Construction of Gender and Identity in Genesis

Karalina Matskevich examines the structures that map out the construction of gendered and national identities in Genesis 23 and 1236. Matskevich shows how the dominant Subject the androcentric haadam and the ethnocentric Israel is perceived in relation to and over against the Other, represented respectively as female and foreign. Using the tools of narratology, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Matskevich highlights the contradiction inherent in the project of dominance, through which the Subject seeks to suppress the transforming power of difference it relies on for its signification. Thus, in Genesis 2-3 haadam can only emerge as a complex Subject in possession of knowledge with the help of woman, the transforming Other to whom the narrator (and Yahweh) attributes both the agency and the blame. Similarly, the narratives of Genesis 1236 show a conflicted attitude to places of alterity: Egypt, the fertile and seductive space that threatens annihilation, and Haran, the mothers land, a complex metaphor for the feminine. The construction of identity in these narratives largely relies on the symbolic fecundity of the Other.