from Prooftexts Volume 20, Numbers 1-2

Embodiments: An Introduction

Anne Golomb Hoffman

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
 

Feminist theory works against the objectification of women, by insisting on inquiry into the place of women in culture. Slowly and persistently, this inquiry discloses and thus unsettles what might otherwise remain in place and unquestioned, exposing the myth of the "natural" as itself a cultural construct, an effect of signification. Examining readers' resistances and discomforts forms an important part of this effort, opening up space in which to think through gender, as we study the alignments of male and female that belong to the past and those we find in the present. We find ourselves thus at a moment of change in which it becomes possible to reflect on what we know about the "terrain" we call gender. As readers and scholars, we can approach the texts of our predecessors and our own, to study the mapping of gender in the writing. Whether or not the "ground" itself changes, our maps do.

The essays in this special issue of Prooftexts explore the cultural uses of gender in biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern texts. Reading through the lens of gender, as practiced by all our contributors, addresses issues of danger, purity, contamination, boundary, permeability, lack, and wholeness. These issues play themselves out corporeally and in terms of corporate identity as well, on the level of the individual and the collective, yielding a set of fruitful encounters in which Jewish studies meets gender studies through the attention each gives to bodies and borders. The readings in this issue of Prooftexts belong to this historical moment in their examination of gender as an organizing category in our understanding of the world.

Growing out of feminist research, gender studies addresses embodiment, a fraught question for each of us. What is that "body," the locus for sensations from without and from within, permeable and yet intact? One's experience takes in a sense of the body whole and the body in fragments. Body whole: the coherence of body parts into an image of a whole, a corporate unity, that yields a working sense of identity. Body in parts: the imaginary coherence that is produced out of a fragmented disarray of body parts and sensations that Jacques Lacan likens to a painting of Hieronymus Bosch.1

As a form of resistance to detached abstractions or universalizing trends that erase differences and disembody utterances, an insistence on embodiment can be considered a major and lasting contribution of feminist theory that alters reading practices and our understanding of texts. Thus might we work toward an embodied knowing, one that acknowledges the realm of bodily experience without necessarily assuming that "the body" is a stable object, there to be known.

While the terrain addressed by our essayists takes in texts from biblical to contemporary, each participates in the present moment of speculation in which economies of power and knowledge, desire and aggression, open to our scrutiny. Borrowing from Luce Irigaray, I would expand the concept of speculation into "specularization," a neologism that invites us to think of the risk-taking of economic speculation, to question where one makes one's intellectual investments, and to keep in mind the notion of the specular, the visible, with particular attention to the "spectacle" of femininity. (Irigaray goes even further in her associative inquiry, invoking "speculum" as a mirror, a philosophical instrument, and as a gynecological tool for probing the hidden recesses of a woman's body.)2

Consider as an example of "specularization" the subversive feminism of Orly Castel-Bloom, in Sippurim bilti-retsoniyim, counterstories with a feminist edge that respond with an abundance of satiric verve to cultural assumptions as to woman's place.3 As my own gesture toward introducing this journal issue, I suggest reading Castel-Bloom's Sippurim bilti-retsoniyim (a title that might be translated as "unwanted" or "unwilled" stories) as if they were a reply to Agnon's Sefer hama`asim (The book of deeds), where ma`asim (deeds) evokes associations of the Yiddish mayses or tales, but carries as well as the sense of action contained in the Hebrew ma`asim, a sense that is rendered ironic by the very lack of action that characterizes these stories.4 Each writer takes up not simply failures of will, but a segment of fictional terrain where plot is more a function of poorly understood repetition than it is of causally related incidents, and characters--male and female--are complicit with larger forces of which they seem to be unaware. The point of this comparative exercise? To catch each writer in the moment of creative resistance, as each reformulates the materials of culture in a subversion that produces the text; to understand each in terms of the impetus to intervene in an existing cultural order, which for Castel-Bloom is the system of gender.

Putting his encyclopedic knowledge of classical Jewish texts to startling literary uses, Agnon was, in Gershon Shaked's phrase, a "revolutionary traditionalist," who drew on the resources of Hebrew in all the strata of its history in a writing at once subversive and conservative.5 For Agnon, the ma`asim (deeds) that were not deeds and the mayses (tales) that were not tales constituted a resistance to narrative that produced a new fictional form, but one that held on to its Jewish roots. The act of writing remained for Agnon loaded with implications, never innocent, in a world structured around the Torah, God's blueprint for the world.

By contrast, Castel-Bloom, who came of age artistically in the 1980s and 90s, declares her independence of Jewish traditions in a writing that is relentlessly secular, offering at times brilliantly biting images of such Zionist icons as A. D. Gordon, the visionary ideologue of a return to the soil, who appears in Dolly siti (Dolly city) as an organic farmer, high on chlorophyll.6 But Castel-Bloom's target is not so much the Zionist enterprise or the history of modern Israel, as it is the enclosure of women in systematic assumptions that curb desire, aggression, and, ultimately, preclude subjectivity.

What does it mean for a woman to write, we might join Castel-Bloom to ask. To whose order must she conform? And what does it mean to be an active subject? What is the relation between her sexuality and her creativity? To whom does her body belong? What constitutes excess? "Hasoferet kezonat tsameret" (The writer as a high-class whore), one of the stories in the collection, plays out some responses to these questions. Building on the feminine nouns of the title, soferet (writer or "authoress") and zonah (whore), it opens with an account of the success of the author as a writer of popular fiction, while describing her as if she were the accoutrement of success--a Barbie doll of a woman who looks good in a bikini--rather than a person who has earned fame through work.

This mix of attributes is followed by a starkly emblematic auto accident: one day as she is out driving her red car, one of five that she owns, habelamim bagdu ba--the brakes betrayed her (111). The very phrase underscores and italicizes some feminine stereotypes, as it invokes the moralizing suggestion that this woman does not belong in the driver's seat, cannot handle control and direction of the car or of herself. Castel-Bloom pushes this morality tale further into a send-up of corrective medicine and surgical intervention as forms of social control and the regulation of women. After the crash and massive injuries that she sustains, this woman/writer is sent to Houston, where she undergoes seventy-two hours of surgery, following which the doctor tells a waiting relative that she has been "saved," at the cost of her libido. How? No ruah or inspiration of her own for her, she is now an automaton, who is activated and comes to life only when another person breathes into her. Noting the loss of her capacity for sexual pleasure, the doctor nevertheless claims success in preserving her capacity to write: once someone breathes into her, this breath from the outside travels through the passageways of her mouth and vocal cords, down her esophagus to the veins of her hand and on into her long fingers; her hand is thus activated and begins to write, and her vagina exudes a yellowish fluid. A cousin, who was once in love with her, tries out this innovative procedure. Marveling at the "medical-literary miracle" that results, he runs to get the doctor, only to return to find the woman dead. Little matter. She has fulfilled expectations: a yellowish fluid has issued from her vagina, and the pages of the story that we read are strewn about her on the bed. So much for the writer as a high-class whore.

Castel-Bloom's brief tale resonates with a deeply angry feminist critique that pictures the woman writer initially as a doll baby, only to dismember and reassemble her as a literal automaton, who exudes fluid and words when activated by another person. As a fluid- or word-producing mechanism, her body is a machine not unlike the little red car whose brakes fail her. Two harsh views rendered equivalent in their insistent denial of subjectivity to the woman.

However angry or one-sided this feminist critique may be, it plays an important role in a process that opens up gender for interrogation in all its forms of expression. This brief tale thus locates itself in a tension between opposing, yet mutually implicated, experiences of embodiment: the body as a sealed container and the violent disruption of that container. (Serge Leclaire notes that "unity is but a fiction and a 'body' always fragmented.")7

The inquiry into the construction of borders and the maintenance of distinctions among bodies--corporate entities on the level of the individual and the collective--attracts the interest of scholars and critics who seek to challenge and even to undo those boundaries, at least to the extent of unsettling traditional hierarchies and oppositions that elevate one group at the expense of another. As the title of a recent collection of essays, Jews and Other Differences, suggests, Jewish studies finds itself today drawn into inquiry into the shifting boundaries that demarcate nations, ethnicities, genders, and belief systems.8 Given this impetus and the interest it attracts, it is inevitable that Jewish studies and gender studies intersect at a point that feminist theory may be said to have marked out: the charged body of the other.

Within the texts and histories that constitute Jewish tradition, we find the body of the woman as a marked other. Feminist research has moved in several fruitful directions as increasing numbers of scholars turn their attention to classical Jewish texts. Our issue of Prooftexts opens with an analysis of recent trends by Adele Reinhartz, who reviews A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible. Under the broad rubric of modes of resistant reading, she accounts for the range of positions, which she identifies as formalist, ideological, and intertextual, from which scholars approach texts. Not least of all, we can be grateful to Reinhartz for her categorization of the theories and methods that shape this multivolume endeavor, a project that charts a sea change in the reading of classical texts.

Reading against the grain produces new angles of vision. Thus, Bonna Devora Haberman's fiercely argued examination of the figure of the sotah (the adulterous woman) takes the biblical text with utmost seriousness. Hers is an essay that can be read as a continuation of a dialogue with the Rabbis and all subsequent readers, as she insistently draws our attention to the body of the woman as an embattled terrain where issues of boundary and penetration are engaged and fought out. From a feminist perspective, the body of the sotah challenges the regulatory system that is patriarchy, by resisting rules of ownership that control not only to whom the body belongs, but to whom it is open. Adultery thus threatens the system that maintains the integrity of the body that is the nation. Literally, the sotah is the one who "turns." In Haberman's reflections, to "turn" is to subvert, to move in a direction that is not in conformity with the larger group, regulated by law. Through her impassioned and rigorous interrogation of the textualized uses of the woman's body, Haberman gives voice to the sotah.

Both Haberman and Natan Margalit explore the appropriation of the territory of the feminine--the bodies of women--in service of the national enterprise, a project that entails fixing borders, categorizing and gendering behaviors. Haberman's embattled sotah encounters Margalit's structural analysis of the place of women in Mishnah Ketubbot. Opting for an anthropological and literary approach, in preference to linear modes of reading, Margalit works toward an understanding of the logic of the whole in terms of relationships among its component parts. His examination of the mishnaic text explores the structural connections between speech and sexuality, the courtroom and the bedroom, the social and the sexual, as enacted by men around and through the bodies of women. Margalit establishes a focus on gender as a central category in the text, as opposed to atomistic readings that fall short of recognizing the extent to which gender organizes our modes of reading.

In a novel turn of the text, Tova Rosen proposes that we take at its word a fourteenth-century male writer's fantasy of being a woman, reading it as an expression of discontent with the constraints of masculinity, a deliberate "transsexual travesty," rather than as a momentary lapse or a joke, as traditional readings would have it. Rosen's contemporary rereading of Qalonymus ben Qalonymus's Even bohan explores a space in which to undo a gender hierarchy and to dislodge fixed categories. Text play, as Rosen reads it, becomes a form of sex play in which double meanings act out the "gender troubles" of men. The effect is not so much to undo difference as it is to allow for the play of ambiguity within the scope of masculinity. Attentive to tensions and movements that resist containment in simple oppositions, Rosen's postmodern reading explores gender identity as a site of uncertainty.

Traditional concepts of the author, which assume control over text and meaning, do not necessarily survive this challenge, as Barthes and Foucault have shown.9 At the same time, controversies over authorial function have provoked a certain feminist anger. Thus the challenge to authorial control clashes with the feminist concern to recover women as authors, to give to women the capacity to name themselves.10 Contributing to this area of inquiry, Kathryn Hellerstein gives us her thoughts on the choices and conflicts she faces in choosing to translate women poets and to rethink the canons of modernist and Yiddish poetry, while drawing on experiences of body and self as a poet, a reader, and a woman. Although Hellerstein acknowledges the fluidity of relations among author, translator, and reader, as well as the indeterminate borders among them, she also retains a strong sense of the identity of each that finds expression in the particular word choices each makes. Hers is thus a feminism that acknowledges a broad terrain of language that exceeds and eludes the grasp of any one of its users (no matter how strong a poet), even as she illuminates the individual struggle to shape discourse that is central to the creative act. We can recover women as authors and revise the canon, Hellerstein demonstrates, while also retaining and continuing the critique of authorial subjectivity.

Lawrence Rosenwald's dialogue with Hellerstein over strategies of translation and editorial choice demonstrates the value of comparative translations as a means to gain new insight into the poetic text. In the three-part dialogue that develops among Hellerstein, Rosenwald, and Anita Norich, the facets of gender are woven into a larger fabric that includes a literary historical understanding of the politics of language choice, along with awareness of the shifting styles and norms of taste in modern Jewish life. Norich extends this inquiry from the immediacy of the translator's choices to include a broader historical awareness and to remind us of the intersections of race with gender in any modern Jewish context.

As we open this space of inquiry, we find the figure of the Jew as racialized other. Jewish history in the modern period is intimately intertwined with the development of ideologies of racial difference. And we see that distinctions of race are cast in gendered terms that construct male Jews as feminized and pathological. Jewish male feminization, a trope whose history goes back into the Middle Ages in Europe, constitutes today a significant locus for contemporary inquiry.11 Historically, ideologies of race, with gender as part of their baggage, bore fruit in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it is striking to note, as Sara Horowitz points out, how little gender has figured as a significant (or signifying) category in the study of Holocaust writing. Horowitz makes us aware of the denial that is necessary to sustain the claim that gender is irrelevant or even trivial in our understanding of the Nazi genocide and Jewish responses to it. Not only a critical survey of contemporary scholarly work, Horowitz's essay is itself a reweaving, accomplished through retrospection, that gives place to gender as implicit in any act of perception.

Responding to our call for inquiry, the essays in this special issue of Prooftexts interrogate traditional boundaries to explore new territories in the reading of gender and to take into account feminine subjectivities--women as subjects. Embattled subjects, even. Thus, while Hellerstein explores the possibility of feminist translation, Wendy Zierler approaches the poetic struggles of Yokheved Bat-Miriam to voice a woman's claim to the land, and Yael Feldman gives her account of Netiva Ben Yehuda's moves to unsettle gender in Hebrew. Each of these essays might lead one to reflect on the relation of the critic to her writer-subject and the importance of this relationship to the intellectual remapping that is criticism.

Against a literary historical context in which male poets appropriate maternal functions in service of a mythic masculine creativity, Zierler examines the struggle of a poet to voice a subjectivity that defies the norms of her time. Intermingling subject and object in a fluid femininity that encompasses the poet and the land, Bat-Miriam constitutes the land as an active female subject, a wanderer. Gilbert and Gubar's madwoman in the attic, the displaced expression of the nineteenth-century female author's rebellion, becomes in Hebrew literary tradition the self-contradictory mad persona of the land, as Bat-Miriam's poetry celebrates an excess that cannot be contained within conventional maps of gender.12 By remapping literary history to make room for Bat-Miriam's revolutionary conception of the subject, Zierler deepens and complicates our reading of the past.

An additional piece of literary history becomes visible as we move from Zierler's work on Bat-Miriam to Yael Feldman's exploration of Netiva Ben Yehuda's gender discomforts. Feldman enables us to read the writer's struggles with gender as a form of autobiography that uses wordplay to work out a new conception of the writer as subject. Ben Yehuda reformulates words in order to disrupt gender alignments and to diminish the distance between written and spoken Hebrew in a form of literary experimentation whose implications may not have been fully realized by either the writer or her audience. At the same time, Feldman investigates the relative silence of women among writers of the Palmach generation in light of conflicts between the wish to transgress boundaries and the fear of loss of identity in the process. These conflicts notwithstanding, Netiva Ben Yehuda's work offers Feldman rich material for a critique of gender theory and its impact on Hebrew letters.

One might argue for a reading of the essays offered here as studies of the shifting relations among texts, bodies, writers, and words. Gender becomes a function of position in discourse, and we find ourselves examining the construction of gender in language. This is not to suggest that differences do not exist beyond the frame of language; it is rather to seek insight into the ways in which differences are encoded into systems of thought that regulate our knowledge of ourselves and of one another. Whether we gain insight, ultimately, into an underlying "ground" of gender difference, I do not claim to know; I have no trouble, however, in affirming the value of these investigations to the project of enlarging the space in which we work. To engage in this inquiry is to respond to an ethical demand for more inclusive modes of reading, as when Wayne Booth takes as his subject "the ethical value of the stories we tell each other."13 Feminist studies have encouraged us to look at our bodies as we know them in and through culture and to interrogate what we know as the product of established oppositions between male and female. Once we realize that we cannot simply extricate ourselves from these deeply embedded habits of thought, we can begin to approach writing as process and to open up to possibilities that go beyond the constraints of simple oppositions resting on claims of absolute difference. Reading through the lens of gender can unsettle distances and disturb boundaries, demonstrating to us both our ongoing need of stable maps and the awareness that, as much as we may need them, they are fictions of stability.

English Department

Fordham University

NOTES

1 Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Practice," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 4-5.

2 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Catherine C. Gill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 172-79.

3 Orly Castel-Bloom, Sippurim bilti-retsoniyim (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1993).

4 S. Y. Agnon, Sefer hama`asim, in Samukh venir'eh, vol. 6 of Kol sipurav shel Sh. Y. Agnon, 8 vols. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1968).

5 Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York and London: New York University Press, 1989).

6 Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly siti (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1992).

7 Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 55.

8 Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

9 In "The Death of the Author," Barthes observes that writing is "that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 168. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" trans. Josue V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979).

10 Responding to Foucault and to Barthes, Cheryl Walker argues for "reanimating the author, preserving author-function--in terms of a politics of author recognition" (553). Cheryl Walker, "Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author," Critical Inquiry 16 (spring 1990): 551-71. See also Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 878-902.

11 See George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997). See also my essay "Bodies and Borders: The Politics of Gender in Contemporary Israeli Fiction," in The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England and Brandeis University Press, 1997).

12 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979).

13 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 1988), p. 15.

IU Press Journals
Home Page
More about Prooftexts
Table of Contents
Library
Recommendation
Advance
Information
Copyright
Clearance