Trauma,Gender, and the Stories of Jewish Women: The Other Within

This paper explores how trauma (individual, cultural, and historical) experiences and gender stories of women behaving more like men become intermingled. Drawing upon stories of women in Jewish literature (Beruriah and Yentl), psychoanalytic theories of gender, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, the author unpacks how women carry vulnerability and helplessness whereas men are seen as stronger and agentic. The author believes that gender performance and passing highlight how gender becomes enlisted as a mode of traumatic transmission and possibly 1 type of internal psychic reparative resolution to complex traumatic experiences.