| This dissertation attempts to deconstruct the narrow definitions of Jewish women that are the legacy of rabbinic and liberal Judaisms. It argues that within these traditions, marriage contracts and rape laws worked in tandem to confine Jewish women to very narrow definitions of heterosexual domesticity. In this way, Jewish women's agency, their ability to position themselves within these various narratives remained limited. With this in mind, this dissertation turns to feminist literary theory and cultural studies in order to rethink this legacy. Using the tools of these critical theories it offers close readings of the ketubbah, the rabbinic marriage contract, liberal marriage and rape laws, and the trope of marriage in liberal Jewish theological discourse. By teasing out the traces of the construction of gender within these texts it challenges the presumed naturalness of these arrangements. Juxtaposing depictions of legal heterosexual contracts, marriage contracts, with their illegal counterparts, rabbinic and liberal rape laws, this dissertation challenges the violence that enforces and theologically sanctions these contractual arrangements. It then turns to feminist literary theory in search of critical tools and a different vision of Jewish feminist identity in terms of "home." This too is not a simple task for even within this theorizing, this dissertation argues that there are Jewish battles yet to be fought. In order for Jewish feminists to use feminist literary theory we must learn to wrestle even with our feminist allies. It is only in so doing that Jewish feminists can begin to claim an identity as occasioned while also acknowledging the complexity and multiplicity of our identities. In other words, it is only in reconfiguring our various homes, Jewish and feminist, that we can begin to claim our Jewish feminist identity/ies. |
