Vulnerability and Resistance

Vulnerability and Resistance Commentary by Maryanne Saunders Cite Share Show Bible Passage The Sotah as a figure and a practice has been the focus for many feminist artists working within the Jewish tradition. American-Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz created The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife in 2009 from the key components of the Sotah ritual: hair, dirt, Hebrew letters, and paper. The dress is made of transparent Japanese paper and displayed in a glass vitrine designed to reproduce the humiliation and exposure of the victim and emphasize the voyeuristic nature of the process. The inclusion of hair is especially poignant for Arnovitz, a practicing Orthodox Jew, as hair covering remains an important sartorial sign of devotion for Orthodox women after marriage. Rather than politicizing the Sotah, Arnovitz turns the story away from the spectator and the spectacle and exteriorizes the shame and vulnerability that go along with being sexualized by those around you. Scholars of feminist Jewish art such as Efraim Sicher have argued that ‘[m]uch feminist art makes the female body a site of resistance to policing by power hierarchies and sexualization’ (Sicher 2019: 271–96). But what we see in this work is more than a strategy by which the female body is 'made' a site of resistance by an artist, and Arnovitz does not deploy the female body merely for argument’s sake. Here, in her simultaneous revealing and concealing of such a body, she invites us to discern patterns of resistance that precede her, suggesting, perhaps, that such resistance has always been enacted in and by female bodies. Indeed, in the Sotah, the body is arguably the only 'site of resistance' available given how irrevocably it is implicated in the brutal social and physical consequences of the ritual. References Sicher, Efraim. 2019. ‘Written on the Body: Re-embodying Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Feminist Art’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,19.3: 271–96