Subverting Hebrew’s Gender Binary: Grammar, Poetry, and Performance in the Work of Esther Raab

Abstract

This article examines antigrammaticality in the work of the so-called first “native” modern Hebrew poet, Esther Raab, focusing in particular on how Raab deploys the constraints of Hebrew’s highly gendered grammar in her poems. I begin by considering the broad implications of grammatical gender for how we think and act in the world, while also taking into account specific, concrete examples of gender policing that Raab recalled from her own early childhood. I then offer a close reading of a single, untitled poem to demonstrate how, from her position at the intersection of multiple margins, as a native-born female poet in a literary milieu dominated by immigrants, most of them male, Raab effectively subverts both gender and grammar normsin the construction of a nonconforming gender identity.