Anatomy of a Revise-and-Resubmit, part I: Writing While Female

I've just recently received word about the final disposition of an article I submitted for possible publication in the Jewish Quarterly Review: after an initial decision of revise-and-resubmit that led to some really major revision of the piece, the article was ultimately rejected. The process was flawed at every stage and doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in the value or merits of the double-blind peer review process as the sine qua non it is often thought to be. The next few posts will reflect upon the process.

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Just for some brief contextual reference, here is the abstract that accompanied the article:

 Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the dawn of modernity, a single exemplar is identified as having been written by a woman. Modern scholarship concerning this poem has primarily been interested in it as a unique and curious artifact of a woman writer working in Hebrew. The present article will reconsider that poem in light of documents in the Cairo Genizah that deal, from a documentary perspective, with the same concerns and activities that the poet treats in verse, specifically the ways in which women supported themselves financially in the absence of their husbands. This study will argue that the work of the supposed Andalusi Hebrew poetess reflects economic and social realities faced by women in Muslim Spain and more broadly in the Mediterranean society documented in the Genizah. The exchange of personal effects between the woman depicted in the poem and her husband stands as a literary comparison for records of similar exchanges and calls for both a more historicized reading of Genizah poetry and for studies of this poem that move beyond the question of the poet’s gender.

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As much as I wanted to ignore the question of authorship and all the attention paid to the poem because it might have been written by a woman, my methodology was, nevertheless, a little bit programatic in this respect. I was drawn, in large part, to this poem because I was really bothered by what, to me, seemed to be very condescending treatment of it and of its ostensible author in the very small amount of scholarship devoted to it. I mentioned this in the introduction to the article and offered a very brief intervention.

One of the anonymous reviewers put on his best condescending air in order to make the following comment on that section:

“So much hot air about a non-issue! It is true that Fleischer and Rosen say that there were no women poets in Hebrew since Deborah. No one made a “comparison” or “identification” with Deborah. To make an issue out of it is not to be able to discern what’s important and what’s unimportant.”

Actually, it’s not a non-issue, and here’s why, explained with text borrowed here from a footnote I added to the the article as I revised it:

“I think that it is important that when we speak about this poem we perhaps moderate more carefully the gendered language with which we describe Dūnash’s wife. For example, even though this poem is rarely given scholarly attention, when it is, some mention is always and invariably made to the gap in women’s Hebrew poetry between the biblical figure of Deborah, whose exploits are recounted in the so-called “song of Deborah” expressed in her literary voice in Judges 5 and the wife of Dūnash; the latter is described as the literary heir to the former, the heritor or lamplight or bastion of Hebrew verse ostensibly written by women. Although it has recently been suggested to me that this is never intended as a serious comparison between the two, it seems that the persistence of the juxtaposition of Deborah and Dunash’s wife ensures a certain, likewise persistent, flattening out of the distinctions between the very limited number of women authors and women’s voices in literature. Especially if the comparison is superfluous or unserious and serves no real purpose but could, rather than illuminate our understanding of the text have a deleterious effect on reading and interpreting it, I should think that it is an analogy best consigned, quite deliberately, to the literary-critical scrapheap; when the identification of the poet as a woman at all is in doubt, this is particularly important.”

Don't even get me started (and I didn't even try to address this in the article) that we in the field, both colloquially and in print, refer to the poet, known as the wife of a poet named Dunash ben Labrat as "Mrs. Dunash."

During my first year of graduate school, after a week on feminist theory in an introduction to theories and methodologies in the field course, I asked the professor what the expectations generally were for women scholars to do feminist scholarship or write on women authors. I did not, I told her in no uncertain terms, want to be pigeonholed as a “girl Arabist.” And she gave me this incredibly sensible, sensitive answer, which was to say that no, I definitely didn’t have to do feminist scholarship or write about women, although some people might occasionally ask me why. She continued that it was possible, though, that in the course of reading text in line with whatever critical schools of thought I might ultimately decide to be valid, I might, by virtue of being a “girl Arabist” (something I couldn’t ultimately do anything about being, she pointed out to me) notice things that a male colleague might overlook or that I might be sensitive to certain textual resonances by virtue of being a woman.

This is not to say that all women readers would all notice the same things, or even that all women readers are uniformly sensitive to the same elements of writing by or about women. (The aforementioned Rosen, after all, is also a woman.) But I think this is one of those cases where the critical status quo bothered me because of the complicated gender issues in the text and in the academy in a way that male colleagues — and I am only assuming that this anonymous reviewer is a man — can overlook and call a load of silly, dithering, girly hot air. Maybe being a girl Arabist isn’t such a bad thing in the end if it means getting to stick it to the guys who read carelessly because they can or because they fail to recognize a problem that doesn’t affect them.

There's no need for condescension; and it might even be worth giving authors the benefit of the doubt that they are, in fact, identifying a real problem. Seems to me that asking for clarification is preferable to dismissing the suggestion out of hand and more in keeping with the scholarly mission of the endeavor.

Women Poets, Part II: On Not Wanting to be Pigeonholed

I was somewhat reluctant to do all of the writing about female subjects that I have done/am doing recently because I very much don't want to get pigeonholed as a "girl Arabist."*

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I should have a really compelling and well-thought-out argument for why I don't find gender to be an interesting or useful interpretive category. But that's just it. I don't. I don't have a good reason for Why not women's lit? because it's just not something I spend a huge amount of time thinking about. I'm not actively rejecting; I'm just not headed in that direction. And the fact is that I am simply not-thinking about something that my male colleagues who don't work on gender can and easily not-think about in a way that is defensible in the framework of our intellectual socialization as academics.

I know I'm likely (or perhaps simply liable, given the small number of readers here to begin with) to take flack for failing to challenge the notion of a "girl Arabist," for not insisting that girl Arabists can write about "serious" subjects such as Ibn Sina or al-Ghazali just as much or well as a, well, plain vanilla, unqualified-with-an-adjective-of-gender Arabist can. But the idea is there. For all the really talented women Arabists I have the great good fortune of knowing, we're still several decades behind the rest of the humanities in that the question of whether a woman can make a good Arabist is still an open one in the minds of many.  And for me, the way to handle it is not to do really bang-up scholarship making use of the tools of gender studies; it's to act, intellectually, like one of the guys. I don't want to fight the problem because the fight would not be intellectually satisfying or stimulating or, for me, productive in any way. I like the intellectual landscape in this respect, even if I have more to prove. I think I might even like it better because I have more to prove; even the littlest things will always be challenges, and even the smallest victories can't be taken for granted.  If I'm going to fight the intellectual establishment, it'll be over something else, like the field-wide bias toward the literature of the Eastern Mediterranean at the expense of that of the Western Med, in other words, something that really and immediately has an impact on my ability to do my work.

(Long after I wrote the preceding paragraph, but long before finishing the whole post, I found this blog post that I think sums things up nicely.)

So I've written now about Deborah and about the woman known in the scholarship as Mrs. Dunash; I am writing more about the latter figure, too. I don't think I've done it in a way that constitutes a gender-based analysis. In once case, I looked at prebiblical prophetic functions and in the other I'm writing an economic analysis of what is, in poetry, typically described as a sentimental gesture but which is, when described in Genizah letters, clearly an economic exchange. The fact that the subjects of these two studies are both female is a total coincidence. Or is it? Will I necessarily write differently about literature written by women and the historical issues that surround the question of women writers? Will I always find those texts more appealing even if they do not form the bulk of my work?

I can blithely go about my work writing or not about women in ways that have nothing to do with the fact of them being women, and then I'm suddenly forced to confront the fact that the scholarship refers to the only woman poet to write in Hebrew in the middle ages as "Mrs. Dunash." We don't have a name for her (although as I run out of ways to circumlocute the "Mrs. Dunash" terminology, I find myself wishing I could just call her Martha or something just for the sake of concision) and so any reference will always be as the wife of her husband, a famed grammarian and poet. This somehow sounds condescending. Why Mrs. Dunash and not Mrs. ben Labrat? In other words, if we're already using pieces of the Anglo nomenclature, why not go whole hog? It's a belittling nickname that to me sounds a lot like when folks (including a lot of people whose work I otherwise respect a tremendous amount) call Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, the women who indirectly facilitated the discovery of Dunash's wife's poem, "the Giblews." It makes them a single entity when they weren't in any way and also, well, frankly, makes them sound like the bits of chicken carcass that you throw away before making soup. Even if I don't care about (or, more carefully put, even if I don't prioritize) issues relating to women, both those who have been dead for more than a millennium and those I might meet at a conference, they still do resonate with me.

I have written before about why I chose to blog under my own name; the fact that I do means you can see it at the right in the sidebar or below this post as part of the tagline. So you see that professionally, I use the initials of my first and middle names rather than my whole given name. The impetus behind that is a very simple one: There's another woman named Sarah J. Pearce who works in a field that's closely enough related to my own that I knew of her existence even as an undergraduate, and enough that a Brill representative once collapsed hers and my records without thinking that the range of books was odd for one scholar. (I got a phone call from Brill one afternoon, with the very hesitant representative wanting to know why the billing address for my recent order was in the US and the shipping address was in the UK, where my homophone is located.) And as much as gender wasn't central to making what was, in the end, a very practical decision, I mention it here because, particularly in a male-dominated field, I  rather like the idea of someone who doesn't know me or know of me being able to pick up my work and read it without knowing that it was written by a woman. I like being able to block out and deflect my sensitivities to women's issues when it serves me intellectually.

I am not a girl Arabist.

I know that this is an issue I will continue to think about and rethink over the course of my career. But for now, excuse me while I go write about philosophy. And some wars.

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*My scholarly identity is actually a bit complicated. Beyond not wanting to play up the fact that I'm a woman or let that influence my scholarly approach, I have utterly given up on trying to decide what kind of -ist I am. I don't fit neatly into any of the categories, so I've all but given up on trying to assign myself a specific label tand have just decided to let my work speak for itself and for me.

Edited on 11/20/11 to include this link: Can Well-Behaved Women Make (Academic) History?

Women Poets, Part I: How I Got the Story (or didn't quite)

One of the things I envisioned being able to do in this space is to give a bit of the background into my thought process and describe and analyze things I find interesting in my research but that ultimately fall outside the scope of what is publishable or published. So here goes:


I have just had an article rejected by Vetus Testamentum. It's a straight biblical studies journal, one of the best in fact, and since biblical literature or history is not remotely close to my field of study (although of course it has implications for it and it was really useful for me to have gotten a good grounding in it in graduate school) I'm okay with the outcome. It would have been a nice-to-have kind of thing if it had worked out, but I'm not so invested in the text or the idea that I'm going to bother continuing to work on it in the interest of having it appear in print elsewhere.


But this post isn't really about the rejection. It's more about the medieval poem that brought me to thinking about the biblical text in the way that I was. My article was entirely about the biblical text (the argument, more or less, was that the representation of Deborah in the Masoretic Text is an amalgam of pre-biblical types of diviners) but it began its life as a a graduate school seminar paper on an aspect of the book of Judges that I had arrived at because of my reading of medieval poetry. What follows here was my original introduction to the paper. It would always have been too far afield to have been included in a published version of the article, and it is also not a topic I intend to return to developing more fully in this form. Even though I do have an article on the Mrs. Dunash poem in the works, this particular interpretation — that the poet becomes Deborah only in the interpretation of later readers, in much the same way that the biblical Deborah really only became Deborah through later interpretation and editing — is too closely tied to my argument about the biblical text to stand alone, and does not coincide at all with the way I am choosing to interpret the poem on its own. Furthermore, as much as I think it's a huge milestone to be able to look back at something I wrote over three years ago and not cringe and even be kind of pleased with it, my modes and methods of thinking about text have evolved pretty substantially since then (see the added footnote below that wasn't original to the text). But I became rather fond of this introduction, and of the small contribution to its interpretation that I was able to make by pointing out that the poet envisions herself as the Shulamite, not as Deborah; and so I was loathe to consign it to some electronic Genizah, never to be seen again.


There will be a part II to this exposition of the story behind the ultimate academic production, specifically concerned with the identity politics of being a woman academic writing about women in a non-gender-studies framework. (It'll be more abstract that it would have been if the article had been accepted for publication, but it's still something worth thinking through.) But for now, here goes. This is what drew me to write about Deborah to begin with. What follows was the original interdisciplinary introduction to the paper:

Among the more unwitting literary descendants of the biblical poet-prophets is a 10^th-century C.E. Iberian woman known to history only as the wife of her husband: ’îštô šel Dûnăš, thought to have been the wife of Dunash ben Labraṭ, an Arabic-speaking Berber Jew who himself fathered the movement to stand Hebrew poetry upon Arabic metrical feet.[1] Because authorship of a single four-line poem conserved in two witnesses in the Cairo Genizah[2] is attributed to her, modern scholarship makes her to bear the heavy yoke of “the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew language since the biblical poetesses Miriam and Deborah.”[3] But in more than one way she is graceless in her assumption of that mantle.

First, her poem is perhaps more important as a historical record than as a literary triumph. It hints at the reasons for Dunash’s flight from Iberia through its allusions to a conflict between the poet’s husband and the courtier Ḥasdai ibn Shapruṭ and provides a window onto some of the domestic realities of the time and place. But as one among the first Hebrew poems written in the new arabizing Andalusi style, it falls short of what would quickly become the high standards of the form; within a century, the finest Hebrew poets would ply their trade as skillfully as their Arabic-language counterparts. At this early date, though, the meter still falters and the diction is repetitive. But she is, without a doubt, a poet as she writes:

Will her love remember his graceful doe,      her only son in her arms as he parted? On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,      on his wrist she placed her bracelet. As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,      and he in turn took hers from her. Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain,      if its prince gave him half his kingdom?[4]

It is not only feminist critics like the above-cited Tova Rosen who exclaim “Deborah!” upon reading this poem. Even a more staid and descriptive account of the poem, one without an explicit theoretical agenda, contains a punctuated measure of excitement at this bridging of a multi-generational gap: “Mrs. Dunash was apparently a Hebrew poetess, the first since the days of the prophetess Deborah!”[5] But both ends of the scholarly spectrum, from the traditional to the feminist-revisionist, fail equally to note that îštô šel Dûnăš did not cast herself in the mold of ’ēšet Lapîdôt. And so second and more critically, Dunash’s wife fails to fulfill the role of Deborah simply because she did not envision herself in those terms; she has become a latter-day Deborah, an inheritor of that literary tradition, entirely at the hands of the moderns.[6] *

One of the remarkable traits of this poet is that she was educated enough to cite the biblical text in her work. That few women were so trained goes (only!) part of the way to explaining the dearth of women poets writing in Hebrew; quoting the Hebrew Bible in poetry was de rigueur in a way that citing Scripture in Arabic poetry is not.[7] She could, though; and she put her knowledge toward painting a picture of her literary self not as Deborah but as the Shulamite, drawing upon the Song of Songs in three of the four lines of her poem.[8] She does not proclaim victory, dedicate herself to the Lord or pretend to lead or speak for her nation. Instead, she aspires to be remembered by her departing husband just as the Shulamite is inscribed on the arm and heart of her lover.

Just as a medievalist’s reading of Bocaccio might be informed equally by grappling with the works of Dante, who preceded him, as with those of Jorge Luis Borges, his literary heir,[9] one perhaps better understands the song of ’ēšet Lapîdôt for having read the poem of îštô šel Dûnăš. It is this historiography — modern medievalist scholarship’s overeager thrusting of Deborah into a certain critical light — that, perhaps more than anything else, informed the direction in which I ultimately read Deborah’s own history and song, namely the text of Judges 4-5: In the body of medieval poetry, one can see Deborah and read through her as a cipher only until peering into the depths of the poem. But it seems not to be an unfair legacy for the ancient woman who, as I will argue in these pages, is so profoundly not at the heart of the standard that later redactors and lectors have made her to bear. It is precisely in the gaps where the ineffable truest identity of Dunash’s wife does not lie flush against the one we as modern readers would wish her to embody that we can glance at the traces, the beloved ruins, of an earlier Deborah.

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[1] I say “more unwitting” because there were certainly those poets who gladly embraced the identity of their biblical counterparts. Most notable among these is Ismā’il ibn Naġrila — Shemuel ha-Nagid — who famously proclaimed from within his poem The War with Yadayyir (The Dream of the Poem, trans. Peter Cole, 52): “I am the David of my age!”

[2] A high-resolution photograph of the complete fragment (TS-NS 143.46) may be found at the Cambridge University Library’s Genizah research unit web site: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/GOLD/thumbs?class_mark=T-S_NS_143.46. The accession numbers for the two halves of the incomplete fragment, also housed at Cambridge, are Mosseiri VIII.202 and Mosseiri VIII.387.

[3] Tova Rosen. Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 2.

[4] Trans. Peter Cole, p. 27.

[5] Genizah Fragments, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GF/7/. The exclamation point is original.

[6] That there is near but not total unanimity of opinion that the author of the poem was even a woman at all only serves to underscore the way in which the poet has been used the service of the modern imagination.

[7] And we do, in fact, find women (both Jewish and not) who wrote poetry in Arabic. See: Abdulla al-Udhari. Classical Poems by Arab Women. London: Saqi Books, 1999; Mahmud Sobh. Poetisas arábigo-andaluzas. Granada: Biblioteca de Ensayo, 1994; and Teresa Garulo. Diwan de las poetisas de al-Andalus. Madrid: Hiperión, 1986. The medieval Arabic literary critic Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyuṭī (d. 1505) also edited a treatise on and anthology of Arabic-language women poets: Nuzhāt al-Julasā’, ed. ‘Abd al-Latif al-Ashur. Cairo: Maktabat al-Qur’ān, 1986.

[8] Line 2 quotes from Cant. 8:6, line 3 from Cant. 5:7, and line 4 from Cant. 8:6-7.

[9] María Rosa Menocal. Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Bocaccio. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.  

*I'm adding a footnote here that was not original to this text as I wrote it just to stipulate that if I were going to expand it from long-form notes into something for publication, I would naturally develop my thoughts about the extent to which a medievalist is or is not obligated to understand text and circumstance as her medieval reader did or might have.