Marriage and Metaphor: Constructions of Gender in Rabbinic Literature by Gail Labovitz
Marriage and Metaphor argues that the dominant model by which rabbis and rabbinic culture construct marriage and gender relations in marriage is through a metaphor of property and ownership: women are ownable and marriage is a purchase/acquisition. The most distinctive feature of this work is its methodology, which is unique in bringing metaphor theory, cognitive approaches to language and thought, and feminist linguistics (as well as many of the well-established approaches to the reading of rabbinic texts) to the studies of gender and rabbinic literature. Beginning with the statement at the opening of Mishnah Kiddushin (1:1), "A woman is acquired (in marriage)...by money, by document, or by sexual intercourse," and using other similar examples of commercial language applied to marriage across the rabbinic canon, Labovitz amply demonstrates that rabbis regularly use information from the realm of property and commercial transactions to structure their understanding of and their reasoning (legal and otherwise) about marriage and gender relations.
