Shira Schwartz

The Ritual/ Performance Braid: Mikvah-Ritual in Orthodox Jewish Communities

My paper explores issues of public and private as they relate specifically to the gendered ritual practices of orthodox Jewish women. Mikvah ritual, a monthly spiritual bath related to a woman’s menstrual cycle, involves a rigorous preparation process (a rehearsal) and a sophisticated final presentation (a performance); the mikvah-body, a body that prepares for and immerses in the mikvah, is thus a central site of performativity. My paper posits that mikvah ritual and space contests fixed notions of public and private through its nuanced rehearsal process and complex ontological structure, and further, that its rehearsal extends beyond the preparation process involved directly beforehand. The specific rituals involved in mikvah-preparations can be viewed as a kind of protest – a quiet counter-public – that tacitly subverts the official public. Considering Victor Turner’s understanding of ritual as interruptive and Saba Mahmood’s theory of a paradoxical agency (acts of resistance that emerge from within existing power-structures), my paper explores the ways in which this cohort locates agency and subverts the status-quo through mikvah ritual, destabilizing overly-simple notions of public. I propose that mikvah performances interrupt publics through gestural, discursive, bodily acts that simultaneously enact and disrupt fixed notions of gender. I suggest a kind of subversion that infringes on societal norms from within, attending to a kind of nuanced doing of gender rather than to its undoing. My paper asserts that mikvah ritual is the primary vehicle through which orthodox Jewish women can engage in re/ negotiations of gender, and that its enactment is embodied through quiet public interruption.