Living still with injury: writing reparative Midrash as an act of feminist resistant memory making

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This cross disciplinary, practice-based project will consider how contemporary Jewish, feminist writing in the mode of Midrash (Jewish biblical exegesis) can both affirm and investigate the complexities of cultural inheritance and identification. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's conception of reparative reading, an 'additive and accretive' relational stance which makes evident 'the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture...whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them'i, I will explore the idea of Midrash as living memory from a queer, feminist perspective. An intervention into the mode, practice and collectionof a generations' long commentary on the sacred texts of Judaism traditionally written by Rabbis-men imbued with spiritual and scholarly authority-I will engage the feminist imperative to complicate what has been understood as 'history', to begin the work of transformative rememberingii. Attending to the ways in which gendered violence and exclusion have been passed down through hegemonic cultural memory and 'normative' Jewish tradition, this writing will establish a dialogic space which attempts to 'come to terms' with painful pasts whilst articulating a mode of writing, and living, otherwise as a contemporary Jewish feminist.