The Time in the Body: Cultural Construction of Femininity in Ultraorthodox Kindergartens for Girls

Abstract

This study focuses on the coming into being of young gendered subjects through their bodies and their habitus. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ultraorthodox (Haredi) Jewish kindergartens for girls in Jerusalem, Israel. My analysis explores the cultural constructions of femininity and the body as these are revealed through practices regarding clothing, hair, voice, food consumption, gestures, and whole‐body movements. I suggest that the value of modesty, characterized by abstinence and restraint, becomes the cornerstone of Haredi femininity, which is at the same time embodied in “doing,” in certain acts that become feminine rituals of cultural affiliation. Furthermore, I argue that the girls embody a unique cultural concept of time, which reflects the importance attributed in their culture to reliving the past as a formative experience of both present and future identities. More specifically, I delineate the development of a distinctly female bodily version of Jewish time, which is characterized by a particular synthesis of cultural and individual orders of time.