“Body Text”: Feminist Art in the Israeli Diverse Religio-Cultural Spheres

This paper highlights aspects common to feminist artists who create within different cultural and religious realms in Israel, where the religious laws of different religious groups bind citizens regarding personal status laws. The artists discussed in this paper—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Druze—amalgamate the “social” with the “theological” through a fusion of sacred texts and the female body. By merging these, they present the body as a source of knowledge and memory, connecting private experience with community existence. Through their critical engagement with the patriarchal text, they criticize the traditions and cultures in which they live and, at the same time, reclaim them for themselves on their terms. Despite their cultural and religious diversity, they seem much closer to each other than men and women who share the same religion or culture. The paper will emphasize the similarities and differences between the artworks, the artists, and the diverse worlds they operate in.