Embodied Jewish gender histories: Feminist, reflexive, creative encounters in the archives and in the field

Session Submission Type: Lightning Session

Abstract

Feminist anthropologists pioneered “reflexive” research, as seen in Behar's THE VULNERABLE OBSERVER (1996), alongside early feminist ethnographies like Landes’ CITY OF WOMEN (1947) and Hurston’s TELL MY HORSE (1938). Since the 1980s, cultural anthropologists embraced “reflexivity” on their positionalities in relation to research subjects, acknowledging the impact on knowledge production. Unfortunately, historians and biographers often avoid this approach due to disciplinary emphasis on objectivity.

Like ethnography, biography is a relationship, as articulated by Amia Lieblich, a psychobiographer. The biographer's identity influences the interpretation of archival materials, shaping the narrative and deepening the understanding of subjects.

Nonhuman entities, such as archival materials, exert influence on researchers (Bennett, Hodder, Latour). Paying attention to what we feel in our bodies as we work in the archives, gives insight into our subjects’ emotional worlds. This is intersubjectivity, a psychoanalytic concept, positing reality as co-constructed by researchers and subjects.

In autoethnography, the researcher serves as both subject and analyst by reflecting on personal experiences within their cultural context. Traditional academic prose often lacks the space to delve into the emotional, embodied, and psychological aspects of researchers' experiences. Therefore, this performance/scholarship session integrates creative methodologies like visual arts (Abeles, Palmén), film (Gondek), YIZKER-BIKHER (Halpern), imagined dialogues (Abeles), travelogue (Leon) and virtual exhibits (Gondek) to create a boundary-crossing performance space inspired by Anzaldúa's “borderland.”

The YIZKER-BIKHER-inspired “Butzy Project” (Halpern) connects the wise woman healer OPSHPREKHERKE with the artist’s great aunt Butzy, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant. Palmén stages the complexities of biographical representation in the work of German-Jewish feminist, Levy-Rathenau, “...between the lines.” “A Political Act” (Dessa) imagines a conversation with German-Jewish social worker, Alice Salomon, demonstrating the interconnectedness of Jewish women across generations. The film project, “The Boundaries of Belonging,” utilizes feminist anthropological methods to explore Gondek’s affective reactions to Jewish South African anthropologist, Ellen Hellmann's, archival artifacts. These performances use genres such as biography, ethnography, and autoethnography, to invite participants to reflect on relational processes with archival materials and fieldwork. We integrate rigorous inquiry with creative expression to provoke interdisciplinary feminist dialogue and intergenerational encounters with Jewish women's history, biography, and the anthropology of Jewish communities.

Sub Unit

• Gender & Sexuality Studies

Chair

• Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

Individual Presentations

• The Butzy Project: Jewish Women in the Healing Arts and the Imaginary - Nikki Halpern

• Return to Sepharad: Excerpts from a Voyage to the Ancestral Past - Mechele Leon, The University Of Kansas

• Meeting Josephine Levy-Rathenau: biography, memory, and intersubjectivity - Angelina Palmen, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

• A Political Act: Unraveling the Legacy of Alice Salomon in Visual Art and Imagined Dialogue - Deborah Petroz

• The Boundaries of Belonging: A Feminist Autoethnography of a Jewish anthropologist’s archives - Abby Gondek, Florida International University

• Ode to Rose Kushner, Who Made Breast Cancer Political (as Nixon lurked in the background) - S.L. Sandi Wisenberg

• An autoethnography against categories: Borderland subjectivities in Israel-Palestine - Hannah Mayne, University of Toronto

Respondent

• Julia Mickenberg, Univerrsity of Texas at Austin

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 03