Reproducing the Social: Magic, Power, and Sexual Taboos

• In Event: Taboo in Kabbalah and Jewish Magic

Abstract

In the conclusion to Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim applies and extends his theory of the sacred to understanding the constitution of society itself. Through collective life, individuals produce the sense of the sacred and also learn to imagine ideals through which society is created and recreated. Taboo and the negative rites that reinforce distinctions between licit and illicit, on the other hand, perform communal boundary work. This paper will draw from ethnographic field work among Jewish feminists in the United States, Canada, and Israel to interrogate the ways in which taboos work to inscribed gendered and sexual difference in social, educational, and ritual distinctions that shape Jewish sociality, and how feminist practices mobilize the power of taboo to challenge Jewish structures of authority.
As many scholars of lived religion have shown, the body is a particularly potent site for mounting challenges to dominant structures of power and disciplinary regimes. The reproductive body, as the vessel for social reproduction, is a particularly contested political site and symbol. The female body became a focus of feminist biopolitics in the 1960s-70s in America, which has shaped how contemporary Jewish feminist activists mobilize the female body a particularly potent symbol and site of Jewish contestation. Within so-called secular feminist circles, magic and mysticism were potent discourses for reclaiming authority over women's reproductive power. In turn, Jewish feminists adopted and adapted these discourses to the particular constraints, and using the resources of, their social, political, religious traditions.
This paper will compare two Jewish feminist practices where magic challenges taboos around sexuality. The first is women's text study, and in particular, the ways in which women invoke magic and mysticism to disrupt the connections between women's knowledge and modesty imposed by Orthodox authorities. The second practice is mikveh and the associated taboos around menstruation and sexuality. I will show how ritual immersions have become a feminist tool for sacralizing women's reproductive roles and transforming shame around the fluids of the sexual body into sources of healing and rebirth.

Author

• Cara Rock-Singer, University of Wisconsin, Madison