The Corporeal Turn

Abstract

The Corporeal Turn Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor, and Professor of Performance Studies, Affiliated Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies What has been called the "corporeal turn" in recent Jewish studies is provoking anxiety. If "Judaism's mind has been more interesting and more influential than Judaism's body," a distinction worthy of study in its own right, critics are calling for "a swing back to its more traditional mooring in the text (which, in any case, has often dealt with the body)." But those who took the corporeal turn never left the text behind. Rather, they brought a concern with the body to the text and found new ways to read and think about those texts. What troubles the critics would seem to lie elsewhere. Reviewing several books published in the 1990s, Hillel Halkin characterized the trend as "feminizing Jewish Studies," which he did not intend as a compliment.1 The problem was not that their authors ignored the text.2 Rather, it was the way they read the texts; their approach was marked, in his view, by "postmodern thinking," skepticism, a "non- to anti-Zionist" stance, an affirmation of "Diaspora Jewish identity," and above all an open embrace of feminism and feminist theory (and, though he does not say so in so many words, a preoccupation with sexuality and homosexuality). Non-Orthodox Jewish America is, in his view, suffering from deep confusion, exacerbated (if not caused) by the "sexual revolution," and this kind of work just makes things worse. A firestorm ensued, fueled a few months later by Gabriel Schoenfeld's wholesale condemnation of "the voguish hybrid known as gender studies" in Holocaust scholarship.3 [End Page 447] Claiming that this trend "does not yet have a name," Halkin called it "the new Jewish scholarship." A year earlier, Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin had announced "the new Jewish cultural studies," and a year later The Chronicle of Higher Education published its own assessment of "the new Jewish studies."4 In an endorsement for the Boyarins' book, Eric Santner defined the new Jewish cultural studies as work that brings "to bear recent innovations in the study of gender and sexuality on readings of canonical Jewish texts."5 While this may represent a corporeal turn in Jewish textual studies, it does not represent the full potential for a corporeal turn in Jewish studies more broadly conceived, a topic to which I will return. What is new in "the new Jewish cultural studies" is not only the concern with gender and sexuality (corporeality is not to be limited to these important topics in any case) but also the cultural turn in literary studies and the emergence of cultural studies.6 Text has not gone away. Rather, the corporeal turn has intensified interest in text and offered new ways to think about text as a social, corporeal, and material practice.7 [End Page 448] If anything, text is everything. So powerful a metaphor for culture has text become that anything usefully understood as text has become fair game for "reading," including film, performance, landscape, image, fashion, the city, and last but not least, the body—note that Daniel Boyarin's appointment at the University of California is in "Talmudic culture" and Carnal Israel is subtitled "reading sex in Talmudic culture" (emphasis added).8 Scholars speak of "writing the body." They speak of the body as "the inscribed surface of events."9 "Socially inscribed," the body "becomes the text that is written upon it."10 But, as Elliot Wolfson has demonstrated so eruditely in Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism, the textualization of the body and embodiment of text are not new Jewish preoccupations. The people of the book are also the people of the body, to paraphrase Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, an early contributor to the new Jewish cultural studies, and, as even canonical Jewish texts amply demonstrate, the body is not only good to think about, it is also good to think with.11 Has an interest in the body lessened the "textualist" emphasis in Jewish studies? No. But it has altered "its traditional mooring in the text" by changing where and how scholars are...