Hello, dear Torah lovers! Here is your periodic (sorry) update on what I am thinking about as I write my queer niddah book. The following is an excerpt from the section I am currently working on about understanding niddah through a purity lens, as part of an exploration of different ways to understand niddah (purity, sexual prohibition, a secret third thing which is covenant). It draws heavily on the scholarship of Mira Balberg in her book “Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature,” but I think even though I am giving you only an excerpt and not the full piece of writing, which has more detailed engagement with Balberg, it will still make sense. Also, a reminder that this is literally a first draft — some, all, or none of this might make it into the final book (iyh one day)!
A comment from my read-through that might be a useful reflection for you:
A menstruating body is irreconcilable with the ideally pure body, bounded and defined as a whole self in its separateness. Menstruation is a threat because of its uncontrollability, presumably. It is not unique in this feature, though—cf wet dreams. It does uniquely combine uncontrollability with regularity, however—perhaps that is the real threat, that the self can be more or less integrally constructed “around” incidental moments like wet dreams, but menstruation is too central to embodied experience to be bracketed. Adler goes on to argue that *all* experience is essentially like menstruation, in this sense.
A comment from my read-through that might be a useful reflection for you:
A menstruating body is irreconcilable with the ideally pure body, bounded and defined as a whole self in its separateness. Menstruation is a threat because of its uncontrollability, presumably. It is not unique in this feature, though—cf wet dreams. It does uniquely combine uncontrollability with regularity, however—perhaps that is the real threat, that the self can be more or less integrally constructed “around” incidental moments like wet dreams, but menstruation is too central to embodied experience to be bracketed. Adler goes on to argue that *all* experience is essentially like menstruation, in this sense.