“Women’s bodies, women’s blood: The politics of gender in rabbinic literature” Ph.D. Dissertation by Charlotte Fonrobert

Abstract: This dissertation argues for the importance of a feminist hermeneutics which refuses to submit to the dominant androcentric discourse of rabbinic literature. Analyzing the talmudic discussions of menstrual regulations (Niddah), it engages in readings of select texts which have as their goal to brush the androcentrism of the literature against the grain. In this, it takes issue with those feminist critics who have been content with a diagnosis of rabbinic culture as entirely patriarchal. Within these parameters this project pursues various approaches. One strategy is to search for and to analyze those moments where the androcentric perspective of the rabbinic discourse on female corporeality is ruptured. Employing methods of talmudic criticism I show that the Talmud produces a reading of the Mishnah which subverts the Mishnah’s androcentric construction of the female body in primarily architectural terms. Instead, the Talmud can be shown to think about female bodies as sentient which prevents their complete objectification. This reading allows for an alternative reality to break into the one which the texts construct as the dominant one. The overarching goal of this project is to move away from a perspective which regards the rabbinic discourse on menstrual impurity exclusively as a product of patriarchalism and serving male interests only. In the context of the rabbinic project to preserve biblical Israel as a corporeal community, sustained by practices inscribed on gender-specific bodies, I argue that the discourse of gender has to be read in conjunction with the discourse of ethnicity. In this context it is then possible to think of women as having a positive investment in observing biblical traditions concerning menstrual regulations rather than merely being forced to do so. To strengthen this argument I use examples in rabbinic literature as well as the example of the Didascalia Apostolorum which presents the extensive and unique argument of the formerly Jewish women in the community for a practice of menstrual separation. Hence, the discourse on menstrual regulations may serve as a ground to rethink the relationship between the politics of gender and the politics of ethnicity, to rethink what is at stake for women in theorizing corporeality or identities of embodiment.