News Highlights Rabbinical Student Meredith Reiches’s Essay Published in the LA Review of Books
One perk of being a feminist who studies reproduction is that people tell me what their uteruses have to say, and what they have to say about them. People telling their own stories is important—it’s the product of a certain kind of autonomy. I think of these raw, frank communications as uterus bulletins…Physically and legally, a uterus changes what’s possible — and now, once again, what’s possible is being curtailed.
– Meredith Reiches
Hebrew College Shanah Aleph rabbinical student and UMass Boston Associate Professor of Anthropology Meredith Reiches’s essay “The Uterus and the Will to Power” was published this week in the LA Review of Books.
“If the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans understood the uterus as a source of organic disorders, stemming from the essential nature of women as bearers of children, early Jews and Christians conceptualized its function and dysfunction as dependent on God or the devil, the former resulting from women’s morality and the latter from her sinfulness,” Reiches writes. “Now, in 2022, we’re still not free from the metonymic use of the uterus: stories about the uterus continue to be stories about the nature of people who have one.”