Description
Book SynopsisFictions of Gender explores how contemporary controversies surrounding Zionism and feminism are prefigured in the legacies of early Zionist women. Studying archival documents and writings from the first eighty years of the Zionist project, Zakai confronts the experiences of Zionist women with the sensibilities of contemporary global feminism.
Trade Review“Asking highly original and challenging questions, Zakai demonstrates the very possibility of writing cultural history through the experience of women and the construction of national femininity within other categories of identity and apparatuses of power. Focusing on the ways women writers approach gender through a practice of ethical reading, the literary female subject emerges as an engaged politico-national agent, actively negotiating power and inventing options of struggle, control, and resistance.” Ruth Tsoffar, University of Michigan and author of The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women