I work at the interstices of Rabbinic Literature, Anthropology of Religion, Queer, Gender and Trans Studies. My dissertation, “Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction”, traces the construction of Jewish bodies comparatively across ancient and contemporary educational institutions. This interdisciplinary project draws on textual and ethnographic data to investigate the role that the yeshiva and its antecedents have played in generating Jewish reproductive bodies, gender, sex, kinship and desire. It explores early rabbinic learning spaces as centers of male reproduction and demonstrates how contemporary Orthodox female bodies are transformed in women’s yeshivas as they attempt to enter this historically male lineage. I am invested in opening up new directions for research on the body, educational ethics, transness and intersex, Jewishness in Orthodoxy and ex-Orthodoxy (OTD). Other nascent projects include a comparative phenomenology of religious “exes” as queer, and a larger study on the relationship between gender, hormones and secondary sex traits in the materialization of sexed and intersexed bodies.
