Embodiments: An Introduction

Abstract

Embodiments:An Introduction Anne Golomb Hoffman 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 [End Page 1] 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 hamaʿasim (The book of deeds), where maʿasim (deeds) evokes associations of the Yiddish mayses or tales, but carries as well as the sense of action contained in the Hebrew maʿasim, a sense that is rendered ironic by the very lack of action that characterizes...