Call for Papers
“What Pertains To a Man”?
Transcending Gender Boundaries in Jewish and Israeli Law
Conference to be held at the University of Chicago Law School
Monday March 1, 2010
This small one day conference will be structured around two documentary films, Praying in her Own Voice and Paper Dolls (Bubyot Niyar), each centered on ways in which Israeli law and culture deal with individuals and groups who transcend the gender boundaries of Jewish law. The conference title is taken from Deuteronomy 10:22, which declares it to be an abomination for a woman to put on what pertains to a man and for a man to wear women’s clothing.
The conference will be held Monday March 1, coincident to the feast of Purim, which commemorates Esther’s saving the Jewish people by crossing uninvited from the women’s quarters to the king’s inner court and is traditionally celebrated with masquerades including some cross-dressing. Purim and the megilla of Esther are also important to the subjects of Praying in her Own Voice, the Women of the Wall, whose decades- long quest to pray and read from Torah scrolls wearing tallit at the Western Wall in Jerusalem led them several times to the Israeli Supreme Court.
The conference will juxtapose the Women of the Wall’s attempt to transcend gender boundaries with that of a very different group, the Paper Dolls, a drag performance troupe whose members are transgendered Filipino care workers in Israel. The award-winning Paper Dolls documentary explores the mulitiplicity of ways in which the group negotiates and transcends gender boundaries, as it examines the group members’ interactions with both the elderly orthodox Jewish men they are employed to care for and the gay male Israeli club patrons for whom they audition as performers.
Confirmed speakers for the conference include Aeyal Gross of Tel Aviv University, Pnina Lahav of Boston University, and Martin F. Manalansan IV of the University of Illinois. We will be adding a few additional speakers and to that end seek proposals in the form either of an abstract or draft paper dealing with any aspect of Transcending Gender Boundaries in Jewish or Israeli Law, by no means limited to the subjects of the two films. We welcome papers from all disciplines.
The conference sponsors include the University of Chicago Law School’s Workshop on Regulating Family, Sex and Gender, and the University’s Center for Gender Studies, Program in Jewish Studies and Program in Human Rights.
Please e-mail proposals to Mary Anne Case at macase@law.uchicago.edu. Proposals received before January 6, 2010 will receive full consideration.
-Mary Anne Case
