The I in My Text: Revisiting Critical Feminist Identity Politics, Refusing the Allures of Purity

Abstract

In this essay, I return to the moves to the first person I made in Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (Routledge, 1997) in order to consider what this approach has to offer us in the present. By insisting on the kinds of complexity that informed this feminist, decidedly impure enactment of critical identification, I make clear that identity is not about purity. Instead, I call attention to the hybrid, messy, and even contradictory lived realities so many of us inhabit. By returning to my own early engagement with placing myself in my writing as a scholar of Jewish studies, I consider the implications of reanimating these practices in the present. In other words, by interrogating what it meant in the 1990s to claim a Jewish feminist position, I consider anew how we position ourselves in our work in the present. Along the way, I challenge alt-right claims to "identity politics" as well as certain forms of liberal pluralism. By revisiting what it meant to write in the first person and to embody this feminist critical scholarly legacy, I hope to revive a strand of that feminist genealogy to imagine a more capacious future for embodied Jewish feminist scholarship.