as possible.

A core of the internet relies on mass communication and digitization of traditional humanistic experiences, and the concepts within the media richness theory seem to alarm us of a possible outcome. Concepts mentioned in the media richness theory, such as paralanguage, social cues, and social presence — which are all heavily present in in-person communications — are mostly-to-always compressed and distorted during the transformation to digitized spaces. A simple "I love you" to a person could be reprinted and reproduced numerous times on language-prevalent platforms like Twitter and Facebook; the cues brought by tone, body languages, and facial expressions were, however, obliterated by the digital presence, despite the fact that they’re heavily influential on conveying deep meanings.

Rage bait could be pretty much interpreted as the direct result of phenomenon. The social media’s lessening capacity to hold long-form discussions is leading to a tendency of encouraging primal flirts to trigger simple emotions, yet ironically speaking, keeping content forms simple for social media seems like a popular solution for a social media platform to thrive. It might seems just easy for us to randomly post anything on Twitter within a 140-word limit, preferably with some pictures to spice up your content. The ultimate outcome we often hope for from posting would be engagement and acknowledgements, whether it could be simple as a like or retweet or as complex as a well-written and formatted reply. But the mediation of language itself is inevitable (and I would personally call it as the curse of language); it’s almost impossible to mirror a specific segment of your personal, in-real-life experience onto a short amount of text and expect other people can feel your same experience through the text. On topics such as debates over ideas and opinions that would often take an insurmountable effort form proper engagements and arguments, the text itself on those topics over social media doesn’t just represent a description, but rather a much dwindled tag of primal humanistic emotions.

What lies the real danger here is that the delivery format of social media is driving such engagements — exchanges of primal humanistic emotions. The root of conflicts inside mankind could be just coming from a small misunderstanding. If one day the boundaries between online and real-life interactions blurred, I must say that I’m not highly optimistic of what might be the outcome.

Sure, you can say it’s primal humanistic emotions again. ("We’re just humans, right?") Just don’t think that I’ll take all those norms in peace.

Works Consulted

Heaton, Benedict. “‘Brain Rot’ Named Oxford Word of the Year 2024.” Oxford University Press, 2 Dec. 2024, corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024.

Heaton, Benedict. “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 Is Rage Bait.” Oxford University Press, 1 Dec. 2025, corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait.

“Media Richness Theory | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/media-richness-theory#terms-&-concepts.

Copyright Acknowledgement

Cover feature image by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash.

Other

Inscription, Identification, and the Mezuzah in Jewish Cultural Habitus

“Bialystok Mezuzah”, created by MI POLIN: a Polish company which casts impressions of former mezuzahs stripped from Jewish homes during the Holocaust in bronze. Courtesy of The Jewish Museum via Medium.

Reading Grant Bollmer’s chapter of Materialist Media Theory, “Inscriptions and Techniques” – which has to do with the cultural practice of inscription and its part in determining reality – I immediately saw connections to my own Jewish culture. Specifically, I started thinking about the ways in which cultural material objects (such as Judaica) store, record, and determine a shared historical, documental, and technique-based experience of “habitus” for people raised within Jewish culture. Physical objects are not always thought of as inscriptions. Therefore, I will begin by addressing the performance of inscription through religious writing, then move on to the significance of Judaica objects, before finally identifying a piece of Judaica which bridges inscription and object, as well as religion and culture. 

Writings

The oldest Abrahamic religion, Jewish liturgical canon and everything considered as “text” within the tradition is seemingly endless. Far beyond just the Torah and the Talmud, Jewish scholars and the ultra-religious study countless writings and commentary which present a litany of different interpretations of text. Notably, the practice of scholarly and iterative work is considered essential even within Judaism’s set of canonical texts; “Ketuvim”, a section of Tanakh, refers to books, scrolls, songs, wisdom, and literature that have been amended to the so-called “Hebrew Bible” over time. 

Similarly, sub-groups (sometimes referred to as movements or sects) within Judaism have also undergone changes, identifying individuals within “orthodox”, “hasidic”, “conservative”, “reform”, “kabbalistic”, “humanist”, and even “atheist” categories, made up of those who agree upon their disagreements with earlier movements. This perpetual schisming of identity within the religion relates to what Grant Bollmer describes as the “control of one’s image and self […] reasserted through legal regulation of documents, inscriptions, and artworks that, in combination with the power of the medium to record, either permit or prohibit something from existing in the future, which can allow (or refuse) specific individuals and relations to materialize.” (55) As a concrete example of reasserting identity through inscription, look no farther than the historical “Platforms” developed by rabbis in US cities throughout the 20th century, which articulated and updated the guiding principles of Reform Judaism over time. 

Objects

What I find so interesting is that despite all of the disagreement (and morphing of central values and interpretations of canonical text within each movement), the media being used to record the cultural side of Jewish tradition are largely the same across movements, ascribing a sense of shared history and tradition among us. Judaica, for those who may not know, are items such as candlesticks, cups, Torah dressing, art, jewelry, religious apparel, and historical artifacts “used and cherished in the context of ritual practice” (Benesh). 

I can’t possibly describe the meaning and use of each physical item within Judaism that has shaped my upbringing and experience of culture. Bollmer describes the production of a habitus by inscriptions existing “at the level of the body[,] through practices we internalize and perpetuate– techniques that we practice” (57). He continues by arguing that repeated performance induces a biological form of inscription where “we are ‘writing’ into our own bodies ways of experiencing and acting that perpetuate cultural difference, which are foundational for how we understand both who we are as individuals and our relations with others.” (57-8). The practice of attending synagogue, the speaking and chanting of Hebrew words in unison; the donning of a tallit for a family friend’s Bat Mitzvah; the home rituals of Shabbat candles and baking my own challah; arranging a seder plate in spring; the smell of spices in a Havdalah box as it is passed around a circle of neighbours on Saturday at dusk– these are the kinds of ritual and embodied experiences that for me are not mere structures of worship, but ways of life.

For many, a sense of culture is intimately linked with a sense of difference. Following the French scholar Jacques Derrida, Bollmer argues that groups ‘write’ or ‘inscribe’ matter from within, producing ‘cuts’ that “organize or make sense of the world, which, in turn, locate, distribute, and police the location of specific bodies based on how they ‘matter’” (64). Unfortunately, much of Jewish history is a history of persecution– from historical subjugation under the Romans, to The Crusades and exile from Spain, to continuous pogroms across Europe, to the failed extermination attempt of the Holocaust. The few remaining Holocaust survivors of today tell their children and grandchildren of yellow stars which they were forced to affix to their clothing in the years leading up to the concentration camps. The inscription “Jude” was more than a sign of shame; the stars were an example of such a ‘cut’ that identified Jews from the rest of European society and primed their status as ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’ in relation to their neighbours. 

By contrast, Judaica objects are typically sites for positive identification at the level of Jewish identity. Many of these objects are either passed down in families, or are recovered after surviving anti-semetic events and being separated from their original owners (Benesh). The craftsmanship evident in their making comes from “hiddur mitzvah […] — the principle of beautifying obligations and rituals by appealing to the senses: sight, sound, texture and fragrance” (Benesh). Essentially, many of the objects are not just historical– and not just useful in ritual– but also beautiful sources of pride found in one’s home.

The Mezuzah

This brings me to a point where I can introduce the mezuzah: both an object which evokes identification, and an inscription which generates concepts and performs symbolic work. The mezuzah takes the physical form of a cylindrical encasement (typically decorated), which is affixed to doorframes and contains a small roll of parchment inside, inscribed with significant passages from Deuteronomy. Specifically, the text found inside mezuzahs contains the Sh’ma, considered the most important prayer in the Jewish religion. Highly observant Jews say this prayer three times daily, shading their eyes with a hand as they do so. The lines that follow the Sh’ma’s main proclamation of “one God” command:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:5-9)

Found in this translation of the original Hebrew, we can see a direct correlation between practices of the habitus and inscription of a religious identity. Various parts of the body such as the heart, the hand, and the forehead are all named as sites for marking. The physicality of the language, using “charge”, “impress”, “recite”, “bind” and, importantly, “inscribe” are significant, because they instruct a person to outwardly show and practice their alignment with the religion in their everyday actions. Perhaps that is why the object of the mezuzah is still so pervasively displayed before Jewish homes, despite the fact that many Jews today do not engage in regular prayer or observance, and many are altogether atheist or agnostic (Issit and Main). 

In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle argued that objects can be sites for our thinking. I would like to use this frame of reference to propose new meanings and uses for mezuzahs in contemporary Jewish culture. The idea of a conceptual mezuzah would suggest that one is hung before a family’s home not because God instructed them to do so, but because its presence offers a material site to “think through” something. Perhaps when we look at, touch, or even kiss the mezuzah when leaving the house, it can remind us of our own ethical standards, compelling us to try and behave accordingly in the world. Maybe the mystery of the mezuzah piques the curiosity of children, who ask their parents why it’s important to them to display a sign of Jewish identity on the cusp of/ barrier to their home. As Bollmer paraphrases from another scholar, Ferraris, “The distinction of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can only happen from the inside– which means that ‘outside’ is always a relation produced by assuming the truth of the ‘inside’” (70).

In recent years, there have been efforts within the Jewish community to turn the sign of the mezuzah from a social object that creates a  ‘cut’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’, to one that welcomes and celebrates. For example, the Trans Pride Mezuzah “represents and embodies an intersection between the trans/nonbinary community and the renewal of Jewish tradition”, where trans and gender diverse people are not merely tolerated in a religious home or dwelling place, but actually highlighted and included (Ben-Lulu). Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a synagogue in New York City which has welcomed the LGBTQ+ community since the 1970s, commissioned mezuzahs for their building created by a Polish company which makes “original casts of real mezuzahs that were on the houses of Jews who lived in Poland, before they perished in the Holocaust” out of bronze (Ben-Lulu). These contemporary Judaica are a highly creative documentation of history, and yet also a symbol of renewed values and understandings about Jewish belief– especially in the context of the synagogue whose entryway they mark.

Conclusion

Analyzing inscription in the context of religion is incomplete without examining materiality. I have just argued how repeated technique and interactions with physical objects create identification with a religious culture within one’s habitus. I’m certain that those with lived experience within other religions can relate to this claim, however I was only able to properly represent these ideas within the context of what I am familiar with. Although my own personal sense of faith is uncertain, and although I hold certain critical opinions about organized religion, my own identity as a Jewish individual is something I consider very important in my life. It is difficult to explain how my life experience, this “habitus”, is inscribed so beautifully and painfully in who I am. Writing this blog has actually allowed me to convey certain ideas which I have never had the words to articulate before. As Bollmer says, things are practiced first before they are ever described. I agree with Professor Schandorf that Materialist Media Theory provides a lot of good grounding for conversations that involve and transcend media studies, and I hope to be able to use it more in the future.

Blog post by Naomi Brown

Works Cited

Benesh, Mika. “Judaica.” Federation CJA, www.federationcja.org/fr/judaica/. 

Ben-Lulu, Elazar. Doorposts of Inclusion: Trans Pride Mezuzah as a Marker of Jewish-Queer Space, Taylor & Francis Online, 8 May 2025, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17432200.2025.2484500#abstract.  

Bollmer, Grant. “Inscriptions and Techniques.” Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 51–78. Bloomsbury Collections. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337086.0005.

Central Conference of American Rabbis. “Platforms.” Central Conference of American Rabbis, 23 Jan. 2018, www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/.  

Issitt, Micah , and Carlyn Main. “Judaism.” Hidden Religion: The Greatest Mysteries and Symbols of the World’s Religious Beliefs. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014. 3–32. Bloomsbury Collections. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400663277.0006. 

My Jewish Learning. “The Shema.” My Jewish Learning, 16 Jan. 2024, www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-shema/.