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    Turning back

    Frosh, Stephen (2016) Turning back. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17 (4), pp. 262-269. ISSN 1524-0657.

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    Abstract

    This response to Miri Rozmarin’s paper, Staying Alive, focuses on the question of what it might mean to create a response to matricide and patriarchal violence that is grounded in the particularities of cultural and personal history. Rozmarin’s rendering of a possible response to matricide through the mother-daughter genealogy is illustrated in her analysis of the Biblical myth of Lot’s wife. She claims that this story of destruction, punishment and incest reveals ‘an option of non-matricidal relations’ and she gives a compelling account of how this could be so. In my response, I suggest that there are alternative ‘against the grain’ readings that are grounded in the Jewish traditions and sensibilities in which such ‘mythic’ material is embedded and from which it draws its vitality. I offer an example of this, not to refute Rozmarin’s claims, but to suggest that something more nuanced and even loving can be found in the specificity of this cultured and gendered encounter, and that this better meets the conditions for ‘concrete’ ethical resistance that she seeks.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): destruction, genealogy, human, human cell, incest, punishment, sensibility, violence, wife
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MAMSIE)
    Depositing User: Stephen Frosh
    Date Deposited: 20 Dec 2016 11:13
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:27
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16388

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