NASHIM 17: Special Issue
Sexuality in Jewish Contexts
From the introduction by Tova Hartman
"For many feminist women and men, religion continues to be a place they not only return to for comfort, but also continually and substantively revisit, with passion and rigor. Once it might have been possible to take for granted that religion is inherently oppressive in its patriarchal hierarchies; but if it were exclusively oppressive, more people, and certainly more feminists, would have made a clean break. Instead, we have Muslim academics like Fadwa El Guindi claiming the veil as tool of feminist liberation. In my own research, I have heard women express a wide range of feelings about the traditional Jewish woman’s menstrual rites, from enthusiasm, to indifference, to contempt—some times all voiced by the same woman! And I have watched gay men and women, who readily acknowledge that their sexuality is delegitimized within traditional Judaism, converting to much higher levels of observance, in some cases becoming Orthodox.
What binds these people – what binds all of us – to remain within this seemingly endless conversation?
One reason for the tenacity with which feminism and religion have held onto each other, is that, on the one hand, sexuality is an embodied experience that cannot ultimately be relegated to theoretical analysis. At the same time, religion itself, while always open to criticism, proves curiously (or naturally) resistant to ultimate dismissal. The analyses of sexual cultures undertaken by the writers in this issue demonstrate in different ways that, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, it is “bodies that matter” as much as the more abstract formulations of sexual ideology. Each author adds richly to our sense of what can be included within the protean field of sexuality and feminism, and expands the range of implications that jump, like sparks, out of the friction between theoretical models and the sense people make of their daily lives."
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