Modesty, Purity and Jewish Women's Bodies: Pedagogical Objects, Performative Subjects, and the Problem of Feminism.

Feminist research has established how religious, national, and ethnic communities police, mark, and enlist women's bodies to assert and protect collective identities and cultural boundaries, suggesting that the female body is a crucial symbol in the construction of "imagined communities". Often, these analyses identify and celebrate subversion and resistance. While capturing gendered and sexualized symbolic meanings of the body, this approach does not address the body as a site of moral training. This shortcoming is particularly acute when one approaches non-western, "traditional" practices, thereby revealing secularist intellectual biases.This paper approaches this "problem of feminism" by drawing on data collected for a research project that examines the negotiations that shape and transform Israel's modern-orthodox community. Examining several pedagogies that orthodox traditionalists employ to enlist women's bodies and sexuality in their cultural battles with secular Israeli culture, this paper argues that these negotiations hinge on the differentiation from and vilification of secular femininity, sexuality, and way of life. At the same time, I caution against a simplistic approach that posits women as pedagogical targets of communal attempts to guard national boundaries. Coming from secular scholars, this view fails to recognize the multiple layers of meanings of traditional practices; propagated by progressive orthodox women, this view reflects a learned, rather than embodied, understanding of religiosity. I argue that despite such internal and external critiques, modesty and purity also potentially define an alternative modality of sexuality-an "authentic Jewish femininity"-that is embodied through the practices associated with Jewish menstrual laws and modesty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]