"A Mystery on the Tombstones, or: Menstruation in Early-Modern Ashkenazi Culture" (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article is about the creative ritual practices of a group of Spanish and Catalan pilgrims who visit French shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Raised and educated in Catholic families, these women describe themselves as being part of the worldwide Goddess movement and do not consider their theories and rituals to be in conflict with Christian values. During their pilgrimages they celebrate rituals in shrines that they feel were unjustly monopolized by the “Church”. The pilgrims see Mary Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood, and advocate a “feminist reading” of Jesus’ message. They perform creative rituals to commune with “Mother Earth” by offering Her their menstrual blood. The creative ritualization of menstruation allows the pilgrims to reinterpret Catholic rituals thereby transforming negative concepts related to body and gender they have received from their Catholic families. The pilgrims’ rituals of offering also foster an embodied relationship with the divine. Analysing one particular menstrual ritual I will show how offering their blood to Mother Earth these women literally turn upside down the central ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist. Through this strategy they manage to ritually transform menstruation from a curse into a blessing and to elaborate new notions about their body and sexuality. I will analyse these womens’ conceptualization of menstrual blood drawing on historical studies about the meaning of menstruation in Christianity as well as anthropological studies about menstruation in traditional as well as in Western societies. I will argue that proclaiming the sacrality of menstrual blood these women try to repair a social order in which menstruation is still often associated with female subordination. With their rituals these women aim to provoke not only a healing process on a personal level but also a shift of perception on a social level.
Reversing Eve’s Curse. Mary Magdalene Pilgrims and the Creative Ritualization of Menstruation
2014
This article is about the creative ritual practices of a group of Spanish and Catalan pilgrims who visit French shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Raised and educated in Catholic families, these women describe themselves as being part of the worldwide Goddess movement and do not consider their theories and rituals to be in conflict with Christian values. During their pilgrimages they celebrate rituals in shrines that they feel were unjustly monopolized by the "Church". The pilgrims see Mary Magdalene as the guardian of menstrual blood, and advocate a "feminist reading" of Jesus' message. They perform creative rituals to commune with "Mother Earth" by offering Her their menstrual blood. The creative ritualization of menstruation allows the pilgrims to reinterpret Catholic rituals thereby transforming negative concepts related to body and gender they have received from their Catholic families. The pilgrims' rituals of offering also foster an embodied relationship with the divine. Analysing one particular menstrual ritual I will show how offering their blood to Mother Earth these women literally turn upside down the central ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist. Through this strategy they manage to ritually transform menstruation from a curse into a blessing and to elaborate new notions about their body and sexuality. I will analyse these womens' conceptualization of menstrual blood drawing on historical studies about the meaning of menstruation in Christianity as well as anthropological studies about menstruation in traditional as well as in Western societies. I will argue that proclaiming the sacrality of menstrual blood these women try to repair a social order in which menstruation is still often associated with female subordination. With their rituals these women aim to provoke not only a healing process on a personal level but also a shift of perception on a social level.
The Power of Blood: The Many Faces of Women's Monthly Menses in Jewish Law and Beyond
Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 2021
Menstruation has many faces. This Essay will discuss competing narratives relating to menstruation as portrayed in Jewish law and culture, and assess the implications of such narratives for modern legal systems. These narratives depict menstruation in all its contradictions — as taboo and power, as health and imperfection, and as reflecting biological difference but not inequality. Each narrative will be discussed from a textual, legal, communal and, occasionally, personal perspective, conveying different meanings that have different cultural impacts, modern applications and reflect different aspects of the quest for equality. Together, these narratives provide a holistic vision of womanhood that resists simplification. Acknowledging that not only women menstruate, in this Essay I refer to women as those who menstruate because this is the category associated with menstruation used in Jewish law and it is the complexity of womanhood revealed by Jewish law and culture that I address. ...
Writing the Unwritten Life of the Islamic Eve: Menstruation and the Demonization of Motherhood
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1996
Western scholars have long studied Jewish and Christian influence in shaping early Islamic tradition, but almost none of them has considered Eve's transformation as a critical part of the “genesis” of an Islamic historical framework and the evolution of its gender categories. I trace the transformation of the wife of Adam from the revelation contained in the Qurʾan and note the abrupt and distinct changes wrought upon this Qurʾanic persona in post-Qurʾanic sources in the matters of menstruation and motherhood. The figure of Satan plays a pivotal role in both of these biological aspects of Eve's biography. Her function as the first woman serves to explain not just the physiology of all women, but also the essential aspects of character that allegedly make all females different from the normative male in biology and behavior. As a wife, Eve is tested and fails, but as a mother, she both fails and passes the test of satanic temptation. I argue that in her role as wife, she is d...
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2022
A rich body of descriptive and comparative anthropological literature about menstrual ritual practices across numerous cultures has unfolded over the last sixty years. What has yet to emerge in this literature is a theoretical framework for a broadly cohesive approach to the study of menstrual practices that would establish menstrual studies as a fully-fledged subfield. In this article, I propose -through a joint ethnographic and textual examination of Jewish menstrual rituals (Niddah)- that such theoretical foundations can be established by integrating analytical tools from ritual studies with anthropological theory. The foundation for this theoretical framework depends on two primary moves: to expand the analytical gaze beyond menstruants to their wider social contexts, their ritual ecologies; and to identify which other socio-cultural domains (such as sex, food, prayer, space, social relationships, etc…) are indexed through a religio-culture’s menstrual practices. This indexical ecology becomes the primary lens through which anthropology and ritual studies can analyze a religio-culture’s articulations of values and meanings not only about its menstrual practices but also its indexed socio-cultural domains. I model this analytical framework by applying fourteen years of ethnographic experience as an observing participant of Jewish menstrual rituals (Niddah) in two separate communities to an analysis of contemporary Jewish promotional literature. This joint approach is necessitated by the highly intimate and ritually invisible nature of Niddah observance. For this same reason, such an analysis depends upon the experience of an insider to bring ethnographic richness and complexity to a literature whose ‘hard-sell’ agenda -to inspire increased observance of an ancient ritual practice among a complex diversity of modern-minded Jews- makes it vulnerable to accusations of a skewed subjectivity disconnected from lived realities, undermining its value as a “legitimate” source of cultural knowledge for academic analysis. This body of literature, being both prescriptive and motivational, outlines the structures of Niddah’s ritual performance and develops Jewish ideals about Niddah’s indexical domains: Jewish sexual ethics and marital relationality. Building on a ritual studies analysis of Niddah’s performative structures and the issues involved when its ritual efficacy for producing ideal Jewish marriages fails to manifest, I argue that Jewish menstrual rituals directly articulating lived experiences of Jewish marital relationality, both sexual and non-sexual, thus acting as an amplifier of the relational dynamics between the participating sexual partners (traditionally married). While a theory of Niddah ritual as an amplifier could be achieved independently of a theoretical framework of ritual ecologies and cultural indexing, such a framework enables more robustly generative cross-cultural comparative studies of menstrual rituals that can transform sixty years of scattered and isolated menstrual studies into a distinct academic subfield with direct implications not only for religious studies, cultural anthropologies, and ritual studies but also for women’s and gender studies, sociology, psychology, and medical anthropologies. This article will conclude with a descriptive summary of implications of this ecological and indexical framework for a variety of disciplines and discourse areas: Sociology, Diaspora Studies, menstrual politics in Women’s and Gender Studies, and both research and clinical implications in Psychology.
From Body to Substance: Islamic Menstruation Laws in the Shadow of Late Antiquity
Islamic Law and Society, 2024
This essay traces the development of the Islamic legal discourse on menstruation (ḥayd) in the formative and classical periods of Islamic law (until approximately 1200 ce). I argue that, unlike their late antique predecessors and contemporaries, Muslim jurists parsed menstrual blood, with its perceived ability to travel and pollute other bodies and substances, as a generically polluting substance (the “substance-thesis”). This development marked a noteworthy departure from rabbinic law, in which the menstruating female body was regarded as inherently impure. The complex and sophisticated conceptual shift in Islamic legal discourse involved the participation of Muslim jurists, exegetes, theologians, and grammarians, who constructed and justified the new social boundaries between men and menstruant women in their respective disciplines. By treating menstruation laws as part of a comprehensive cultural regime governing the body, I seek to understand the nexus between Islamic menstruation laws and the social worlds they constituted, historically examining the conceptual shifts in the logic of making such laws. The essay puts sociological and anthropological theories in conversation with a wide array of Islamic legal and quasi-legal sources, offering a model for understanding the legal and cultural process by which Islamic (menstruation) laws became codified against the backdrop of much older late antique legal epistemologies.