Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Read Free Page A

6970)
My claim is that an ethnography of rabbinic culture would find that the first two categories are not dominant in this formation, i.e., that explicit devaluation of women, while certainly present in the texts, is not in them a key symbol (Ortner 1973). Moreover, as I have tried to show here, even practices such as menstrual defilement do not necessarily reflect a general attribution of defilement to women or female sexuality and that within the classical rabbinic periodas opposed to medieval Judaismthey, in fact, do not. If, however, Ortner's first two categories of female inferiority

 
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4
Engendering Desire
Husbands, Wives, and Sexual Intercourse
The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality . . . to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse." Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasureall this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the "polymorphous techniques of power." (Foucault1980, 11)
My purpose in this chapter is to begin the charting of the operations of power over and within the forms of pleasure and desire in the talmudic culture, the power of the rabbinic class over the sexual practices of married couples, and the power of men over women in sexual life. The Foucauldian critique of the "repressive hypothesis" will serve us well here in looking at the complex modalities of power and production within which rabbinic texts on sexuality function. I will be looking at texts that have been read until now as the very origin and sites of a repressive discourse, but my aim will be to show that their actual function is quite different from what has usually been portrayed. The text often cited as the marker of a controlling force that the Rabbis claimed over the conduct of married sexual practice can be read precisely as a renunciation of such control. In several ways, through several textual practices, the Rabbis removed from the Torah's purview the actual practices of married couples in the bedroom, and their extreme codification of the necessity for privacy during sexual activity makes actual sexual practice invisible and thus

 
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uncontrollable. The area over which the Rabbis do wish to retain control is paradoxically the emotional, affective state of relations between the husband and wife at the time of sexual contact, which they codify as requiring intimacy, harmony of desires, and mutual arousal and pleasure. This point will raise serious questions regarding a commonly held view that woman is a sexual object and not subject in rabbinic culture. While the only voices heard in the talmudic and midrashic texts are male ones, among those male voices many are earnestly empathic of female need and desire.
Indeed, this ironic double stance of both genuine empathy for women and rigid hierarchical domination of women is endemic in the talmudic discourse. Perhaps its most sardonic moment comes in a text that I will analyze in the next chapter, where a husband who has spent more than a decade away from home to study Torah refers to his wife as ''that poor woman," because he has been away for more than a decade