Foucault Mekhitzah 1
Foucault and Jewish Feminism:
The Mekhitzah as Dividing Practice
Shira Wolosky
To Jewish feminists, reading Foucault is an uncanny experience.
Foucault himself was occupied neither with feminism nor with Judaism.
However, although his viewpoint is resolutely male, the terms of his
investigations have proved extremely fruitful for feminist analysis.1 As to
Judaism, although Foucault at first focused on modern topics, in his last works
on The History of Sexuality he turned to ancient regimes and their
organization of the practices of selfhood.2 Judaism in any case would not fall
into the periodization of modernity Foucault outlines, since it never was
governed by sovereign kingship or other centralized forms of power, but
always through the institutional forms that are the objects of Foucauldian
analysis. Indeed, Foucault's whole notion of praxis as the level on which
analysis takes place is extremely suggestive for Judaism, which has always
been conducted as an organization of material life, not, as has been claimed
through centuries of Christian polemic, as a negation of spiritual meaning, but
as its concretization and site of experience.3 This is one significant way in
which Judaic culture intersects with contemporary theory, that is, in the postdualist insistence on concrete practices as the locus and expression of
cultural meanings.4
Foucault's own attitude, however, towards institutionalized practices is
highly suspicious, whereas Judaism invests in institutional life as the very
Foucault Mekhitzah 2
forms through which individuals are both shaped and come into significant
experience. In this, Judaic culture raises questions of critique regarding
Foudauldian theory. Yet the converse is also true. For the force of
Foucualdian institutional analysis is striking when brought to bear on Judaic
gender practices. This is the case for a range of strictures regarding the
regulation of women's bodies, including dress, purity, and other rituals. Here,
I will focus on the Mechitzah, the partition separating men from women, and
the issues it raises of spatial organization. Such arrangements and
compartmentalizations of space are in fact the first category Foucault
addresses in his discussion of the regulation of bodies. Moreover, his
analysis of disciplinary space is especially resonant in what has become
today in certain communities not only an increased enforcement of Mekhitzah
but its proliferation into wider and wider areas of social life.
The Mekhitzah is a partition that divides between genders, originally in
situations of prayer services. No longer found in Reform, Conservative, and
egalitarian Orthodox synagogues or social settings, it remains in traditional
Orthodox settings a central and in many cases an increasingly enforced
practice. This is partly due to the way the Mekhitzah has become a focally
symbolic line of demarcation not only between women and men, but between
different denominations: the sign of orthodoxy itself.5 Within many Orthodox
contexts, Mekhitzah practices are highly charged and carefully watched as
indicators of authenticity and religious status. Gender, as so often in
modernity, becomes the lightning rod of identity practices.
But gender is not only symbolic. It is also a concrete practice which,
from a Foucauldian viewpoint, raises questions about the relationship
Foucault Mekhitzah 3
between Halakhic rulings and extra-Halakhic considerations in Orthodox
contexts. The notion that men and women should be separated during prayer
and in other ritual contexts seems to have been accepted in Jewish tradition
at least since late Second Temple times and is recognized by modern
Orthodox religious authorities as a halakhic requirement, one borne out in the
architecture of Orthodox synagogues.6 Historical studies of the Mekhitzah
and of its Halakhic bases, along with the wider topic of women's participation
in the synagogue, have investigated this question of gender separation in the
Temple, in the medieval period, in early Modern as well as contemporary
times. The first mention of Mekhitzah is in the context of the Temple, where,
however, it is cited as an anomaly. The Temple contained an inner court and
a women's court, but the latter was not segregated by gender, including
instead both men and women. Separation apparently was instituted under the
particular occasion of the Water-Drawing Ceremony, with its carnivalesque
atmosphere of free encounter between women and men.7 In subsequent
periods a variety of Mekhitzah practices have been pursued. Edward Fram
reports that by the late sixteenth century at least, formal space was
increasingly being made for women in the synagogue, with some participation
in regular prayer, due not least to the women's own initiatives.8 Moshe
Rosman discusses women in the synagogue along with a myriad of gendered
practices in early Modern Poland, noting that synagogue attendance became
more typical of women during this period. This is reflected in changes in the
synagogue architecture, including the construction of weibershule –separate
women's prayer services in which women conduct prayer while remaining
segregated; as well as women's sections (ezrot nashim) – separate women's
Foucault Mekhitzah 4
areas with women prayer leaders mediating between the men's prayer
services and the women's, again very much determined through the initiatives
of women.9 Women also participated publically in ceremonies such as
circumcision and burials.10 Today, there are many innovations in which
Mekhitzahs are retained but in ways that allow women a greater sense of
participation even while they remain separate on their side of the Mekhitzah.
In these contemporary contexts, the experience of Mekhitzah very much
depends on how and where the Mechitzah is concretely instituted: its
positioning, its opacity, its height, its extent.
What emerges from these historical studies is the fact that the
practices of separation of men and women in the synagogue have been
varied at different times and places. Although this variety was conducted
within forms accepted within Orthodoxy of Halakhic procedures for
determining how and what kind of Mekhitzahs be instituted, the results in
different cases differed, depending upon cultural context and other
considerations including the activism and desires of the women themselves.
Thus, the application and understanding of Halakhah regarding the Mekhitzah
even within Orthodoxy has not been uniform, and took shape in terms of what
Clifford Geertz calls "thick description," the particular cultural situation in
which these modes were instituted as understood from many directions,
including contact with other cultures, economic exigencies, threats to Jewish
identity, etc.11 This variety discloses a certain leeway even within traditional
Halakhic discourses and rulings within differing cultural situations.12
Therefore, in considering both the intensification and proliferation of
Mekhitzah in contemporary Orthodox Jewish life, reference to Halakhah in
Foucault Mekhitzah 5
itself does not explain changes to increasing stringency such as are occurring
in contemporary Orthodox settings. Mekhitzahs today are, in many Orthodox
contexts, spreading outward from the synagogue to more and more venues.
Mekhitzahs are increasingly found at lectures, at concerts, at weddings and
Bar Mitzvahs, not only during the ceremonies but during the festive meals, so
that women are kept distant from the Chuppah and even the appearance of
the bride's mother and the bride herself under the Chuppah is minimized.
During this past year, 2008, a longstanding custom of Chabad to host men
and women during Sukkoth celebrations was suspended in Jerusalem, with
women asked not to attend. Mekhitzah's are increasingly found at the graves
of Tzaddikim, as also at the Western Wall, although there was no Mekhitzah
there prior to 1967.13 And there is now a phenomenon in Israel of separate
work spaces for women, and of public buses being divided into men's sections
and women's, with women assigned to the back of the bus.14
This proliferation of Mechitzahs is highly suspicious from a Foucauldian
point of view. Seen through Foucault, the spread of Mekhitzah serves not
only the religious purposes it is claimed to but also the institution of power
through gender hierarchies in which one group – men – are situated as
dominant over another group – women. As with various institutions discussed
by Foucault, the hardening claims of religious stringency through proliferation
of Mekhitzah can be seen as part of a systemic exercise of power and control.
What is claimed to be no more than a logical or intrinsically Halakhic set of
considerations, in practice incorporates many different motives and goals.
Foucault raises suspicions that power hierarchy is one such motive for the
spreading of the Mekhitzah, discussions and practices of which in any case,
Foucault Mekhitzah 6
as I will argue below, do not take women's viewpoints and voices into
consideration but rather occlude women as religious subjects.
The Mekhitzah is one site of the fraught contrary commitments of
Orthodox Jewish feminists. The quandary of the feminist committed to
Halkhic frameworks of law and its interpretation as practiced through the
centuries is how and how much to sustain such Halakhic practices and
procedures if and when these seem to conflict with feminist principles of
equality and dignity to women as to men. Judaism is an ancient culture, and
in its history it in many ways gave to women dignity and protection, albeit only
within the paradigms of women as subordinated to men which have been the
universal norms through all human cultures in the world.15 It is under the
pressure of the rise of women's movements during the last two hundred years
that these basic paradigms have come into question, including within Jewish
contexts. The challenge for Orthodox feminists is how to remain true to
feminism without abandoning Halakhah, to which they are committed because
of its historical continuities, its rich tradition, the rigor of its practices as
binding to community and culture, as well as the divine mandate it is seen to
have by Orthodox Observant Jews, as interpreted through Halakhically
ordered procedures. Reference to Foucault clarifies, on the one hand, not
only historical but theoretical understandings of Mekhitzah practices as they
problematically situate women. On the other, Jewish feminism helps
articulate the strengths and resources of traditional institutions and the
motives for remaining committed to them beyond any offered by Foucauldian
critique.
Foucault Mekhitzah 7
I.
Seeing the Subject
Foucault in his work offers a meticulous anatomy of institutional norms and
how they situate the individuals within them. From Foucault's viewpoint,
institutions are themselves networks of power, which exercise control over
their subjects through intersecting distributions of authority and regulations.
Institutional life is thus regarded by Foucault as directive and restrictive, both
producing and controlling the energies distributed inside it.
Within these networks, the positioning of the body constitutes a central
strategy and even basis for institutional power. The body is the primary
concrete space within which the material and historical practices that organize
experience are directed. Foucault's Discipline and Punish sets out to explore
just these questions of bodily practice and positioning. It delineates what he
calls the “political economy of the body” and the “political technology of the
body,” “its forces, utility and docility, distribution and submission,” the “hold of
power relations on it, investing it, marking it, training it, torturing it, forcing it to
carry out tasks, perform ceremonies, emit signs.”16 As he explains in his
chapter on “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, the body increasingly
finds itself
in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints,
prohibitions, or obligations. . .exercising upon it a subtle coercion,
obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—
movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over
the active body.17
As Paul Rabinow sums up in his “Introduction” to the Foucault Reader:
“Foucault has been consistently interested in the shifting ways that the body
and the social institutions related to it have entered into political relations.”18
Such techniques of power on the level of the body – what Foucault
Foucault Mekhitzah 8
calls microphysics" or "biopower" – constitute discipline and take place
through specific modes. Biopower implies
an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the
activity rather than its result, and it is exercised according to a
codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, and
movement. These methods, which made possible the meticulous
control of the operations of the body which assured the constant
subjection of its forces and imposed on them a relation of docility-utility,
might be called “disciplines.”
The first method through which such disciplinary coercions of the body are
instituted Foucault calls "the arts of distribution" or "dividing practices."
"In the first place," Foucault writes, "discipline proceeds from the distribution
of individuals in space." Coercion takes shape on a primary level through the
positioning and organizing of the person’s body, on the concrete and material
level of bodily dispositions through "partitions." As he elaborates in "The
Subject and Power," “the subject is objectified by a process of division
whether within himself or from others.”19
The Mekhitzah in these terms suggestively emerges as a Foucauldian
"dividing practice.” As such, Mekhitzah practices further engage a second
major Foucauldian organizing factor, that is, how architectures of division in
space in fact also engineer visibility, what Foucault calls "the gaze,"
controlling who sees whom: "The exercise of discipline presupposes a
mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the
techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power."20 This
question of control over visibility is strikingly present in the practices of
Mechitzah. Such is the case from the earliest discourses of partition in the
context of the Temple. Men and women usually separated during Temple
rituals, according to Susan Grossman. 21 Separation is mentioned as a
Foucault Mekhitzah 9
"tikkun gadol," a "great correction," in Mishneh Sukkoth 5:2, specifically with
regard to the "Water-Drawing Ceremony," simhat beit ha-shoevah which was
held every year on the second night of Sukkoth. Until then, according to the
Tosefta, men would watch from the inside and women from the outside. It
was feared, however, that the Water-Drawing Ceremony with its free mingling
and festival atmosphere, could lead to "kalut rosh," lightheaded frivolity, and
so balconies were stipulated (Tosefta Suk. 4:1).
This concern with lightheadedness raises from the outset a distinction
that remains pivotal in governing Mekhitzah practices. There is a question as
to whether the requirements of separation are essentially spatial, to prevent
the social mixing that may lead to "frivolity;" or whether the Mekhitzah needs
also to control and indeed block visibility, which is to say, the visibility of
women to men. This question proves central in, for example, the responsa of
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a leading contemporary posek of Halakhic rulings.
As Norma Baumel Joseph discusses, the distinction of key importance as to
kinds of Mekhitzoth and their locations in Moshe Feinstein's Iggerot Moshe is
the question of spatial separation as against women being seen. According to
Moshe Feinstein, the partition must be high enough to prevent the
communication and mingling that bring with them frivolity, but not necessarily
to prevent the visibility of women. Therefore in his rulings a balcony will
suffice, as in the Temple Water Drawing Ceremony; for it is "not a question of
prohibiting seeing" (Responsa 1:39). When there is no balcony the partition
can be shoulder-high, allowing visibility. Even a partition of glass could be
permissible on the assumption that the women are modestly dressed (Orah
Hayym 1:43). "If women are on the upper level, even without a screen or
Foucault Mekhitzah 10
curtain, or if they are below, but behind a substantial, high Mekhitzah, so that
there be no fear of levity, it is of no consequence if the women are visible."
For Feinstein, as Norma B. Joseph goes on to explicate, "the problem is not
one of preventing visibility even though his preferences is to avoid looking at
women." True, invisibility is set as the highest standard. But in current
conditions of "minhag America," where women circulate freely and largely
dressed in ways that do not accord with orthodox definitions of modesty, the
exposure of women does not have the same significance or impact as in more
restrictive gender cultures, and therefore the Mekhitzah need not block out
women visually: "the obligation of the Mekhitzah is due to frivolity and not
gazing" (IM, OC 1:40). 22
Rav Feinstein further specifies that no Mekhitzah is
required at for example weddings or other occasional gatherings, especially
when there is assigned seating rather than general mingling. For, he notes
that men and women ate the Pesach sacrifice in one group, with several
families participating together (Orah Hayyim 41).23
This issue of separation to prevent mixing rather than visibility has
been significant throughout the discourses of Mechitzah. Maimonides, for
example, offers two comments, one early in his career and one late, with two
seemingly differing implications. In the first interpretation of the Mishneh
Sukah 5:2, he writes: the tikkun gadol, "significant correction" of women
above and men below is "in order that the men will not look on the women."
However, in his Hilchot Shofar viSukah vi Lulav (8: rule 12) Maimonides writes
in contrast that the separation by gallery of above and below is "so that the
two will not mix together." Other important commentators have also
questioned whether the Mekhitzah needs to be "over [the women's] heads,"
Foucault Mekhitzah 11
which assumes that it is "forbidden to look on women." For this, according to
the Sridei Esh, is an added "strictness [machmirim]," as is likewise forbidding
prayer without such a Mekhitzah, and even forbidding "women to come and
pray" in such a situation as some Hungarian Rabbis have ruled, stipulating
that in such case "it is better that they should remain at home."24
Yet what is striking, even in the more lenient rulings, is the fact that
preventing women from being seen also prevents women from seeing is
something that is never mentioned. Whether women see or not is a question
that is completely ignored. At issue here is Foucault's pivotal notion of the
subject. It is one of Foucault’s most disturbing gestures to focus on and
intensify the ambiguity inherent in the very term “subject.” Traditionally the
subject is assumed to be the center of agency and individuality, of decision
and action. Yet Foucault underscores its no less powerful implication of being
'subject to' or the 'subject of' some external interest or power. This second
sense tends to overwhelm the first one through most of Foucault’s writings, as
he analyses ways in which even the interiority of the person is part of an
ambiguous "subjectification," as he calls it. The "subject" both acts and is
acted on or through by powers surrounding it. For Foucault, the self emerges
out of processes of cultural organization rather than such organizations
emerging as the intentional expression of selves.25 In this doubled sense of
subject as subjected, the self does not direct, but is directed and even
constituted by institutional orders that operate both on and through those
subject to them. The very formation of the subject Foucault thus sees as
occurring not as individual expression or assertion but as an institutional
subjection, executed through procedures such as dividing practices. The
Foucault Mekhitzah 12
location of the body in specified physical allocations as separated from other
bodies is a central concrete mode that defines the subject, as placed within
demarcated spatialized and other hierarchical and distinguishing positions.
In this Foucauldian sense, women behind the Mekhitzah are
demarcated as subjects in being subjected. They are not "subjects" either in
terms of considering their points of view, or as participating in Rabbinic
discourses, none of which are by women. No women's voices are heard in
these discussions; women themselves never speak in them. Indeed, the
voice of woman is itself a problematic issue in discussions related to the
Mekhitzah. Judaism, like every known culture, has been organized around
fundamental gender distinctions. As in other cultures, these distinctions have
been formulated in terms of public and private spaces.26 The limits on
women being seen run parallel to limits on women being heard. In another
set of regulatory practices, the voice of woman – kol Ishah – is restricted so
that men will not hear it. Both Mekhitzah and kol ishah (along with other
modesty practices) regulate modes in which women may or may not appear in
public spaces. But these, in focusing on what men see and experience,
completely occlude what women see and experience or do not. And in fact
these rulings that involve women not-being seen or heard also involve
blocking women from seeing and speaking. Throughout the Mekhitzah
discourses, seeing is something done by men, of women. The women's
seeing is never a topic of concern, but remains itself an invisible subject
Women thus are treated not as acting subjects but only as subjected to
regulation such that men will not regard them, in ways that block women from
viewing and hides them from view. Only men are "subjects" in the sense of
Foucault Mekhitzah 13
actors, whose prayer is of concern, and the arrangement of the synagogue is
entirely viewed from their point of view. But this is to block out not only
women but their religious life and experience, which are issues barely
addressed or acknowledged.27 Even the Sridei Esh's comments against strict
rulings that would prevent women from attending synagogue altogether are
based not on the notion of women as subjects but on regulating their
subjectification:
In our times the situation has changed and women if they stay at home
and are not permitted to come to the Synagogue they will forget the
laws of Judaism altogether, and of course it is forbidden to distance
them in this way because of an additional strictness of ruling (chumrah)
that has no strong basis in the Mishneh and other rulings. . . For
attending the Synagogue is in our times the very establishing of
Jewishness in women and mothers.
The Sridei Esh proposes a more lenient option against stringencies that may
prevent women's attending synagogue at all, for reasons of historical context
and necessity. This he does in the form of a concession, to ward off still
worse possible consequences that women stop attending synagogue and
disengage from Judaism altogether. Such logic of concession was likewise
the basis of the ruling by the Hafetz Chaim that women be permitted to study
religious texts. In that case it was thought that, given women's access to
secular education, preventing them from a Jewish education could weaken
their attachment to Judaism itself. 28
Another turn of the Mekhitah discourses involves the fact that when
women are blocked from seeing men they are, more consequentially, also
blocked from seeing the synagogue space itself. In a comment in his
compilation of Rabbinic discussions of women's modesty, Rabbi Getsel
Ellinson interestingly notes: "In Tractate Soferim 14:4 and in the Shulkan
Foucault Mekhitzah 14
Arukh regarding the mitzvah of lifting the Sefer Torah we find, "It is a mitzvah
for all the men and women to see the lettering and bend at the knee." 29
There is, then, a positive commandment to see the letters of the Torah; but it
is overruled by the danger of women being seen. Here, what is cited as a
specific mitzvah, that women see, can be eclipsed by an interpretive option
acknowledged to be a chumra that adds strictness beyond what is
Halakhically required. The concern that women be not-seen overrides their
status as religious subjects, who should see.
II. The Subject of Sexuality
The danger that seeing women presents is that of erva, a nakedness
that contains an erotic element and requires covering. Seeing what should be
covered causes distraction in men, and this is particularly problematic in the
synagogue where prayer requires spiritual concentration.30 The kalut rosh,
lightheaded frivolity, that is cited as the cause for separation during the WaterDrawing Ceremony in the Temple, is dangerous because of its erotic
implication.31 The problem, that is, is sexuality. Within Judaic discourses,
concern is directed toward protection against sexual immorality for the
preservation of Jewish family life and the uprightness of the people. Yet a
strong Foucauldian dimension emerges in the discourses of the Mekhitzah. In
Foucault, sexuality plays a pivotal role in "subjectification" as a technique of
control. Controlling, and indeed creating sexual norms is a crucial part of the
subjection to disciplinary practices that grip each person, in and through his
and her body (albeit differently for him and her in ways Foucault tends to
Foucault Mekhitzah 15
ignore). As Foucault explores in his three volumes on the History of
Sexuality, sexuality is not merely a natural, spontaneous, and individual
phenomenon, nor only an interior one. Rather, sexuality is a cultural
construction with a history. It is instituted through practices and norms,
discourses and attitudes. The ways we speak of sexuality – in Foucault
notably in the confession, first in its Christian forms and now in its Freudian
ones – and deal with it form and inform our experiences of it. Moreover, in
both Christian confession and also Freudian therapies, such discourses wield
enormous power over behavior and the construction of interior experience
itself. Sexuality is in fact shaped within practices of culture that direct and
construct it. More than repression is involved. Foucault recurrently, and
particularly in History of Sexuality I, insists that power is not merely
repressive, but is an activating force.32 Controlling sexuality restricts it, but
also activates it as a force requiring constant attention and direction.
Sexuality serves thus as a core structure through which other behaviors, and
the spaces in which they take place, become understood and designed.
With regard to the Mekhitzah, the danger of erotic thoughts through
men's view of women is a potent interiorizing gesture. It establishes discipline
as penetrating fully inward into the deepest recesses of the self, establishing
its grip on the self in and through the body. Watchfully guarding against erotic
thoughts also keeps them constantly present and in view. It even moves
towards defining the male as overwhelmingly subject to sexual impulses, as
the central fact governing the behavior of men, which in turn governs women,
who are "subject" here to this activation and then control of male sexuality.
Foucault Mekhitzah 16
Within the synagogue, attempting to guard the situation of prayer from
sexualization has its validity, if also its potency. But from a Foucauldian
perspective, more significant still than the forms of the Mekhitzah within the
synagogue, where the question of spiritual concentration is at stake, is the
encroachment of Mekhitzah in spaces outside the synagogue. For the
practices of the Mekhitzah are not restricted to the synagogue and the
question of erotic thoughts in prayer. Rather, they have come to extend into
further and further social spaces and practices in Orthodox contexts. Such
extension is an important part of Foucault's analysis of disciplinary forms. The
Mekhiztah in fact pursues the course Foucault ascribes to core disciplinary
practices. These spread from their original sites to serve as models that
infiltrate into wider and wider cultural arenas. In Discipline and Punish he
traces how disciplinary distributions and allocations move outwards, in an "art
of effects" that become diffused "throughout the whole social body, capable of
encoding all behaviors." (93-94).
Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place
heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. . . But the
principle of ‘enclosure’ . . . works space in a much more flexible and
detailed way. It does this first of all on the principle of elementary
location or partitioning… One must eliminate the effects of imprecise
distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their
diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation.33
Such disciplinary procedures then come to exert pressure across a "whole
infinite domain of the non-conforming," through increasingly detailed
expectations, instructions, and penalties on the body's placement,
deportment, conduct and scheduling across increasing areas of activity and
institutional organization.34
Foucault Mekhitzah 17
In Discipline and Punish Foucault locates the intense regulation of the
body into specific formations as originating in military contexts: marching,
saluting, lining up, comportment of feet, hands, head, torso, regimentation into
closely defined groups assigned to clearly delineated places. But this bodily
regimentation does not remain exclusive to the military. Foucault traces its
entry into more and more modern institutions: schools, especially ones where
children are carefully seriated into orders by rank; factories as they discipline
time and allocate space for the body in closely planned and monitored
sequences of labor; hospitals; prisons. The regimented and meticulously
distributed formations of the military become more and more the norms
through ever wider social contexts in an escalating exercise of disciplinary
control.
Just so, the practice of the Mekhitzah has come to extend beyond the
synagogue. The question of partitions has been raised for Mekhitzah in the
cases of lectures, learning groups, meetings, educational settings,
recreational activities, as well as celebrations including not only dancing but
seating arrangements at weddings and other ceremonies. Indeed, in today's
religious world the Mekhitzah is found at more and more events as higher and
higher and less and less porous partitions. In each of these settings, erotic
danger is seen as increasingly penetrating and requiring increasingly
disciplinary guards. Ellinson's The Modest Way offers a wide compendium of
such discussions, which, as he sums up, imply "that there is no difference
between the separation required for synagogues and for any public
gathering." Throughout, sexual danger remains the crucial issue governing
what becomes an ever larger injunction not only toward separation of men
Foucault Mekhitzah 18
and women, but to women's concealment and confinement. The picture that
emerges is in fact rather grim: men as sexually driven compulsives requiring
utmost and constant vigilance to keep in any kind of bounds; and women as
provocators of sin. Thus, Ellinson cites Sefer Ha-Hinukh, Mitzvah 188: “One
should do nothing that might lead him to erotic thought, neither should he
communicate affection by word, deed, or other means, to any woman but his
wife… and it is impossible to be specific.”35
To prevent this danger, ever widening and penetrating regulation is
necessitated. Here again, women are not in the position of subjects but of
functions within an explosive sexuality that therefore requires the most
concentrated controls of spatial allocation, surveillance, assignment, dress,
bodily deportments and perceptual range in almost breathtakingly
Foucauldian detail. What emerges are more and more detailed disciplines of
women: seating in synagogue, eating at feasts, positioning at recreational and
educational settings, alongside myriad and multiplying focus and regulation of
dress, hair covering, greetings, deportment, and, in the ultra-Orthodox world,
also work spaces and public travel.
In this regimen of eros – which is to say eros as a ground for regimen –
women are quintessentially a threat of sin, men a vulnerable explosiveness,
and regulation a massive watchdog ever prowling at ubiquitous gates. By
way of erotic thought, the self is fully and thoroughly disciplined into constant
vigilance, surveillance, and obedience. Nor do dividing practices stop at
spatial distribution. Modesty regulations concerning dress erect Mekhitzoth
around each woman's body as covering clothes, preventing the seeing of
women and also women's movements if not appropriately dressed, with
Foucault Mekhitzah 19
incidences of violence by modesty monitors against those women deemed to
be transgressive. (This of course is true in the Muslim world as well as in the
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish one). Alongside these are regulations of women's
voices in what might be called auditory Mekhitzoth, making women's
expression subject to concealment. Comments on Tractate Berakhot 24a,
where it is written that “women’s voices constitutes an erotic stimulus,” offer a
range of interpretations as to how far to restrict women's voices: in singing but
not speech, if the woman is known or not known, if her face is seen or not
seen, if she is present or recorded, if in prayer and Sabbath Song or love
songs or secular songs.36 In stark contradiction with women's lives in nonreligious settings, religiously she becomes inaudible as well as invisible. This
may be the greatest subjection, negating the very possibility of women's even
participating in the discourses that regulate her.
One may ask whether sexuality and eroticism is, or need be, such a
defining experience as to govern the movements and positions, the seeing
and not seeing, of men, and therefore also of women, keeping them unseen.
The Foucauldian gaze in which surveillance itself is a major exercise of
power becomes truly ubiquitous and commanding, made possible by the
partitioning of space through dividing practices – or in the case of Mekhitzah,
determining who does and does not see.37 But even if male sexuality were
the overwhelming force that these discussions portray, and also create and
enforce it to be, would this warrant restricting women from appearing in public,
preventing them from being seen or heard? In these disciplines, male erotic
risk outweighs the value of women’s participation and indeed fundamental
expression, overriding as Halakhic value the participation and active religious
Foucault Mekhitzah 20
life of other Jewish human beings, i.e. women. Should the religious
experience of women, from their own point of view, not be taken into account?
Should women be punished, indeed even blamed, for male sexual drives,
warranting the excision of female presence, the instituting of invisible
women?38
Or, in a still more Foucauldian way, should these Halakhic discussions
be regarded not as attempts to create religiously informed social spaces, but
to use religion to control social spaces and above all the distribution and
hierarchy of gender within them? This would be to regard Halakhah itself as a
mask for the exercise of power, with the power over women a core and
defining case. Halakhik discussion would then be reduced only to
Foucauldian regimen, a discipline whose purpose becomes suspect through
its result: that is, not, as is claimed by the system itself, the spiritual purity and
striving of its religious practitioners (meaning men), but rather the restriction of
women from access to public spaces, from active roles, from religious agency,
showing a lack of concern for women as religious subjects through dividing
practices that extend ever more broadly into social spaces and ever more
intimately into the subjectivity of women, and also differently, of men.
III. Religious Feminism
The Foucauldian position would be that the Halakhic regimen is
nothing but a power system instituting the interests of those who dominate,
that is, men. Yet this response fails to account for the many other experiences
and principles involved in Halakhic life. From a purely Foucauldian
perspective, it would indeed by incomprehensible as to why feminists, or
Foucault Mekhitzah 21
individuals in general for that matter, would wish to be part of a Halakhic or
any other community at all. Foucault in fact is very weak in accounting for any
sort of community life. To him, any institution is coercive; any discipline is
punishing. Participation arises from coercion itself, increasingly internalized
and regrettably inescapable. 39 But this is a very limited view not only of
community, but of selfhood – limitations that feminist theory has made central
to its own concepts of both self and society.
Orthodox feminism appears on one level to be a contradiction in terms.
The gender assignments of Jewish tradition are, as in all other traditions,
unequal, and a feminist commitment to equality stands in strong tension
against traditional arrangements and gender roles. But a closer look at both
feminism and orthodoxy reveals the relationship between them to be far more
complex than simple antagonism and opposition. There are many resources
in religion which in fact have strong connection to a variety of feminist
commitments and modes, as well as tensions and conflicts with them.
Liberal feminism's commitment to individual freedom, autonomy and
equality, adopted from modern discourses and wishing to claim these values
for women as well as men, spars not only against gender divisions but also
with other religious commitments and notions of the self. The liberal dream of
pure autonomy contrasts against both religious and other feminist trends
which sees the self as embedded within culture and tradition, as obligated
towards others and, in religious terms, ultimately towards God. Yet liberal
feminism also affirms the religious and Biblical vision of the sanctity of each
self and its equality before God, doctrines out of which liberalism itself
developed. Liberalism itself drew on biblical affirmation of the sanctity and
Foucault Mekhitzah 22
dignity of the individual, based in the image of God, in its own formulation and
dedication to individual dignity and rights.40 Feminism in fact brings to the fore
the self-contradiction within Jewish values themselves, when women are not
treated with the kvod haAdam and kvod haBeriyoth, the respect for each
person and indeed creature that Judaic religion demands. This itself has
been a recognized topic for discussion within traditional Jewish discourses
including Halakhic Orthodox ones. The principle of "kevod haberiyot," based
in traditional sources such as Berachoth 19: 72 where it is written that "kvod
haBeryoth [dignity of persons] is greater than the prohibitions in the Torah" is
in many ways a challenging one that opens within Halakhic frameworks the
question of values that are themselves religious and their Halakhic
realization.41
Whether or not equal dignity requires identity of roles is a question
feminism itself has long grappled with. If liberal feminism has pursued the
avenue of equality as identity, radical feminism allows and cultivates
difference.42 Radical feminism has sought to preserve and strengthen
women's identities through their solidarity. From this feminist viewpoint,
separate women's sections in the synagogue, or separate prayer groups –
which in many ways recall the "weibershule" of separate women's worship in
earlier centuries – allow women a space for their own association. This
expresses and strengthens women's self-conscious identity, out of which a
sense of their own initiative and value commitments may develop. Women in
single gender groups can focus inward rather than outward, can develop
relationships among themselves and their own initiatives, undistracted by
reference to their roles in relation to men or to male expectations of them.
Foucault Mekhitzah 23
Such considerations have been central to support for single-sex education,
which studies show girls to benefit from. In similar ways, separation from men
in prayer leaves women free from the male gaze, their concentration
uninterrupted by men's attention or inattention, enforcing their sense of
themselves as women. Being a woman becomes a distinctive way of being
religious.
Yet such separation raises problems even as it makes claims.
Separate women's prayer groups may weaken the sense of joint Jewish
community life.43 And while within the situation of prayer separation may have
positive elements regarding women's participation, initiative, or sense of their
own identity, this would depend upon the positioning of the Mekhitzah, its
opacity and height, and other specific arrangements that very much create
and also symbolize the inclusion or denial of women as subjects. Nor would a
sense of distinct women's community justify the spread of Mekhitzah
segregationist practices to wider and wider social contexts. It is difficult to see
sitting at the back of a bus as anything but dominating, coercive, and
exclusionary.44
Liberal feminism undervalues community. Radical feminism further
segregates genders and divides communities, and problematizes equality.
But other feminist thought may open ways between these contrary trends. In
feminist psychology, moral theory, and political philosophy, new approaches
to selfhood and how it constitutes and is constituted by community are
emerging, that are homologous with religious notions of both self and society.
The work of Carol Gilligan and other feminist psychologists have introduced a
concept of selfhood not exclusively based on notions of autonomy and
Foucault Mekhitzah 24
independence, but as formed through relationships, reciprocities, and
responsibilities.45 This vision does not see the self as weak if dependent, but
as enriched and enlarged, personally and morally, through ties and
responsibilities to others. In political philosophy, critiques of liberal
individualism see its emphasis on independence as both problematic for
building a common society and distorting as denying the reality that human
beings in fact are interdependent: that they are born into families that nurture
them and into cultures that shape them. These are not mere restrictions on
the self but in fact the basis out of which the self emerges and develops.
Moshe Rosman sums up the attitudes towards women in Jewish
Poland as ambivalence. "They were," he writes, "both temptresses and
victims; cultural facilitators for men and cultural actors in their own right. . .
expected to stay at home but required to contribute to the family livelihood." 46
Such contradictions are, he adds, not exclusive to Judaism. According to
Foucault, they are inherent in any institutional structure and cultural network.
For Foucault, it is exactly such contradictions that make possible challenges
to coercion through what he calls resistances. Gaps, conflicts, multiple
requirements along different disciplinary and institutional tracks can be
exploited one against the other. As Foucault remarks in one interview, in that
power is always “dispersed, heteromorphous, localized, . . .accompanied by
numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement, and resistance. . . there are
no relations of power without resistances.” Power produces resistance;
indeed, resistances “can only exist in the strategic field of power relations,”
although this does not necessitate “that they are only a reaction or rebound. . .
always passive and always doomed to defeat.”47
Foucault Mekhitzah 25
And yet appeal to resistance is not sufficient to describe the
relationships between feminism and Jewish tradition. Resistance implies only
counter-trends, working against the institutional forces and forms. But
Orthodox feminists do not accept that their two commitments of feminism and
orthodoxy are irrevocably at odds with each other, and that the only relation to
tradition is one of resistance. To be a traditionalist feminist entails a
commitment to tradition: to working within and through it and not only against
it, nor by severing the tie to tradition altogether. Within each denomination,
women and men negotiate this in appropriate ways. In the case of Orthodoxy,
this involves accepting Halakhic writings and precedents and Halakhically
conceived authorities for determining Halkahic practices. Orthodox feminists
find within Orthodoxy the best model of a community that adheres to
Halakhah and therefore tend to accept and endeavor to remain within the
bounds of the interpretations of modern Orthodox Halakhic authorities. But
from a feminist viewpoint it is still necessary above all that women themselves
come to participate in such Halakhic discourses, that there voices be heard
within Halakhic deliberations and their viewpoints and experiences considered
in Halakhic decisions.
Such participation opens relations to tradition other than resistance or
complicity, a possibility which Foucault never formulates. That is the
possibility of embracing the resources of the tradition, as an institution that
supports and indeed helps create the self as subject and does not only
subject it in the sense of subordination and coercion. There is a range of
approaches that can enlist institutional forms and trends. There is the
possibility of continuing Halakhically accepted practices rather than
Foucault Mekhitzah 26
abandoning them, but understanding them in new terms, a continuing process
of historical Jewish life in any case.48 There is the possibility of bringing to the
fore elements that are contained in the tradition but have not been
emphasized, that have been taken for granted or marginalized rather than
seen as central. This can occur through appeal to Halakhically historical
precedents that have been accepted in the past, not only as minority opinions
but as Rabbinic practice. There can be consideration of contemporary
contexts as framing norms, such as the notion of minhag America as they
have also done in past rulings. Greater attention can be turned to traditional
texts and exploring their implications, such as those embodying the principles
of the divine image and the sanctity of the person. This involves not only
resistance against but intensification of traditional elements, drawing on their
own resources in new balances and configurations – again, a process that
occurs constantly in Halakhic discussion, including in the erecting of chumras
or stricter interpretations. Investment and not only resistance is a strong part
of institutional creativity.
In general in religious feminism, most significant are ways in which
religion and certain forms of feminism share common commitments to
community and the understanding of the self in relation to it.49 In both, the
self is not imagined as bounded within itself, but rather as embedded in
culture and history, responsible to others even as each commanding respect
and dignity. In both, selves are seen as formed through tradition and
communities and are enlarged by their connection to values beyond
themselves, to a past and a future they are part of. Self and community are
mutually constituting, in a positive reciprocity in which the integrity of the
Foucault Mekhitzah 27
individual is respected by and realized though a community, which both
shapes selves and is shaped by them. In specifically religious terms, the
sense of religious awe before the mystery of a world greater than the self and
to which each self is responsible is both profoundly moral and feminist. Yet
realizing both this morality and feminism requires at the very least the full
participation of women in discussion and reflection on how traditional
procedures, including Mekhitzah, are understood and implemented, in
Orthodox as well as other denominations (which the revolution in women's
learning has made possible), taking into account and recognizing women's
experiences, viewpoints, and voices.
In being pledged to a range of traditional commitments, feminism and
religion need not be regarded as in conflict with each other. Each instead
should call on the other to confirm both the value of each individual, woman
and man, and the value of community in which individuals flourish and to
which they contribute.50 In this sense, to renounce tradition for feminism
would mean losing the tie to community, tradition, and connection to others
that feminism itself has embraced.51 But for Jewish orthodoxy to negate and
reject feminism would be to lose its own basis in moral commitment to the
integrity and sanctity of each person, as expressed in the core biblical
teaching that each person is made in the image of God.
I want to thank Moshe Rosman and Tova Hartman for their support and
encouragement in undertaking and completing this essay, and to Daniel
Boyarin for comments on an early version of it. Also to the editors of Nashim
and especially Deborah Greniman for meticulous commentary and
suggestions.
Foucault Mekhitzah 28
1
This has been acknowledged and addressed by feminist critics. See for
example Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and Patriarchal Power,”
Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance ed. Irene Diamond and Lee
Quinby, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 61-85: “Foucault treats
the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and
women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to
the characteristic institutions of modern life. Where is the account of the
disciplinary practices that engender the “docile bodies, bodies more docile
than the bodies of men? Women like men are subject to many of the same
disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is blind to those disciplines
that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine. To
overlook the forms of subjection that engender the feminine body is to
perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these
disciplines have been imposed. Hence, even though a liberatory note is
sounded in Foucault’s critique of power, his analysis as a whole reproduces
that sexism which is endemic throughout Western political theory,” p. 64.
2 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (NY: Vintage Books, 1980).
3 Howard Eilberg-Schwart, "Introduction" in People of the Body: Jews and
Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992), 1-18, discusses this polemical context, pp. 3-4.
4 I have discussed this intersection between Judaic and contemporary theory
in "Pharisaic," Common Knowledge, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall, 1993, 66-80.
5 This is a point elaborated by Norma Baumel Joseph, "Mehitzah: Halakhic
Decisions and Political Consequences," Daughters of the King: Women and
the Synagogue (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 117-134,
pp. 129-131.
6 See footnote 5.
7 Susan Grossman, "Women and the Jerusalem Temple," 15-38; Hanna
Safrai, "Women and the Ancient Synagogue," 39-50 Daughters of the King.
8 Edward Fram, My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education
of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union
College Press, 2007).
9 Moshe Rosman, "Jewish Women in Early Modern Poland, 1500-1795,"
Encyclopedia of Jewish Women cf. "Hishtatfuth Nashim BeTephila BeTzibur
BeKehiloth Askenaz," Festschrift for Professor Shmuel Lieter forthcoming [Is
this really his name? Publication details?]. Various "positive commandment"
mitzvoth were also permitted, if reluctantly, as by Rabbi Moses Isserles, who
wrote in a gloss on the Shulchan Arukh that if women "want to wear [a talit]
and make the blessing over it, they may as with all other time-conditioned
positive commandments." (Section: Orah Hayyim, ch. 17, paragraph 2).
10
For other discussions of women's presence in the synagogue even across
the Mekhitzah for, for example, participation in brith milah ceremonies see
Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Life in Medieval Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 18-19; Avraham Grossman,
Pious and Rebellious (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004) pp.
27, 177. 180-181; and Daniel Sperber The Jewish life cycle : custom, lore and
iconography : Jewish customs from the cradle to the grave, (Ramat Gan: BarIlan Press, 2008).
11 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, (NY: Basic Books, 1973).
Foucault Mekhitzah 29
12
This question of Halakhic as against non-Halakhic considerations in
the case of women's prayer groups has been taken up by Aryeh Frimer
and Dov Frimer in "Women's Prayer Services – Theory and Practice"
Tradition 32:2 1998, 5-118. The conclusion of the article was that
women's prayer groups are Halakhic, but should not be permitted
because of "Hashkafic and Public-Policy Concerns," p. 40. Mendel
Shapiro has written "A Halkhic Analysis" regarding the question of
women reading Torah in "Queri'at ha-Torah by Women" The Edah
Journal 1:2 2001 2-52, in response to the innovative participation of
women in the synagogue Shira Chadashah in Jerusalem, which retains a
Mekhitzah that divides the genders side-to-side. See especially the
section "Women in the men's section of the synagogue," pp. 41-42.
13 There have been recurrent protests and even violence over the attempts
by the "women of the wall" to pray at the Western Wall in a women's prayer
group. See Rivka Haut, "Women's Prayer Groups and the Orthodox
Synagogue," Daughters of the King 135-158.
14
For comment on the practice of Mekhitzah on buses see Susan Weiss,
"The great and equivocal vanishing trick of Israeli vanishing trick of Israeli
women," Jerusalem Post Dec 9, 2008; Jonathan Rosenblum comments on it
in "Burning Down Our Own Neighborhoods again," Dec. 12 2006, internet site
Cross-Currents.
15 Feminist anthropology in particular has engaged this question of the
universality of this subordination. See for example Michelle Zimbalist
Rosaldo, “Woman, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Women,
Culture, Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975), 17-42); and Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "The
Use and Abuse of Anthropology," Signs 5 (1980) 3 389-417.
16 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (NY: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 25-26.
17 Michel Foucault, Discipline , p. 137.
18 Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, (NY: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 10.
19 Michel Foucault, Discipline p. 141; “The Subject and Power,” in Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert Dreyfus and
Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 208.
20 Discipline pp. 135-138; 171-4.
21 Susan Grossman discusses this background in "Women in the Jerusalem
Temple," Daughters of the King pp. 22-27.
22 Norma Baumel Joseph, "Mehitzah: Halakhic Decisions and Political
Consequences," pp. 118-119; also Norma Baumel Joseph, "Hair Distractions:
Women and Worship in the Responsa of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein," Jewish
Legal Writings by Women ed. Michah Halpern and Chana Safrai, Jerusalem:
Urim, 1998 [publication details?], 9-22, p. 9, 21. Joseph notes at the end of
"Hair Distractions" that "legal decisions in thse cases are determined to a
degree by public custom," and that "Mechitzah applies to public behavior and
to men and women equally (IM OC 1:43), pp. 20-21. Cf. Women and men
can also participate together in meetings, and also for learning Torah: "Jewish
women participate in every process. . . Women like men need to know Jewish
law and it is beneficial for them to hear themes from Torah and ethics," as in
the rulings that women should hear the King read the book of Devarim (II.
109)
Foucault Mekhitzah 30
23
The Sanctity of the Synagogue ed. Baruch Litvin (NY: The Spiro
Foundation, 1959 [do you mean self-published?]
24 Weinberg, Yechiel Yaakov, Sridei Esh, Responsa [publication details?] (
Jerusalem: Rav Kook 1966, 2:14.
25 Michel Foucualt, “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208-226, p. 212.
26 See footnote 7 above. Carole Pateman “Feminst Critiques of the
Public/Private Dichotomy,” The Disorder of Women, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1989), “the dichotomy between the public and the private. .
. is ultimately what the feminist movement is about.”p. 118.
27 Chana Safrai and Avital C. Hochstein, Nashim baChutz Nashim Bephnim,
(Tel Aviv: Miskal: Yedioth Achronoth and Chemed Books ?? 2008)
(Hebrew) offer interesting discussions on when women are or are not
included in general categories concerning "people" or "men," pp. 42-44.
pp. ?
28 Quoted in Rabbi Getsel Ellinson, Women and the Mitzvot, Vol. 2, “The
Modest Way” (Jerusalem: Department for Torah Education and Culture in the
Diaspora, The World Zionist Organization, 1992). Moshe Rosman discusses
the concessionary basis of extending education to women in "Jewish Women
in Early Modern Poland," as does Tova Hartman-Halbertal, Appropriately
Subversive, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). Other
concessionary permissions include the Sridei Esh's permission that men and
women could sing Sabbath songs together, on the principle "When it is time to
act for the Lord, violate the Torah!" "When it is not a question of an outright
prohibition, but of the modesty practiced by pious people, we may draw upon
the concept of "When it is time to act for the Lord, violate the Torah! (Psalms
119: 126) . . . [Given] the spirit of the contemporary young woman, who,
having been educated in the state schools and having learned languages and
science, has a sense of self-respect. Because they view the prohibition
against their participation in religious singing as a form of ostracism, they
have been permitted to participate in singing Sabbath melodies. . . In these
countries, the women will feel that they have been insulted and that their
rights have been denied them if we forbid them to participate in singing
Sabbath melodies. Anyone familiar with the nature of the women in these
countries will understand this. Prohibiting them may cause them to be
estranged from religion, God forbid. Of such it is said, “When it is time to act
for the Lord, violate the Torah” (Psalms 119:126). (1:8)
29 Rabbi Getsel Ellinson, Women and the Mitzvot, Vol. 2, “The Modest Way.”
The authorities he quotes are standard ones, and the regulations as Ellinson
presents them are widely, indeed increasingly observed in orthodox circles.
The book itself has been widely used in female education in Israel.
30 See Nora B. Joseph , "Hair Distractions," for discussion, pp. 10ff.
31 Rav Feinstein thus interprets Maimonides's comment "that men should not
see women" to mean the sort of looking that "induces lightheadedness," not
seeing as such [source??]. As the Sridei Esh comments on Rav Feinstein's
responsa (2:14), Maimonides is understood there not as forbidding men to
look on women as such (shelo yistaklu anashim al nashim) but rather that
Foucault Mekhitzah 31
men do not wantonly come to look on women for the purpose of pleasure
(leshem hana'ah).
32 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality I, (NY: Vintage Books, 1990), takes as
one of its central points that power is not “a repression of disorder but rather a
maximization of collective and individual forces,” p. 24.
33 Foucault, Discipline pp.141-143
34 Foucault, Discipline, p.178.
35 Ellinson, pp. 19, 47, 49.
36 Ellinson assembles discussions on women's voices, pp. 98-115.
37 Foucualt discusses the gaze in Discipline and Punish pp. 172-5. The notion
of the gaze goes back, of course, to Freud in his discussions of scopophilia in
Three Essays on Sexuality as taking other people as objects, subjecting them
to a controlling and curious gaze. Its gendered meanings are taken up by
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, Vol. 16: 3,
1975) p. 8.
38 Catherine MacKinnon explores the legal implications of blaming women for
male sexuality in her discussions of sexual harassment, e.g. in Toward a
Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1989).
39 Foucault's apoliticism has been criticized by Michael Walzer and Charles
Taylor. See the discussions in Foucault: A Critical Reader. David Couzens
Hoy, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Foucault does not show much
interest or confidence in electoral politics or democratic participation: as he
writes, “The phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus
but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals,”
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon, ed. (New York: Prentice
Hall, 1980)), p. 55. "The Ethics of Foucauldian Poetics: Women's Selves,"
New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer 2004, 491-506
40 This is especially discussed in the American context, investigating the
relationship between religious principles and American Revolutionary
commitments. See for example Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (NY:
Harper and Row, 1956); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); also, for example, Alan
Heimert, Religion and the American mind : from the great awakening to the
revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). I have
discussed the complex relationship between biblical teachings and women's
initiatives in "Women's Bibles," Feminist Studies Vol. 28, no. 1 Spring 2002,
191-211.
41 The saying in Berachoth 19: 72 that "gadol kvod haBeryoth shedocheh lotaaseh shebatorah" – ‫תעשה‬-‫גדול כבוד הבריות שדוחה לא‬.‫ שבתורה‬is discussed Y.
Brand "Gadol Kvod HaBeryoth" in Sidnah 21, (2006) 34-35; also by Yaakov
Blidstein "Kvod haBeryoth vi kvod haAdam," pp. 102-103, alongside many
other traditional sources and discussions for the notion of kvod haberiyoth as
an authentic element in classical Jewish tradition," p. 98. Questioning Dignity
ed. Joseph David, Jerusalem: The Democracy Institute, 2006) 97-138. In the
same volume, Yeira Amit discusses the notions of kvod haAdam and kvod
haBeryot as they appear in the Bible itself in "Kvod haAdam baMikrah," in
Questioning Dignity ed. Joseph David, Jerusalem: The Democracy Institute,
2006), 13-25, tracing it first to the notion of the image of God in Genesis. The
Foucault Mekhitzah 32
phrase "kvod haAdam" does not itself appear in the Bible, but "image" and
other language is taken to ground this notion. The question of its reference to
women is mentioned, p. 14. The Talmudic Encyclopedia includes an entry
on Kvod haBeryoth, Vol. 26. A famous commentary by Rashi on
Deuteronomy: 21:23 concerning the rule not to leave the body of a man
hanging "all night" but rather to bury him "the same day" is another core site
for discussion of the dignity of the person. Rashi comments that it is
forbidden to leave a man hanging all night is because "the man is made in the
likeness of [God's] image," and desecrating man reflects a descration of that
likeness, told through a fable of twin brothers, one of whom is king. R. Meir
repeats this parable in discussing the rule in Sanhedrin: 46. Interestingly,
kvod haAdam is cited as the foundation of the basic laws in Israel as a
"Jewish and Democratic nation." See Orit Kamir, “Honor and Dignity Cultures:
The Case of Kavod [Honor] and Kvod Haadam [Dignity] in Israeli Society and
Law,” in The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse, ed.
David Kretzmer and Eckart Klein (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 2002). The closely
related topic of kvod haTzibbur or the "honor of the community" as it
has in the past restricted women but no longer applies today since the
norms of women's participation in community have changed is another
core subject in Jewish feminist religious discussion. See Mendel
Shapiro footnote 12 above.
42 See for example Rosemarie Tong for an overview of different feminist
ideologies, Feminist Thought (Colorodo: Westview Press, 1989).
43 For discussion of the opportunities and challenges of separate women's
prayer groups, see Rivka Haut, "Women's Prayer Groups and the Orthodox
Synagogue," Daughters of the King , 135-158.
44 This problem of balancing women's identities with religious ones is
dramatically posed in the issue of the veil among Muslim women. The veil on
one hand can be extremely limiting and restrictive, removing women from
public presence and even obstructing their vision, as in fully veiled faces or in
the recent suggestion by a Saudi Imam that women's veils have only one
eyehole. Yet women have also embraced the veil as a mark of their
distinctive religious identity. For discussion of the veil, see Nancy
Hirschmann. ‘Western Feminism, Eastern Veiling and the Question of Free
Agency,’ Constellations (1998) 5 (3):345-368. Rose Weitz offers an
interesting discussion of the veil as a balance between accommodation and
resistance in "Women and their Hair," The Politics of Women's Bodies ed.
Rose Weitz, (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133-151, pp. 144-146.
45 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1982).
46 Moshe Rosman, Review of Edward Fram "My Dear Daugher: Rabbi
Benjamin Slonik" Nashim 16 2008, 242-247.
47 Power/Knowledge p. 142; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality I: The Will
to Know (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 95-6. For a full discussion of
resistance see Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the
Body. (New York: Routledge, 1991). I have discussed the limits of
Foucauldian resistance in "The Ethics of Foucauldian Poetics: Women's
Selves," New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer 2004, 491-506
Foucault Mekhitzah 33
48
This approach of reinterpreting while retaining Halakhic practices has been
variously discussed with regard to Mikveh practices, that is, the practice of
ritual bathing after menstruation and a waiting period. See for example
Rachel Wasserfall, ed. Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and
Law (Brandeis University Press, 1999).
49 I discuss the history and principles of what I call civic feminism in “Public
Women, Private Men: American Women Poets and the Common Good,”
Signs, Winter 2003 Vol. 28, no. 2, 665-694.
50 Cf. Shira Wolosky, "The Lonely Woman of Faith," Judaism, Vol. 52. Nos. 12, 2004, 3-18.
51 Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism, (Waltham,
Mass: Brandeis University Press, 2007), pp. 2-3. Hartman also discusses
feminist critiques of liberal individualism, p. 12; and women as subject to the
male gaze, p. 54.