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The objectification of women, which reduces the individual woman to her physical appearance while denying her autonomy and subjectivity, has long been and remains to this day a pressing feminist concern. In a Jewish context, this objectification finds expression in numerous laws that regulate women’s appearance and silence the female voice. While poetry has often been coded as female, not enough has been said about the ways in which the form-content divide in poetics discourse parallels the objectification of women which, seen through this lens, aims at divorcing the individual woman’s “form,” or looks, form her “content”, or inner world.
This paper examines the ways in which Jewish women’s poetry resists objectification through the reclamation of and celebration of poetic form and of the female body. In particular, I focus on early 20th century poems by the Hebrew poet Esther Raab and the Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, and show how their work subverts, through reappropriation, the prioritization of form over content and the preoccupation with female appearance. I argue that for both Raab and Dropkin, poetry, as a genre that is often coded female, and that depends in equal measure on both form and content to create meaning, provides a space for enacting a radical feminist poetics whose ultimate aim is to expose the fallacy of the form-content distinction, and the dehumanizing effects of objectification. In conclusion, I aim to shed new light on the intersections of gender and genre in feminist resistance to objectification in early 20th century Jewish literature.