Menstruation and Ritual: Is Niddah Inherently Gendered?

• In Event: Spotlighting Forgotten Women

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to analyze how the Jewish menstrual ritual of niddah emerges in modern Jewish life as a site for investigating questions around gender, sex, and ritual. In its most basic observance, niddah requires a menstruating person to abstain from sex throughout their menstruation. At the end of the niddah period, the menstruator then immerses in the mikveh - a ritual bath - that transitions them from impure to pure, returning them to regular life. As a ritual purity practice, niddah frames religious life around menstruation and sex. In this way, niddah structures a person’s life - not just through marking menstruation and the body but also through marking a niddah observer’s relationship towards sex, desire, and their partner.

In this paper, I analyze a set of interviews I’ve conducted with menstruants who observe niddah. My interlocutors range from their early twenties to their fifties, fall on a spectrum between Reform and Modern Orthodox, and have diverse gender and sexual identities. In these interviews, niddah observers raise competing narratives to frame their niddah practice. On the one hand, observers situate niddah within their own pre-existing frameworks for understanding Jewish ritual at large. Observers clearly explain the similarities between the way they approach niddah and the ways they approach other routine rituals, such as observing shabbat or kashrut dietary practices. In this way, niddah emerges as a site for constructing one’s general relationship to Jewish ritual. Yet, on the other hand, my interlocutors turn to niddah to think through questions about sex, gender, and partnership. As they integrate niddah into their lives, they use niddah to think through how sex relates to their bodies, their gender identities, and their relationships. Niddah observers detail how they consciously work and think through niddah, as they choose certain parts of niddah to keep, ignore, or reframe in a way that fits within their own frameworks for sex and relationships.

In their reliance on these different narratives, my interlocutors emphasize niddah as both a generalizable ritual and as a specific site for thinking through gender and sex. Thus, I seek to analyze this entanglement of gender and ritual within niddah observance. I ask, how does niddah emerge as a general ritual site for identity contestation, and how does it manifest as a specific site for framing gender and sex? How do these frameworks complement or contradict each other within niddah observers’ narratives?

Author

• Liza Bernstein, Northwestern University