Transgressive Tides: The Feminine Aquatic in Contemporary Jewish Fantasy

• In Event: Drowning, Leaking, Flowing: Images of the Aquatic in Jewish Literature

Abstract

Although scholars Dee Dee Chainey and Willow Winsham have begun to excavate the generative space that water provides in folklore, it is from a universal, European framework, which does not account for divergences in Jewish literary representations. Water existed before Creation in Genesis, and its characterization as a space of chaotic primordial evil is a threat to the dominant order, epitomized by the draconic Leviathan. By engaging with liminal figures who unsettle the binary of the human and the nonhuman in adaptations of Jewish folklore, I will elucidate how as Jewish women authors, Rebecca Podos and R.M. Romero challenge anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as animalistic by respectively reformulating the male, Christian conception of the ‘human’ through posthumanist explorations of the nonhuman aquatic world in FROM DUST, A FLAME (2022) and THE GHOSTS OF ROSE HILL (2018).
Drawing on feminist black environmental scholars, such as Christina Sharpe, Anissa Janine Wardi, and Katherine McKittrick, I will illuminate the importance of Jewish literary production in the stakes of environmental literature. Both Podos and Romero reimagine the aquatic environment, not by assimilating to a Eurocentric model of masculinity and whiteness, but through a posthumanist existence that is necessarily feminist. In considering metamorphosis in FROM DUST, A FLAME—both literal in Podos’ shapeshifting characters and metaphorical—as symbolic rebirths, characters actualize their potentials for fluid and free ways of being through aquatic forms. Both authors employ water demons to embody transgressive, liberatory epistemologies which deconstruct rigid boundaries of the human and nonhuman worlds. I aim to explore both works from the lens of feminist environmental studies to argue that the aquatic is inherently in conversation with femininity. Water and the womb go hand in hand, and the literal and metaphorical slipperiness of water necessitates that we must revisit these biblical depictions of water as a space of evil in conversation with these contemporary works to make space for a feminist posthumanist understanding of water in Jewish studies as a powerful space of autonomy.

Author

• Marissa Herzig, University of Toronto