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“A Girl Who Has Not Yet Begun to See”: Radical Indeterminacy and the Riddle of Virginity in B. Niddah 64b

Tue, December 18, 8:30 to 10:00am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 2 & 3

Abstract

How can we think about female interiority, both physical and metaphorical, in an androcentric symbolic system? And what is at stake in the rabbis’ attempts to classify, determine, and interpret it? Through the lenses of text- and source- critical analysis, and the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, this paper proposes to explicate a dense, problematic, and ultimately irresolvable riddle found in M. Niddah 10:1, and the beginning of its associated gemara in B. Niddah 64b, regarding determination of the nature of female post-coital bleeding.
M. Niddah 10:1 is divided into three cases. However, the terms and framing of these cases take a sharp, contradictory turn between the second and third cases, fracturing attempts to harmonize and interpret them—a problem which is borne out in the opaque and counterintuitive reading proposed by the gemara. This paper will argue that female interiority is a site of persistent difficulty for rabbinic systems of halakhic classification and interpretation of the material world, and it will use theoretical tools to show that the sources of this particular textual riddle reflect a larger rabbinic struggle with the indeterminacy of the physical world in terms of a system which demands knowledge of objects and status sometimes beyond the limits of human perception.
This paper will pair close reading of the text’s own categories—and the subtle changes in the way they are applied between the mishnaic cases and between the Mishnah and the gemara—with theoretical models drawn from philosophy, gender theory, and rabbinic scholarship in order to unfold the layers of meaning contained in this text. Each of the two approaches, theoretical and source-critical, enriches each other when used in combination, allowing for both a broad perspective on how the text fits into the system of knowledge created by the Talmud as a legal document, and a narrow focus on how the details of the text express minute but important discursive features, such as shifts in terminology, framing, and structure.

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