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The Believable Mouth: Interpretation and Gender in BT Ketubot

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

In this paper, I show that the anonymous narrator of BT Ketubot 16b, in its treatment of mishnaic cases in which women either are or are not believed, simultaneously constructs and destabilizes its own construction of an untrustworthy female legal subject. My paper focuses on the Bavli’s analysis of a series of cases in the first two chapters of m. Ketubot in which hypothetical women respond to questions about their sexual histories. I show that the stam’s renarrativization of these cases creates hypotheticals that self-deny, positing their own certainty while also emphasizing their lack of verifiability. The passage’s treatment of the hypothetical woman thus highlights the fundamental irreconcilability between the need for legal coherence and the law’s access to reality.



My reading of this passage responds to two different lines of argument in rabbinics, the first relating to the stam’s role in the construction and narration of Bavli sugyot, and the second having to do with the portrayal and function of women as legal subjects in rabbinic texts. Most scholars of the Bavli’s anonymous layer have claimed that it is fundamentally oriented towards asserting its own authority over previous texts, whether such authority is characterized by preserving (Halivini), harmonizing (Friedman), or distancing (Vidas). As my reading of this text demonstrates, the stam in fact frequently undermines its own authority through its use of interpretive structures that highlight their own indeterminacy. I also complicate an argument put forth in different ways by Fonrobert and Halberstam, among others, that rabbinic literature portrays women as unreliable sources of knowledge or of truth about their own bodies in order to assert the rabbis’ own legal agency. Instead, I suggest that the hypothetical woman in this passage, whose credibility is successively affirmed and doubted over and over, may in fact function here as a metaphor for the indeterminacy of the legal text and the fundamental unreliability of its own interpreters.

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