I have taken Sonya Rapoport’s statement of Make me a Jewish Man to introduce you in this hypertext. This is a reply to the e-mail I sent her.
MAKE ME A JEWISH MAN: An Alternative Masculinity, is an interactive web-based artwork on the cultivation of the ideal Jewish man, a feminized, gentle, and non-phallic man as proscribed by Talmudic Law in the year 400 CE.
The work is an articulation of the paradox of rabbinic masculinity usurping the feminine while coupling it with male domination and the marginalization/exclusion of women. Although appropriations of "femaleness" are necessary in the production of the Jewish male ideal, the blood of circumcision, that of power, and the blood of birthing, that of impurity, reflect strong gender bias.
The development of the boy into ideal manhood is intertwined with the growth and cultivation of the olive tree, the horticultural hermaphroditic counterpart from which oil, the light of Jewish Law, is processed; and for the tree for which the Lord named Israel.
Humor is provided by Olive Oyl, partner to macho Popeye who eats olives instead of spinach, in order to make him a man. Ms. Oyl is the menu pop-up spokesperson who interrupts the religious edicts to take a feminist stance.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Laura Tortosa Nieto
lautor2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press