Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women's Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law

Abstract

Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men's capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women's disability in primarily visual terms. In the sensory anthropology of rabbinic desire, women are led by the nose—while men are drawn by the eye. This article uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the queer closet to probe the charged, sexual dimensions of knowledge and ignorance at the heart of rabbinic marriage. Rabbinic law aims to protect the husband from the possibility that a blemished bride might pass, while simultaneously guarding against the immodest gaze.

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