Alicia Ramos-González

Universidad De Granada

Daughters of Tradition Women in Yiddish Culture in the 16th-18th Centuries 1

Keywords:

This article focuses on the cultural world of Jewish women in Eastern Europe between the 16th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It reveals the extent to which Yiddish language and literature were a means of gaining knowledge for such women. This is because Yiddish -a Jewish language that developed around 1000 years ago among the Jews living in Ashkenaz -was the language of the people, of ordinary life, of business and social relations, and also of the home and the kitchen. It was the language of female spaces, stigmatized by its 'humble' associations with women and uncultivated persons. In turn, Yiddish literature was closely associated with women and a female readership.

of all pious women' -diner or shreyber ale frumem vayber. The female readership carried considerable weight in old Yiddish literature. Ashkenazi women were not only great consumers of this production, but also, in a certain way, their preferences had an effect on what was produced and translated into their vernacular tongue.

Girls and women read Yiddish books aloud or had the books read to them. Some texts became indispensable for the hours of rest and were read and reread day after day, either alone or in group reading sessions. Often a single text was read and reread throughout the day and week, as a group activity. This is the case of Khumesh-Taytsh (Niger, 1994: 76), an exact translation of the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish that was used for the teaching and reading of the Holy Text to the masses of ignorant or simple Jews (proste yidn) who were not versed in the Holy Tongue. Most women had their own Khumesh and the introductions to many of these vernacular Bibles emphasized the importance they had for women, since they were a means of acquiring knowledge and allowed girls to learn to read and to begin their moral and religious reflection. Other religious works popular among the female audience were commentated Bibles, especially the Tsenerene (Ferrer i Costa, 1999: 43-50).

The Tsenerene, which literally means 'go forth and see', in allusion to the Song of Songs 3:11, was written in the 16th century by a travelling preacher named Yankev ben Itzkhok Ashkenazy, of Janow. It gracefully narrates the main biblical episodes, interwoven with legends taken from the Talmud and other Hebrew sources, and with extracts of important Jewish Cabbalistic works, especially the Zohar -the most important work of classical Jewish mysticism -as well as selections of the classical commentaries of biblical texts. Although the book was conceived by its author as a work for both a female and a male audience, the Tsenerene soon became a 'women's book', with which women learned and enjoyed themselves; a vehicle for making contact with the Sacred Texts to which they did not have access because they were in Hebrew (Waxman, 1960: 635). Young women read this book in search of inspiration and catharsis (Weissler, 1998: 6), and it was a favourite for holiday and leisure reading. According to Baumgarten, women were 'the favourite readers of Yiddish works: in the Jewish quarters, especially during the pious readings of the Sabbath rest, while the man studied a page of the Gemara, the woman studied or read popular Yiddish texts, especially the Tsenerene' (Baumgarten, 1987: 16). It therefore comes as no surprise that the Tsenerene was popularly called 'the women's Torah'. In addition, although the women appearing in the Tsenerene were sometimes characterized as sinners and transgressors, the work represents a real 'promotion' of the image of women as the centre of daily life and as an important part of the process of messianic redemption, as a source of knowledge and as the living heart of the Jewish home.

Another very popular work among female readers was the Brantspiegel (1596), by Moses Henoch Altshuler Yerushalmi (Weissler, 1998: 38), a book on morality, an ethical guide devoted largely to detailing the duties of wives and mothers, which, just as the Tsenerene did, also enhanced the image of the Jewish woman, particularly as the real foundation of the home and family, and as the natural educator of her children (Baumgarten, 1993: 277;Weissler, 1998: 53-5).

In addition to these works, among the others that had multiple editions published up until the 19th century especially for 'the pious lady reader', special mention must be made of Azhores noshim, by Dovid Hacohen (1535), a book of religious laws for women (Baumgarten, 1993: 255); Seyder mitsves ha-noshim, by R. Benjamin Aaron ben Abraham Solnik (1577), a compendium of rules of conduct for women, written in verse (Weissler, 1998: 68-9); and, in the same year, Sheyn froyen bikhl, on the appropriate behaviour of women, their religious obligations and the proper relationship with their husbands (Niger, 1994: 76). Another work from this era was Seyfer midos (1542), rich in parables and legends, which was dedicated to all pious women and in particular to Morada of Ginzburg, whom the author describes as a doctor of medicine (Baumgarten, 1993: 264ff.).

But women did not only read muser sforim and minhogim sforim (books on morality and customs): the pakntregers (travelling booksellers) who visited the Jewish communities of Ashkenazi Europe also attracted buyers, young girls and housewives, with the praises of the works they peddled, offering a wide variety of small-sized, inexpensive books. Most of them had very few pages and specified neither author nor date. Some of them, such as Seyfer matsl memoves -a booklet of just eight pagescontained prayers of supplication, while others were collections of hymns. Others contained historical texts, agodes (Talmudic legends) or biblical fragments.

There were also pakntregers who sold little books on morality or edifying tales. From the 17th century, women showed great interest in an opuscule called Dinim veseyder, which was about the purification of food and how foods should be washed and salted. It was a very useful text for Jewish women in their efforts to comply with dietary purification laws (Baumgarten, 1993: 64, 306).

In addition to translations of the Bible into Yiddish, works addressing ethics and morality, books on customs and practices and the little booklets on a variety of subject matter, most women also owned and read makhzoyrim (books of prayers for Holy Days) and books on the legends of Hassidic holy men. 6 The Shivkhei ha-Besht, a collection of legends on the Baal Shem Tov (founder of the movement), was for many years the only collection of Hassidic legends in print. It was only in the last third of the 19th century that books on the tsaddikim (spiritual leaders in the Hassidic community) began to proliferate, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, which many women read avidly. The Shivkhei ha-Besht, aimed at all pious women, enjoyed great popularity during the 19th century (Weissler, 1998: xxvi).

Psalms, the holy book most translated into Yiddish between the 16th and 18th centuries, was also among the favourites of Ashkenazi women. Along with Psalms were collections of religious hymns used by women during celebrations and Holy Days, such as Tsemakh letsvi (Baumgarten, 1993: 90), and bilingual books such as the numerous siddurim (books of prayers).

Many works on morality and books of a religious character spread through Eastern Europe from the 16th century. These books constituted an important element in the development of private forms of education for Jewish girls; pious works that instructed and gradually became an instrument that stimulated and encouraged reflection by women, who read not only for entertainment, but also to educate themselves.

Through translations and adaptations of Hebrew works into Yiddish, Jewish women began to cultivate themselves: they received and assimilated religious texts or parts of religious texts that for centuries had been a body of knowledge accessible exclusively to the Jewish man, and with such texts they discovered new worlds. Yiddish literature thus became for Ashkenazi women an indirect route by which to acquire broader knowledge in religious fields and to nourish themselves with sources that helped combat their ignorance. The Yiddish books read by women served as cultural contact between two very different traditions, their own and that of the cultural and religious world of men, of the Hebrew books restricted to men and prohibited and unknown to women. Also published were Yiddish translations of works of a mystical nature, such as the Zohar. From the 17th and 18th centuries, ethical works inspired by the literature and the subjects addressed by the Cabbala began to appear in Yiddish. Works such as Nakhlas Tsvi -also known as the 'Yiddish Zohar' -or the Kav ha-yashar (1709) -the bilingual edition of which became a great favourite among the female readership -were published in various editions, were very popular reading, even among the female public, and served as a bridge to help reveal, sometimes surreptitiously, the mystic texts to the unlearned, among whom women of course were a large part (Weissler, 1998: 56-9). This shows us how Jewish women readers of Ashkenazi Europe were experiencing a broadening in the limits of what they were allowed to know, and were now accessing texts that had previously been reserved for erudites and scholars. Women thus came into contact with Jewish mysticism, opening up new fields of wisdom and reflection, which allowed them to find answers and also discover new questions.

Although in this area of domestic and private education of girls, reading and reflecting on religious works certainly played an important role, young girls and women, excluded from the study of the Torah and the academic education reserved for men, gained instruction and education in a freer way within the walls of their own homes and also enjoyed works whose sole purpose was to entertain. Most were adaptations of Germanic chansons de geste, translations of chivalrous romances of the medieval western world or Arthurian legends modified for dissemination among a Jewish readership: the valiant knights were converted to heroes wearing the taleysim (prayer shawls) and tfiln (small leather cases containing scriptures) -as used by men during prayer -who practised Jewish ceremonies and rites. Among the most famous books of this genre during the 16th to 18th centuries, two in particular must be mentioned. The first, Dos Bove bukh, is a chivalrous poem by Elie Bajur Levita that recounts the trials and tribulations of the hero Bove. It reappeared as Bove mayse (The Story of Bove) at the end of the 18th century, in the form of a book published in instalments, and gained even more popularity among the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe, especially women, although it was later attacked by educated Jews as 'trashy literature' (Niger, 1994: 82). At the beginning of the 20th century, 'Bove' became the derivative 'bobe' and bobe mayse came to constitute a 'genre' within Yiddish literature that designated old women's tales, stories for women (Klepfisz, 1994: 35-6). The second, the Künig Artus hof, is also a romance, recounting the series of Arthurian legends.

Also enjoying a great deal of success among an audience characterized as vayber un proste mentshn ('women and simple people') were works such as Mayse bukh (1602), a book of motifs and popular tales with a convoluted moral, which was declared the 'Yiddish Talmud' -and consequently the 'women's Talmud' -and two chansons de geste with abundant biblical and post-biblical material, Melokhim bukh and Shmuel bukh. The latter was attributed to a woman, Lita of Regensburg, since at the end of a manuscript of it dated 1544, the following note appears: 'This book I wrote with my hand, Liva [Lita] of Regensburg is my name. My dear generin's [patroness's] name is Breindlen, may she use and read it in joy. This I desire' (cited in Zinberg, 1975: 108).

The majority of books known as galkhes bikher (transcriptions of Christian works) were attacked in the prefaces of religious works as silly and frivolous, and were stigmatized as profane reading, as books of fables that distracted girls and women and wasted their time (Baumgarten, 1993: 367;Niger, 1994: 78). But beyond any doubt, the translations of the Germanic epic poems also represented for their female readers a new awareness of the non-Jewish world. For this reason (although it was not only women who read and integrated elements of the gentile culture through Yiddish literature, uncultivated men also read these books), works such as Dietrich von Bern, Herzog Ernst, Hildesbrandslied, Der ghoenen gluk and Ritter von Steiermark -the most commonly read by Jewish women in Eastern Europe -were scorned by authors of pious works. They were considered sources of contamination for the population that sustained the Jewish home and transmitted the faith to future generations, namely Jewish mothers and their daughters.

Finally, the reading material preferred by Ashkenazi women up to the 19th century also included works of a variety of genres: animal fables, adaptations of Yossipon by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, or of Decameron, and certain medical books devoted to subjects related to women, such as Derekh noshim veyoldos (Niger, 1994: 78). There was also a Yiddish translation of Midrash Petirat Mosheh, which was extremely popular among the women of Poland and Russia and was published in 1693 by the German writer Aaron ben Samuel, at the request of his wife. Another popular work, the Eyn Yaakov, was a compendium of non-legal subject matter from the Talmud (Seeman and Kobrin, 1999: 73).

In Yiddish literature women found an abundance and variety of subjects with which to enrich their lives. The Ashkenazi woman, excluded from traditional study and texts in the Holy Tongue, has a link with Yiddish literature that brought her closer to Judaism and its traditional sources, but not just as reader. There were also women associated with Yiddish books in other ways: printed works were sometimes dedicated to them, they were authors or translators of the works into the vernacular tongue, or the generins or patronesses of this body of literature.

In Krakow in 1586, Moshe Stendel's Yiddish version of the Psalms was published by Royzl Fishl (Zinberg, 1975: 242). To the translation, Royzl added an extensive preface of her own, written in verse. It seems that she also published some books she composed herself using the Shmuel bukh as a model (Taitz et al., 2003: 136, 152). But most women who worked in the print workshops were the wives or daughters of the printers. This is the case of Czerna, who helped in the printing workshop of her father, Menahem Nahum Meisels, in Krakow; of the sisters Rivke and Rokhl, daughters of Itsjak ben Yehuda Löb Yudels, in Wilmersdorf (Henry and Taitz, 1978: 118); and of Rivke, the daughter of Israel ben Mosheh, who prepared the Yiddish part of a bilingual Makhzor (book of prayers for the Jewish Holy Days) that her father published in 1735 (Baumgarten, 1993: 78). Gele, the 12-year-old daughter of an Amsterdam printer, prepared the printing of a book of prayers, to which she added a brief poem as an introduction (Baumgarten, 1993: 83-4), and nine-year-old Ella, the daughter of a printer from Dessau, copied in the lower part of a page from a prayer book a few verses in which she declared that she had participated in the printing of the book (Taitz et al., 2003: 135, 162). Other women's names that appear in connection with the world of Yiddish books and their printing are Gutel Kohen of Prague, Fiola Hirsch of Bavaria (Henry and Taitz, 1978: 118) and the wife of the Polish rabbi Tsvi Hirsch ben Issacar Berish Rosanes, named Judith, who apparently did printing jobs in Lemberg [START_REF] Alfassi | Rosanes, Zevi[END_REF].

Studying the works that women read daily or frequently in 16th-to 18th-century Ashkenazi Europe is important not only because it indicates to us what was allowed to them, but also because it informs us about the power they had to choose. Similarly significant is the study of the generins or patronesses of letters who exercised the right to choose the works they wished to sponsor. Very few references exist regarding these early female promoters of books. One of the names known is a certain Rebecca, who appears in a manuscript of prayers translated into Italian (Zinberg, 1975: 132). Others include Breindlen (mentioned earlier) and Pesl bas reb Yisroel (Niger, 1994: 74). But in any case, the presence of these women and those engaged in printing, together with the large number of works consumed by the female readership, reveal, at the very least, the interest women had in getting to know the world of culture and, more importantly, in participating in it, something also demonstrated by the women who wrote in Yiddish.

In Ashkenazi Europe, there were women who were literate in Yiddish and had also learned Hebrew, women who studied religious works and who had a thorough knowledge of the biblical texts. There existed the figure of the zogerin, a woman who, as we have seen, read prayers in the synagogue in their Yiddish translation so that women could understand them, and who also explained passages and rituals (Niger, 1994: 74). One of these zogerins was Rivke Tiktiner, who lived at the beginning of the 16th century possibly in Prague or somewhere in Poland. A woman with extraordinary knowledge, she was a well-known preacher noted for her erudition (Zinberg, 1975: 241-2, 285), and, as indicated in the study by Remy in 1916 (cited in Henry andTaitz, 1978: 270) she stood out for her special interest in writing 'for women'. In the introduction to her book Meyneket Rivke, which was published in 1609, after her death in 1550, and which saw at least a second edition, in 1618, the printer addresses women, praising the virtues of the writer and calling for the attention of the female audience (Taitz et al., 2003: 146-8, 160). He declares that Tiktiner wrote her book 'in honour of all women' and that Meyneket Rivke demonstrates that 'a woman can also compose a work of ethics and offer good interpretations, as well as many a man' (Henry and Taitz, 1978: 94). Meyneket Rivke, a collection of moral dictates and passages from the Talmud and the Mishnah, and which also contains poetry, is the most well-known work by this author, although it is also important to remember that she translated the 11th-century work by Bahya Ibn Paquda, Khoyves halevoves (Duties of the Heart), which was one of the most widely read books by Ashkenazi women up until the 20th century. She also wrote a hymn, Simkhes Toyre lid, which became very well known and was frequently sung in the women's section of the synagogue.

Other well-known zogerins were Dolca, Marat Guta (Zinberg, 1975: 23) and Javah Baharah (also known as Javah of Prague), the granddaughter, daughter and mother of great wise men of Israel and who herself was very knowledgeable in biblical and rabbinic literature and who also wrote very significant commentaries on some of the important Jewish texts (Taitz et al., 2003: 134). There is no doubt, however, that the most famous reader of prayers for women in the synagogue was Sarah bas Tovim (17th century), author of tkhines. 7 The tkhines, Yiddish prayers of supplication, were initially published in the 16th century as small leaflets, using simple printing methods and on low-quality paper. They used a special variation of Yiddish called tkhineloshn (see note 4) and were aimed especially at women. From the 17th century, there began to appear prayers of this type written by women themselves and in a 'very feminine style' (Niger, 1994: 77), so that Ashkenazi women could recite them and thus enrich their spiritual lives. The tkhines came to be a part of the 'domestic religion' (Myerhoff, 1980: 234-5) that women nourished in the private sphere of the home. While men prayed in Hebrew in the synagogue, women recited these tkhines, which dealt with such subjects as household duties, sexuality, the relationship with the husband, pregnancies, births, the raising of children (Weissler, 1998: 151-3) and so on. These private prayers by women were said directly to God, a God that they made closer, more domestic and more feminine, a God who, through these tkhines, let women speak and who listened to the sound of their lives, to the things they held dear (Weissler, 1998: 177-8), to what spirituality meant to them, that special female spirituality that prompted them to turn to their Creator and thank Him, entreat Him and show Him their lives and the limitations on their existence. The value of the tkhines resides not only in the fact that they show the specific realities of Ashkenazi women, but also in that, as pointed out by Judith Plaskow, they are a testimony of the extent to which 'patriarchal boundaries affect women's religious expression even when those forms of expression are woman-made' (Plaskow, 1991: 49). This is why the tkhines are very valuable documents in any effort to reconstruct the lives of the women of Eastern Europe. These prayers of supplication uncover a private world, unknown and strange, or at least different from the Ashkenazi Europe more commonly known to us and in which women seemed not to be protagonists. 8 Women gave prayers of supplication for their children, their husbands, for household harmony, for a newborn child, for a young woman about to be married, or for someone deceased; some tkhines contained different mystical conceptions, Cabbalistic material or even translations of fragments of the Zohar. They reveal that the women who composed them were very well versed in Jewish literature and at the same time offer testimony of how, through this production in Yiddish language, women gradually came to have access to certain areas of knowledge. But perhaps, as the studies of Chava Weissler show, their most important feature is that sometimes these prayers transform the traditional sources in order to reaffirm the power and dignity of women.

The prayers of the Jewish women of Eastern Europe reveal a rereading of the female characters of the Torah, recovering especially the biblical matriarchs who serve as examples to strengthen the value of the traditional roles of mother and daughter, and to acknowledge the worth of women as mediators between God and men. By recovering these female characters in their prayers, women give back to themselves the role of protagonist that the sacred texts took away and, like their heirs, they thus gain authority to recognize their own merits and values. On some occasions, the tkhines challenge the masculine interpretations of the important texts of the tradition: for example, in these petitions made by women the sin committed by Eve is never described as murder but rather as disobedience to God (Weissler, 1987: 71-2, 117-20, 177-8).

Sarah bas Tovim was an author of these feminine prayers. Born in Podolia, Ukraine, it appears she came from a well-off family, although her old age was spent in poverty, moving from place to place and helping others, which has resulted in her being considered a female complement to the prophet Elijah. 9 Sarah, the daughter of Mordechai, is perhaps the most well-known Yiddish writer. Her fame was such that many authors signed their works with her name and there were many tkhines that appeared under her name, 10 presumably in an attempt to attain the same level of success as Shloyshe Sheorim (Tkhine of the Three Gates), one of her collections of tkhines. The success of these tkhines is further testified by the fact that it was reprinted many times, even after Sarah's death. Her prayers were known far beyond the borders of the Ukraine, as proven by the 1838 printing of this collection in Jerusalem (Henry and Taitz, 1978: 183).

In addition to Sarah bas Tovim, there were other women authors of tkhines who were well known and admired for their learnedness. Just one example is Leah Horovitz, born in the early 18th century, apparently in Bolekhov, western Ukraine, whose tkhines reveal that their author possessed a great deal of knowledge and erudition. She was a student of the Torah and the Talmud, a rabbinic and Cabbalistic erudite and one of the few women known to have read the Zohar in Hebrew. It appears that she engaged in Talmudic conversations with other learned women, and even with erudite men (Taitz et al., 2003: 140-2, 233). Fully aware of the marginalization experienced by Jewish women and of her unusual status as a female erudite, she passionately defended women's 'right' to study and broaden their knowledge (Weissler, 1998: 106-8).

Other, less well-known but similarly talented female authors of tkhines include Serel Segal Rapoport, Leah Dreyzl, Mamael and Shifra (Weissler, 1998: 61-3) among others (Niger, 1994: 90).

If the writers of tkhines are important because they represent the voice of Ashkenazi women at the dawn of the modern world, speaking of spirituality, their world and their lives, then from the historical, literary and female perspective equal importance must be granted to Glückel of Hameln -Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646-1724) - (Davis, 1997: 5-62), a wealthy Jewish businesswoman. Born in Hamburg, she attended the kheyder as a boy would have and received a religious education that her father completed by furthering her knowledge of different religious and non-religious subjects. Married very young to a German trader, whom she assisted in his commercial activities, and the mother of 14 children, upon her husband's death she had to take responsibility for the family and the business, and she began to write her Zikhroynes (Memoirs) [START_REF] Abrahams | The Life of Glückel of Hameln[END_REF]. The importance of these memoirs lies in their religious sensitivity and spirituality, as well as her consciousness of herself as a parent. Glückel's memoirs are a reflection of her life and of 17th-century Jewish society. Moreover, because of the way she constructs her past it can be said that these memoirs are an authentic female midrash (a genre of rabbinic literature based on the interpretation of texts) (Reitz, 1999: 63-72) and that she interprets life through the eyes of the Other. There were other women who wrote in Yiddish and who also translated books. They showed a rare knowledge of the Hebrew language and of Jewish sources and made available to the female readership a variety of works in the vernacular tongue. Most have remained anonymous because only rarely were they cited in the works, although it was common to read in the prologues that they had translated the work 'for the pious women who only understand Yiddish' (Weissler, 1998: 12).

The presence of women writers of old Yiddish literature testifies not only to an interest on the part of Ashkenazi women in culture and letters, but also in some cases to an advanced conception of collectivity and difference. The hymns composed by women for reciting and singing in the synagogue by women; the tkhines, those prayers about the world of Ashkenazi women that reflect a different and very feminine spirituality and that represent a space allowing freedom for women, where they can transform the traditional sources using the perspective of their gender to reclaim power and their rightful place in Jewish history; the wish of Rivke Tiktiner and other authors and translators to write for women. All of this can be understood as the expression of a conscious or unconscious feeling of marginalization and a need to nourish a world and a religiosity belonging to women. NOTES 2. Jewish, relating to Jews, but also connotating the language spoken by a large part of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe for 1000 years.

It is a mixture of Germanic dialects from the High German period, a dialect spoken by the Jews of France and Italy with abundant Romance elements and of Hebrew and Aramaic. It is written in Hebrew characters and is read from right to left. 3. The plural of shtetl, a small village of Eastern Europe inhabited by Jews. It constituted a sociocultural pattern based on the Judaic character. Life in a shtetl revolved around the synagogue, the home and the market. The first shtetlakh appear in Poland-Lithuania in the 16th century and they begin their decline at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For the transcription of Yiddish words, I follow the norms established by the Yiddisher Visnshaftlejer Institute (YIVO). 4. The zogerin (firzogerin or zogerkeh) was a woman educated beyond the normal bounds, who knew Hebrew very well and who was in charge of translating Hebrew prayers recited by men into Yiddish so that less educated women could follow the synagogue service from the women's section (Zinberg, 1975: 23ff., 29, 100). 5. Or the Yiddish of women. Other types of typographic characters used for printing Yiddish books were Tkhine ksav (writing for prayers of supplication) or the Tsenerene ksav (writing for the Tsenerene), of which there were up to 21 different variations. These types of typographic characters clearly demonstrate, as stated by Baumgarten, that many books in the vernacular tongue of the Jews of Eastern Europe were especially oriented towards and aimed at female readers, since, as is discussed later, both the Tsenerene (a Yiddish commentated Bible) and the prayers of supplication in this vernacular tongue (the tkhines), to which the names of these typographic characters make reference, were a very important part of the life of Ashkenazi women (Baumgarten, 1993: 84). 6. Hassidism was a pious movement that arose in the 18th century in Eastern Europe, the followers of which were the hassidim, or fair men. 7. Chava Weissler defines tkhines as 'supplicatory prayers in Yiddish recited by Jewish women of Central and Eastern Europe' (Weissler, 1998: ix).

According to Israel Zinberg, the tkhines were probably created by the zogerkes for recitation in the women's section of the synagogue (Zinberg, 1975: 251). 8. Thus, for example, in one of the collections of tkhines by Sarah bas Tovim there is a prayer about the making of candles in memory of a deceased loved one, a task that women seem to have performed as Yom Kippur (Day of Expiation) was approaching. The composition of the tkhine reveals the importance of this task in the world of women, to such a point that the author describes the making of these candles as a mitsve, a commandment to women (Weissler, 1998: 40, 126-46). 9. The fame of Sarah bas Tovim was enormous and a legend developed around her. The writer Isaac Leib Perets wrote a story titled Der Ziveg: oder, Sore bas Tovim, in which Sarah appears as a fairy godmother. See 'Ha-zivug o Sarah bas Tovim' (Perets, 1968: 65-72). 10. Ayzik Meyer-Dick (1814-93), whose work was frequently read by female readers (Roskies, 1977: 854) was one of the authors who in the 19th century published tkhines under the name of Sarah bas Tovim (Zinberg, 1975: 286-9).

Alicia Ramos-González received her degree in Hebrew philology in 1991 and in 1994 read her PhD thesis 'Genesis of the Modern Hebrew Novel: "Ahabat Siyon", by Abraham Mapu. Translation andStudy'. In 1996 and1997, she

  worked under a grant from the research group Estudios Judíos Contemporáneos at the University of Granada. From 2000 to 2002, she had a research grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports to work on the first Hebrew women writers. She now has a research contract with the University of Granada, through which she works with the Women's Studies Institute. She is a member of EAJS, AEEHJ, AAS and AUDEM. Her research interests include Yiddish and Hebrew women's literature (focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries) and female Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the US, Western Europe and Israel. Address: Instituto de Estudios de la Mujer, Edificio de Documentación Cientifica, C/Rector Lopez Argüeta s/n, Universidad deGranada, 18071 Granada, Spain. [email: aramos@ugr.es]

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Ramos-González: Daughters of Tradition

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(2)

This work has been partially supported by the 'Programa de Incorporación de Doctores del Plan Propio de Investigación' of the University of Granada, Spain. Ramos-González: Daughters of Tradition


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Ehrenreich and Hochschild begin with a nanny posing the question to her twoyear-old charge: 'whose baby are you?' The baby thinks for a moment, and points to the closed door where her mother is working. The nanny replies: 'no, you're my baby', whereupon the child settles the issue by saying 'together'. This story illustrates the discomfort raised in reading the book: the guilt of women attempting to juggle highly pressurized lives; the isolation of migrant domestic workers who leave their own families to care for the vulnerable family members of others and, in their loneliness, invest the love they feel for their own family in those they are paid to care for; the confusion of the children being cared for; and the absent voice of the domestic worker's family

The book places these relationships within the context of both family and wider socioeconomic forces. It highlights that although migrant women are important economic actors, their economic activity is closely related to the needs of their families. The choices women make about work can therefore not be understood without taking into account the wider situation of their families and women's roles within that particular society. Leaving men out of the equation has enabled unregulated capitalism to sustain situations in which women struggle to compete and still be mothers.

The dominant narrative of women at work tends to be that of high powered executive jobs, remaining in contact with children through international phone calls and emails. This picture of 'success' fails to take account of the emotional cost of such conditions of employment. The move to work has created what has been framed as a 'care deficit' in the First World, a deficit that has acted to pull migrants from Third World and post-Communist nations, while at the same time poverty pushes them to migrate for work and new opportunities. With few exceptions [START_REF] Anderson | Why Madam Has so Many Bathrobes: Demand for Migrant Domestic Workers in the EU[END_REF][START_REF] Gregson | Servicing the Middle Classes[END_REF][START_REF] Zlotnick | Migration and the Family: The Female Perspective[END_REF], the flow of women from Third World countries to do 'women's work' has received limited academic European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), 1350-5068 Vol. 12(2): 227-234; DOI: 10.1177/1350506805051261 attention. Ehrenreich and Hochschild account for this by noting how the indoor nature of this work means they are isolated from one another and hidden from view. They suggest that the western celebration of independence has meant that for the most part, domestic workers are rendered invisible. They note too that within the US, many female domestic workers are migrant women of colour, and therefore subject to what they refer to as 'racial discounting'. This silence has wide-ranging implications for relationships between employers, employees, children and other care recipients: it is within the First World home that children become aware of the structure of difference and authority relative to which she or he takes up a position in relation to gender, class and race. For example, in learning to render domestic workers invisible, children learn that while some are valuable enough to be noticed, others do not warrant a similar 'reciprocal gaze ' (p. 78).

While this book is based primarily on research in the US, elsewhere - [START_REF] Anderson | Why Madam Has so Many Bathrobes: Demand for Migrant Domestic Workers in the EU[END_REF] discussed how in Britain -implicit in the choice of an immigrant as domestic worker is the assumption that they will require less personal engagement and can more easily be 'othered'. Drawing on the South African context, [START_REF] Pollock | Territories of Desire: Reconsiderations of an African Childhood[END_REF] proposes that when cared for by both mother and nanny, the child has the opportunity of identifying with one or both women: subject to the power of a mother who is at liberty to leave the home, the child may identify with her. However, ongoing contact with the nanny, the alternate and more present mothering figure who remains at home, means that the child also identifies with the woman who 'belongs there with her, but also to her' (Pollock, 1994: 81).

The history of domestic service suggests that it is a job like no other [START_REF] Toynbee | Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain[END_REF]: it creates a context in which employer and employee are easily drawn into a fantasy of friendship, including the sharing of unusual intimacy and rivalry. However, intimacy is bound by a highly asymmetrical balance of power and privilege. As the chapters by Anderson and Hondagnue-Sotelo indicate, domestic work produces relationships that fall somewhere between family and employment. Although many employers invoke a family rhetoric in referring to domestic workers, family membership is always qualified and balanced towards the advantage of the employers. For example, a family rhetoric enables employees to be expected to work longer than their contracted hours. Even acts of generosity can be seen as acting in the service of the employer, in emphasizing her status and power.

However, this rhetoric quickly collapses when the domestic worker is seen to cross a line and is dismissed. As many work illegally, formal contracts of work are rare. On dismissal, few are paid severance pay or given sufficient time to seek employment elsewhere. However, dismissal not only means the end of paid work but the end of a more personal relationship too. In many cases, difficulties might have existed for some time, but erupt in what is termed in the book a 'blow-up'. In such situations, it is difficult to separate the person from the job. Their shared and different history of intimacy and rivalry means the reasons for ending employment are unlikely to be clearly articulated, adding to the complex web of being personally wounded when an employee is dismissed, or chooses to leave. Although she argues for greater clarification of employees' rights, Anderson cautions against moving too quickly in the direction of 'commodification' of care: while increased professionalism might offer clarification of roles and conditions of employment, it carries the risk of rendering the employee even more anonymous.

Underlying much of the book is how personal engagement challenges the meaning of family connectedness. All forms of care work are relational: bodily care, like bathing and feeding, cannot be separated from emotional attachment, affiliation and intimate knowledge. However, although employees might be hired for their capacity to relate sensitively to vulnerable family members, personal engagement is seen to be antithetical to what is normally regarded as employment.

Several authors discuss how far-reaching lifestyle changes have been made possible by the global transfer of services associated with a woman/wife's traditional role. Immigrant women are seen to embody traditional feminine qualities of docility, nurturance and eagerness to please. For example, as sex workers, immigrant women signify the possibility of sexual and romantic love (as discussed in the chapters by Brennan and Bales); nannies bring the children they care for 'real' maternal affection. So too, as Lan's chapter outlines, Taiwanese women are freed from the obligation towards parents-in-law, how through the employment of immigrant women hired to fulfil traditional requirements.

As suggested earlier, increased employment of immigrants may not only be determined by economic factors: it may be an attempt to ensure that the person recruited to perform tasks traditionally seen as part of family interaction is kept in an 'othered' position, be this based on racialized or ethnic difference, or through the use of uniforms.

Women from the Philippines form the most prominent group of domestic workers in the UK and several papers draw attention to the Philippines. An estimated 30 percent of children in the Philippines live in households where at least one parent is overseas (see Hochschild's chapter). Domestic work needs to be placed in the context of wider global economies: care is now the Philippines' primary export. To call for the return of migrant mothers would be to ignore the country's dependence on these remittances. Hochschild's and Parrenas's chapters debate the implications this has for children's mental health. Although they note the suffering of many children, who grow up without ongoing care from parents, they caution against moving too quickly to pathologize their experience. Instead, as noted in the context of Caribbean migration [START_REF] Chamberlain | The Family as Model and Metaphor in Caribbean Migration to the UK[END_REF][START_REF] Fog Olwig | Narratives of the Children Left Behind: Home and Identity in Globalised Caribbean Families[END_REF], they argue for examining how emotional ties are also sustained across a geographic divide.

As mentioned, with few exceptions -the book draws primarily on the US context. Nonetheless, it has a great deal of relevance to Britain and Europe, where the last decade has seen both an increase in the domestic service industry, an increased recruitment of immigrants and where the bulk of female employment is in the service industry. As such, these workers' rights to remain in the country remain uncertain, rendering them extremely vulnerable to abuse. In an attempt to redress this, a self-conscious 'community' has been established in Britain, with the organization KALAYAAN acting as a support for immigrant domestic workers in the UK. It is through their work that the government has introduced legislation regularizing the position of migrant domestic workers.

State provision of childcare is minimal in America. Although several European countries have gone a long way towards ensuring universal state childcare, in the UK, there is still enormous dissatisfaction with the failure to provide universal childcare with well-paid nursery assistants. It could also be argued that increased emphasis on care in the community has added to the need to recruit others to assist in caring for elderly or disabled family members. Rather than arguing against women working outside the home, the book highlights how the low market value of care lowers the way in which the provision of care is viewed. The authors call for increased salaries, better public services and the involvement of men in an issue that involves not only women but families. This means taking domestic work outside the home: campaigning around issues of migration and domestic labour, and as Anderson suggests, recognizing that this work is 'in the best sense, just another job ' (p. 114).

Although never stated, as an academic book one may assume that the views expressed are weighted towards a middle-class understanding of the issues. Despite this, it draws extensively on the narratives of many working in domestic service and has therefore much to offer in moving the complex and potentially shameful dynamics of domestic labour to a more public arena. It will serve as an invaluable resource for academics working in the fields of social policy, migration and gender studies, as well as mental health professionals working with people struggling to retain their dignity as they move between the personal and professional within a small and intimate space. However, written in a clear and engaging style, it is equally recommended for all men and women engaged in the arena of domestic employment.

  ASYMMETRIC POWER RELATIONS: DOMESTIC LABOUR IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE B. Ehrenreich and A.R. Hochschild, eds Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003, 328 pp., ISBN 0-8050-6995-X


Gudrun-Axeli Knapp

Race, Class, Gender Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories

Keywords:

The article focuses on the temporal and epistemic economy connected to the transatlantic travels of the categorical triad of 'race-class-gender'. It looks at conditions and forces that have fuelled the dynamics of the discourse on differences and inequality among women and analyses feminist discourse and its aporias as a particular environment for the travels of theories. Furthermore, it follows the changes the triad of 'race-class-gender' undergoes on its transatlantic route from the United States to a German-speaking context and it outlines the theoretical challenges connected to an intersectional perspective that aims to overcome a theoretical stagnation that itself finds symptomatic expression in the ritual citing of 'race-class-gender'.

For the past 20 years, questions of inequality and difference among women, especially the interconnections of race, class and gender have been at the centre of Anglo-American feminist debates. In this article, I focus on the specific temporal and epistemic economy connected to the transatlantic travels of the categorical triad of 'race-class-gender'. Starting out by taking up the metaphor of 'travelling theories', discussing its scope and limits, I gain the contours of a broader analytical framework. This allows me to focus on some of the changing conditions of traffic in concepts and theories, namely the recent development of a new constellation of knowledge and economy reflected in notions like 'cognitive' or 'academic' capitalism [START_REF] Corsani | Wissen und Arbeit im kognitiven Kapitalismus. Die Sackgassen der politischen Ökonomie[END_REF][START_REF] Slaughter | Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University[END_REF]. Against this background, some of the more specific factors and forces that have fuelled the dynamics of the discourse on differences and inequality among women are looked at. I analyse the aporias and the moral economy of feminist discourse as a particular environment for the travels of theories and follow the changes the triad of 'race-class-gender' undergoes on its transatlantic route from the US to a German-speaking context. In the last sections, I consider the irritations that accompany the arrival of 'race-class-gender' in Germany and outline the fundamental theoretical challenges connected to the perspective of an intersectional analysis that aims to overcome a theoretical stagnation which itself finds symptomatic expression in the ritual citing of 'race-class-gender'.

ON TRAVELLING

Since the advent of Edward Said's essay 'The World, The Text, and The Critic' [START_REF] Said | Traveling Theory[END_REF], the notion of 'travelling theory' seems to have become its own exemplary case of a fast moving idea. 1 The diversity of disciplines, contexts and ways in which the metaphor of 'travelling theory' has been taken up suggests that it must have hit a nerve beyond the conventional descriptive usefulness of the figure of 'travelling', which looks back to a long tradition in poetical and philosophical writings from (at least) the 16th century onwards. Until recently, the notion of 'travelling' has mainly been used in reference to travelling subjects or agents to picture their leaving home, moving to unknown places, their experiences, discoveries and learnings. Exemplary figures in this field are the 'ethnographer' and the 'tourist'.

With Edward Said's observations on the travelling of theories, some aspects seem to have been added to the focus. In the 1980s, taking 'theories' or 'concepts' as travelling objects was more than a reminiscence of established academic exercise in the humanities. The new perspective was emphatically connected with a cultural turn, focusing on theories as embedded cultural practices involved in power struggles. A growing awareness of the ways in which theories are shaped by and charged with the historical contexts of their articulation has inspired reflections on historicity, on cultural difference, on translation and rearticulation of theories that have left home (whatever that meant, before it was -rightly -deconstructed). In the wake of these developments, the problematic of treating 'theory' as moving object or taxonomic entity has also come to the fore.

The image of travelling, along with a whole set of related notions (journeying, nomadism, trafficking, etc.), has also invited more intense reflection on the changing conditions of travelling. It is this aspect that seems to have gained a lot of attention recently in media theory, cultural and social theory. In this broader horizon, analyses confront the far-reaching changes in the spatio-temporal set-up of contemporary culture and society as well as the material conditions and power structures determining the traffic in theory.

Whether in frameworks of 'postmodernity', 'second modernity', 'globalization', 'world society', 'late capitalism', the 'Empire', 'technocapitalism', 'knowledge-' or 'network society', phenomena of a condensing temporal economy, connected with processes of disembedding and acceleration, are at the centre of the debate. The conditions of travelling have been deeply altered by a globalizing economy and culture, by revolutionary developments in the technical media of exchange and communication and by a growing body of transnational institutions, securing and restricting the conditions of possibility of exchange. People, goods, weapons, risks, information and ideas can move farther and faster than ever.

Simultaneously, this renders more visible the uneven, somehow oldfashioned and harmonizing character of the metaphor of travelling itself, which is inherently associated with a contemplative mode, with the privilege of spending and losing time. Trying to understand the fast travellings of theories today thus means moving beyond the familiar set of categories associated with the trope of travel.

In postcolonial studies and transnational feminism, notions of exile, displacement and migration have been critically set against the 18th-and 19th-century images that accompany the metaphor of travel like a shadow of its noble and later bourgeois past. Sometimes 'smuggling' may be the word more adequate for describing the moves of theories: a lot of smuggling of books to and fro took place before the Berlin Wall came down. Today, notions of the 'theoretical parachutists' [START_REF] Petö | An Empress in a New-Old Dress[END_REF] reflect the ambivalent and in parts degrading experiences accompanying the transforming of academies in all Eastern European countries (Braidotti and Griffin, 2002).

Travelling theories will take routes influenced by the stating and defining of knowledge gaps and knowledge divides, which by construction imply an asymmetrical distribution of knowledge that counts. The cultural formation of such 'knowledge gaps' or 'knowledge divides' can be seen as highly overdetermined processes involving constellations of politico-institutional power and opportunity structures, markets and survival strategies, linguistic hegemonies as well as unevenly distributed phantasies and prejudice about the use and exchange value of the works one has not yet read and of the necessity to read them. By defining deficiencies and lacks, such 'knowledge gaps' can add to the dynamic of traffic in theories, accelerating the travels of some, blocking the distribution of others.

The changing conditions of travelling theories cannot be tackled today without reflecting on the recent development of a highly competitive capitalist world market. In a complex configuration of economy, science, technology, policy and culture, it is now obvious that the knowledge and information sectors have become increasingly important domains. Knowledge and reflexive competencies in dealing with it have turned into highly valued commodities. These developments include far-reaching changes on the institutional level in systems of higher education and research that have come to be termed 'academic capitalism' [START_REF] Slaughter | Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University[END_REF]. Mediated by evaluation systems, individual profiling, quality assurance and criteria-based funding, there is a growing pressure on the academic system, on universities and by now on all disciplines, to produce knowledge that sells: on the markets of invention and innovation, on the diverse expert-markets, on markets of political advice, on the markets of education and last but not least, on the transnational 'quotation market' (Derrida, 1990: 74).

In The States of Theory (Carroll, 1990), which in some respects offers a California-based perspective on academic capitalism, Jacques Derrida reflects upon the field of forces influencing the states and the interstate travels of theory. He exemplifies the hasty trafficking in 'theory' by looking at the cantankerous lot of 'neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms' (Derrida, 1990: 63), describing them as symptoms of a 'frenzied competition' under the institutional conditions of the academic system. It is this 'frenzied competition' that, as he observes, activates and accelerates the production of titles of 'post' and 'new' driving the merry-go-round of doxographic discourse. As constituents of this field of forces he points to the general 'socio-economic conditions', explicitly he refers to the politico-institutional arrangements of a state or a country, for example 'different teaching and research systems, depending on whether they are predominantly public and state organized, on the one hand, or private and dominated by free enterprise in a capitalist style, on the other', and, besides but not less important than the economy or politico-institutional settings he names 'the psycho-historical and phantasmatical-libidinal dimensions' that can drive the markets, the thrust for knowledge and the acceptance or rejection of theories (Derrida, 1990: 70).

FEMINIST DISCOURSE: A 'HOT' EPISTEMIC CULTURE Against this background, I now look at the triad of 'race-class-gender' moving in the medium of feminist discourse, which I describe first as a particular environment for the travels of theories.

Feminist discourse in a broad sense can be sketched as a polyphonic interdiscourse critically focusing on processes and problematics connected with sex, sexuality and gender; a variable network of communications crossing the boundaries of countries, disciplines, theoretical paradigms and diverse fields of academic, political and professional practice. It materializes in manifold forms: in dispersed exchanges of sometimes more local and insular character and then again it can take the shape of broader transversal currents and interconnected discursive dispositifs in the Foucauldian sense, often stabilized by forms of institutional governance (e.g. discourse on gender mainstreaming in the EU). The attentive cohesion that runs through this multi-voiced and dissonant network is something quite unique and still amazing. On numerous occasions and in numerous locations, women of different cultural, professional and academic backgrounds, very often strangers, enter into communication by obviously presupposing there would be reasons to address each other on the basis of their gender and that there could be something to share.

Much has been said and written about the fragile foundations of feminism. I tend towards a decisively deconstructive view in reflecting on the homogenizing and totalizing presuppositions of feminism, but I also find it indispensable to neither lose interest in the diversity of women's experiences nor to lose sight of the homogenizing and totalizing dimensions ingrained in the material and symbolic conditions of women's lives within and across sociocultural contexts.

The 'imagined community' (Anderson) of feminism is of cognitive, emotional, normative and practical significance, in spite of and maybe because of its imaginary dimension. The presupposed generalized 'We' functions like a regulative idea: it has substantive effects, but it cannot be positively defined with reference to a collective with a substantial identity of experience and interests. The principal indeterminateness of this generalized 'We' on the one hand and its practical, operational character on the other hand, hint at a fundamental aporia that distinguishes the field of feminist critique from other traditions of critical theory. The aporia lies in the simultaneous indispensability and impossibility of a foundational reference to an epistemic or political subject. It is the effects of this aporia, repeatedly instigating new controversies about the proper object (Butler, 1994) of theory, which have made feminism such a fidgety, sometimes moralizing and idiosyncratic, vital, controversial, productive, 'hot' epistemic culture.

One of the most influential debates reflecting this aporia has been the debate on inequality and difference among women. Politically, it was driven by the normative but counterfactual inclusiveness of the feminist 'We', disrupted by the factual power differences and lines of exclusion within the feminist community. The political and moral need for feminism to be inclusive in order to be able to keep up its own foundational premises opened up the avenues for dispersion and acceleration of 'race/ethnicity, class, gender/sexuality etc.'.

The career of the triad of 'race-class-gender' started around the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US, when feminists of colour voiced vehement criticism of what they saw as a white middle-class bias, an unrecognized self-centredness in much of feminist theory and politics. Understanding race, class and gender as interrelated structures of oppression, as Patricia Hill Collins named it, was most strongly advocated in the context of black feminism with its comparatively marked radical (left) tradition of social theory [START_REF] Collins | Black Feminist Thought[END_REF]Combahee River Collective, 1982;[START_REF] Davis | Women, Race, and Class[END_REF].

Debates on 'differences' among women climaxed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a clash between identitarian articulations of 'differences' and radical questionings of the epistemological and political foundations of feminism, ambivalently labelled 'postfeminist' theory. In this respect Judith [START_REF] Butler | Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity[END_REF] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity marks a peak of this development by radically subverting all 'theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and ablebodiedness [and] invariably close with an embarrassed "etc.", at the end of the list' (Butler, 1990: 143).

In spite -but maybe also because -of the diversity of political, disciplinary and theoretical contexts in which questions of 'difference' have been articulated and analysed, the triad of 'race-class-gender', which now regularly includes a number of supplements (religion, age, ability) and the unavoidable 'etc.', has become a fast and flexible traveller in the English-speaking world of western feminism, taking different shapes in the US, Canada, Australia or the UK.

TRAVELLING THE DOXOGRAPHIC DISCOURSE

Analysing the conditions of fast travelling theories in the US context, one material medium of acceleration is to be seen in the highly developed tradition of a certain genre of scholarly texts: the extended orienting genre of course readers, introductory literature, overviews, theory websites, etc. offering shorthand sketches and digestible pieces of theories or debates, sometimes using exaggerated and misleading scenarios in describing controversies, generally accentuating differences between 'positions'. The presentation of 'postmodernism' in this type of literature is an exemplary case of this fashion like 'in' and 'out' structuring. It is these kinds of texts that transport a good deal of what Derrida called the 'doxographic discourse'. Doxographic discourses are second-order or meta-theoretical discourses in which theories tend to move as taxonomic entities. A characteristic feature of doxographic discourses is, as Derrida noticed, the 'quotation market'. Taking up the speech-act theory distinction of using vs mentioning, he points out a secret imperative underlying doxographic discourse: 'don't use that concept, only mention it' (Derrida, 1990: 75).

The temporal structures of using and mentioning differ. Much of the speeding up of 'race-class-gender etc.' has to do with its circulation as shorthand for the latest news in feminist theory within doxographic discourse. Its reification into a formula merely to be mentioned, being largely stripped of the baggage of concretion, of context and history, has been a condition of possibility of its acceleration. The simultaneous functioning as moral mantra links it to the particular political economy of feminist discourse sketched earlier. The dual message it signals is: 'I'm well informed' and 'I'm politically correct'. By just mentioning other 'differences' besides 'gender', the work to be done continues to be delegated to the respective 'others'.

This mechanism reproduces a division of academic labour and certain specializations along identitarian lines in the field of theory, too. On the one hand, the division of labour according to 'identities' documents the close interconnection of knowledge and interest and the emotional cathexis of motives driving the legitimate desire to explore specific understudied problematics. On the other hand, it is the interplay between mechanisms of delegation and respective claims of competence, authority and authenticity that also keeps the mantra going: mention differences -and continue doing what you've always done. Against this background, the programmatic of 'intersectionality' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF], pioneered by black feminists' interest in theorizing race, class and gender as a trilogy of oppression and discrimination, can be seen as a revolution in perspective. It articulates the aporias in feminist theorizing and promises to lead a way out of the impasses of identity politics in theory production while maintaining feminism's political impetus.

The concept of intersectionality was introduced in the mid-1980s by legal professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in two articles: on black women's employment experiences, and on violence against women of colour. For her the main problem in identity politics was not 'that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite -that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1242)). The political observation that ignoring differences within groups contributes to tensions among groups inspired her to develop intersectionality as a way of 'mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics' [START_REF] Crenshaw | Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color[END_REF](Crenshaw, : 1296)). Since Crenshaw's early formulations, the concept of intersectionality has been taken up and elaborated in different ways. It stands for an analytical programmatic in policy contexts focusing on multiple discrimination and vulnerabilities, and it stands also for a more general theoretical programmatic by aiming to relate the integrated study of large-scale societal structures of dominance, the historical and contextual systematics of unevenly distributed power, meso-level institutional arrangements and forms of governance, interactions between individuals and groups as well as individual experiences, including the related symbolic processes of representation, legitimating and meaning production [START_REF] Weber | Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework[END_REF].

PROBLEMATIC ARRIVALS: CLASS AND RACE IN A GERMAN-SPEAKING CONTEXT

The programmatic of intersectionality only recently arrived in the German-speaking context in company with the doxographic mantra of 'race-class-gender', and joined by decontextualized rumours about a lessening social relevance of gender and a crisis of feminist theory altogether (Hark, forthcoming;[START_REF] Knapp | Fragile Foundations, Strong Traditions, Situated Questioning: Critical Theory in German-Speaking Feminism[END_REF][START_REF] Knapp | Grundlagenkritik und stille Post: Zur Debatte um einen Bedeutungsverlust der Kategorie "Geschlecht[END_REF].

The delayed reception of the triad of 'race-class-gender' has to be seen as part of the general late-coming of German-speaking feminism when compared with the transnational pacesetters of US-American feminism. One important reason for this is a linguistic one. The academic market of Germany, Austria and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland is not large, but it has been large enough to function as a market of its own. Undoubtedly, the pressure to enter the world of Anglophone discourse has been greater in the smaller linguistic communities. Also, the professional need to join the Anglophone discourse varies significantly by discipline. Traffic in Anglophone theories was prompted by departments of English and American literature and the newly established area of cultural studies, which -along with the more disciplinary subject matters -led to a specific selection of theoretical perspectives and debates that were transferred into the German-speaking context along with the discussion on differences among women. In sociology it was mostly a younger generation of feminists, often daughters of migrants or scholars working in fields of migration studies, which took up and pushed the debate on intersections of gender and ethnicity (Apitzsch and Jansen, 2003;Bednarz-Braun and Heß-Meining, 2004;[START_REF] Gümen | Das Soziale des Geschlechts. Frauenforschung und die Kategorie "Ethnizität[END_REF][START_REF] Rodriguez | Intellektuelle Migrantinnen -Subjektivitäten im Zeitalter der Globalisierung[END_REF].

The arrival of the triad of 'race-class-gender' is accompanied by a significant shifting of meanings that affects all of the categories, but especially the notions of race and class. While the notion of class in the US-American context seems to be a common category denoting the differences in social location, be it in the framework of structural functional, Weberian, Marxist or occupational classificatory approaches, the German notion of Klasse is almost exclusively used in the context of Marxist theory. One can even say that along with the 1980s crisis of Marxist theory, in recent sociological theories of inequality the notion of class has largely been replaced by notions of Schicht (strata), more cultural notions of horizontal disparities, lifestyle differences or, in the field of systems theory, by the categorical pair of inclusion and exclusion.

Among many others, Ulrich Beck, a well-known social theorist influencing much of the scholarly and public debate on second modernity and globalization, had in the 1980s already pointedly stated that notions like class are Zombie-like categories. In his view, in an era marked by individualization they have lost their lives as categories of structured inequalities, but still cannot die [START_REF] Beck | Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?[END_REF]. When German feminists, taking up Anglophone discussions on intersectionality, speak of Klasse as one of the central categories of social analysis, they position themselves rhetorically in the past of radical debates of the 1970s. The notion of Klasse either suggests feminist theories sticking to yesterday's analytics, or it locates feminist theory at the fringe of today's scholarly debates on inequality. Looked at from within feminist discourse and its currents, there is an obvious tension between the line of gender mainstreaming, by which practitioners and theorists of gender or women's studies join the forefront of new public management, and the continued references to Klasse, which signals its hang-up with a seemingly outdated tradition of social criticism.

While feminist theory never quite forgot to mention Klasse as an axis of inequality in the mantra of 'race-class-gender', it has not really engaged in reformulating it [START_REF] Acker | The Continuing Necessity of "Class" in Feminist Thinking[END_REF]. But the merry-go-round of 'old' and 'new' keeps on turning and today the once provocative postmodern diagnoses about the erosion of class structures are themselves being challenged, not only because inequality increases even in the rich western countries, but also because the forms and mechanisms of inequality obviously have not changed as radically as theoretical exaggerations suggested during the short phase of prosperity. 2 Even more complicated is the landing of the category of race. Quotation marks and inverted commas, frequently framing notions of Rasse, are symptoms of a deep irritation. Whenever race appears without quotation marks one can be sure it is the English word being used as a marker of distance in an otherwise German text. Rasse is a category that cannot be used in an affirmative way in Germany: it is neither possible to ascribe a Rasse to others nor is it acceptable to use Rasse as a basis for identity claims, which by comparison is a common practice in the US. And this holds true not only for scholarly contexts, but also for general public discourse, where even racists tend to avoid notions of Rasse. A public discussion on how to redefine racial categories so they would be better suited to counting and measuring a 'mixed' population as has recently taken place in the US would be quite unthinkable in Germany.

It is obvious that the impossibility of the notion of Rasse relates back to the history of the racist identity politics of National Socialism. It was modern scientific systems of racial distinctions and hierarchies, along with the modern mania of unrestricted practicability that legitimated industrialized genocide of millions of 'others', predominantly Jews, from all over Europe, and warfare legitimated by ethnic (translated as völkisch) nationalism that aimed at changing the map of the continent.

Thus, scholarly discourses that take up questions of race in Germany hardly ever use race as a categorical resource, but rather make it the topic of critical analysis. Race enters discourse as an almost entirely negative category, but it is exactly the non-fitting of race to the context of arrival that poses a challenge. Paradoxically, this becomes visible only by decentring the focus and situating Germany within the EU and in its European neighbourhood. Countries like the UK, France and the Netherlands have been urged to deal in more active ways with their colonial and imperialist past and their present as countries of immigration, while Germany is again late in acknowledging that it has a history of colonialism and has been a country of immigration for a long time. In neighbouring countries like the UK, for example, there seems to exist a diverse handling of notions of race: critiques of racial categories are quite common, but so are pragmatic as well as affirmative uses of race by minority groups as a category of identity. This configuration of controversial references to race invites debate, while in Germany the term is taboo, which leads to a preclusion of the problematic.

Underlying the striking taboos connected to Rasse there is a subcutaneous and uncanny continuity in the imaginary of an ethnically homogeneous nation [START_REF] Gümen | Die sozialpolitische Konstruktion "kultureller Differenzen" in der bundesrepublikanischen Frauenforschung[END_REF]. The effects of this imaginary constellation of tabooing certain categories of difference (race) by secretly presupposing ethnic homogeneity seem to be a compromise and a symptom of unresolved conflict with the past. Paradoxically, it is the same constellation that has made affirmative notions of collective 'identities' deeply suspect for many German feminists -with or without theoretically resorting to deconstruction or negative dialectics [START_REF] Adorno | Negative Dialectics[END_REF]. The grounds for what is being called 'identity' have been historically shaken.

INTERSECTIONALITY: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES OF A THEORETICAL PROGRAMMATIC

While specifics of the historical context seem to preclude taking up the triad of 'race-class-gender' in German feminism it is the same history which -on a more general level -turns the programmatic of intersectional analysis into a significant critical project.

In an article on 'managing the complexity of intersectionality', the American sociologist Leslie McCall states that: 'feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality (the relationship between multiple dimensions of social relations and social identities) as itself a central category of analysis. One could even say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution of women's studies along with racial and ethnic studies so far' [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF].

The problematic of inequality and difference has come up politically and epistemologically as a domestic affair of the women's movement and feminist theory. Yet the questions concerning inequalities among women cannot be answered by looking at women. Race, class and gender are relational terms: whom they interconnect and separate, whom they include and exclude how and by what means, and how the respective relationality is composed under specific sociohistorical, cultural and economic conditions will not be understood by examining only one category.

In her discussion on intersectional analyses, McCall distinguishes three approaches: anti-categorical approaches that she mostly sees represented in deconstructionist and poststructuralist theories; intra-categorical approaches, which focus on differences and inequalities within the frame of one of the respective categories, be it class, race, ethnicity or gender; and third, inter-categorical approaches, the study of relations between categories.

While McCall takes up questions of methodology, i.e. how to manage the complexities of intersectionality in the field of quantitative empirical sociological research on inequality, I want to comment on the theoretical challenges that have been put on the agenda by this debate.

Although the programmatic associated with intersectionality is supposed to extend from a micro-analytical focus to macro-perspectives aimed at large-scale structures in culture and society, most of the actual studies have concentrated more or less on micro-level analyses. The predominant perspective has been looking at how different categories interact in shaping subjective experiences, often experiences of discrimination, how they determine access to resources and options and how they are taken up in constructions of identity.

And most certainly there was and still is much to gain by adopting these perspectives. Yet, for a more comprehensive understanding of structured subject positions it is necessary to extend the analytical range to include social theoretical approaches: How are gender relations and heteronormative sexuality, class relations and configurations of ethnicity and race/ism interwoven in the structural and institutional make-up of a given society and economy, in national as well as transnational contexts? And what happens to these relationalities under conditions of social, political and economic transformation? As Cornelia Klinger puts it: 'It makes no sense to hint at the superimposing and intersecting aspects of class, race and gender in the worlds of individual experience without being able to specify how and by what means class, race and gender are constituted as social categories' (Klinger, 2003: 25;my translation).

The question that emerges is, whether feminist theory is really equipped to take up the debate on race/ethnicity, class, gender/sexuality and intersectionality on this level of analysis. I'm afraid, with few exceptions, feminist voices have been rather absent in much of the recent social theoretical debates. It looks like the programmatic of multidimensional intersectional analysis in feminism has developed and moved faster than feminism's capacity to work it through.

If feminist theory does not supply all of the tools needed for moving within this complexity, one has to look for offers from other experts. But are the participants in non-feminist social theoretical debates any better equipped to take up the programmatic of intersectionality? This is also doubtful. While rhetorically travelling in the repertoires of the general, the analytical scope is quite particular, still resting on systematic exclusions: gender relations in particular have hardly been integrated into social theoretical frameworks and in theories of inequality. In spite of much feminist critique there remains a widespread tendency to depotentialize gender as category of social analysis by systematically locating gender relations in the private sphere or on the micro-levels of social interaction.

Looking at this whole discursive setting from a more abstract view highlights corresponding blind spots: while feminist theory brought up questions of 'race-class-gender' and intersectionality via an internal critique and self-reflection of the imagined community of feminism, it has not really been able to develop more encompassing theoretical frameworks. On the other hand, non-feminist social theorists are engaged in producing terminological fireworks of single-aspect societies ('service society', 'risk society', 'single society', 'event society', 'multicultural society', 'knowledge society', 'multioption society', etc.) while systematically leaving out central axes of dominance and inequality that structure contemporary society in spite of and via the changes that -undoubtedly -have to be taken into account. The semantic framework of modernization that has influenced much contemporary social theory shows systematic difficulties in dealing with inequalities by the very arrangement of its central categories. This has often been noted with respect to postmodern theory, but it also can be related to self-declared critical theories of (second) modernity, e.g. for Beck and Giddens (Aulenbacher, 2001). One main source of this difficulty lies in the foundational decision of focusing contemporary capitalist society as a new formation without alternatives, characterized by highly reflexive systems of permanent self-correction and reform, thus overestimating aspects of change and underestimating continuities in the structural relations of power and dominance.

There is an irony of history connected to this configuration of corresponding lopsidedness. Travelling the transatlantic route, the triad of 'race-class-gender' -originally designed to reflect an American context -has not only contributed to ideological discourses on European diversity, but it has also turned into a radical historical reminder of the dark sides of modernity. Read as a New World Mirror for Old Europe, the provocative constellation of 'race-class-gender' shows a remarkable potential to shake up the common matrix for understanding European modernity.

Posed as a systematic perspective of study and research, the triad of 'race-class-gender' necessitates calls for a radical transdisciplinary reinspection of European modernity in its historical interdependency with an emerging capitalist economy, including specific androcentric forms of rationality and rationalization it presupposes and enforces [START_REF] Adorno | Dialectics of Enlightenment[END_REF]Kulke and Scheich, 1992). A more grounded picture of this history would centre on the tense and contradictory synchronicity between promises of individual rights and equality on the one hand and politico-scientific as well as economic discourses and practices on the other hand, inventing, establishing, legitimating and exploiting difference and inequality along the lines of gender, class, race and ethnicity. This could help correct the false assumptions, the biases and self-deceptions underlying many theories of modernization and enhance a critical selfreflexivity that turns out to be a basic competence in a globalizing world. An awareness of this uncanny simultaneity of progress and barbarity would not have to deny the gains of modernity yet it would not lend legitimation to hegemonial missions in the name of western values.

It is a long way from a fast travelling mantra of 'race-class-gender' to the theoretical challenges of intersectional analysis. The metaphor of reclaiming baggage that I pose against the speedy economy of doxographic mentioning refers to a time-consuming activity, resembling the psychoanalytical process of 'Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten'. In the field of theory it works by remembering, by historicizing, contextualizing and comparing with respect to both levels: the so-called ontological level dealing with questions of 'what is' and the epistemological level of how we look at it. And, in a self-reflexive move, it would take up the question of how both of these levels are interrelated in contemporary culture and society and how they shape one's own conditions of proposing. More specifically, 'reclaiming baggage' would translate into: Let's work through the critical theoretical traditions again, but starting from present-day problematics and on the basis of insights gained from former controversies. This perspective would help to avoid a relapse into old either/or positions: cultural vs social, material vs discursive, linguistic vs mentalist paradigm, etc.

Past theoretical controversies have themselves at least in part been relativized and decentred by historical developments. Late capitalism, technology and the new media have produced new configurations of the cultural, the social and the economy; revolutionary developments in the techno-sciences keep informing a lingering erosion of the ontological grounds for powerful binaries like nature/culture [START_REF] Haraway | Die Neuerfindung der Natur[END_REF]. Hybrid compositions of material and discursive matters cannot be grasped by uncritically using the conventional theoretical devices: they are simultaneously as real as nature, as narrated as discourse and as social as society (Latour, 1995: 13). Some scholars have described these developments in terms of a dematerialization and virtualization transforming the fabric of social reality. Cultural theorist Dietmar Kamper, for example, refers to Marx's notion of 'real abstraction' in order to grasp these tendencies: 'The progressing real abstraction forms an alliance with abstract analyses in a yet puzzling way. Abstraction is construction which substitutes and substitution which fabricates -which amounts to an almost divine project' (Kamper, 1998: 27;my translation). It is obvious, that the processional triad of abstraction, construction and substitution, if it really turns into a powerful sociocultural tendency, would have enormous epistemological consequences, including consequences for trying to analyse these tendencies themselves. Yet, in order to get a more differentiated picture, the ways in which tendencies of real abstraction work within and across different arenas of economy, science, culture, politics, the private sphere and everyday life have to be more thoroughly studied. The specific weight of forces of real abstraction, and the counterforces they evoke, can only be determined within an empirically informed and terminologically complex theoretical framework. Focusing on race/ethnicity, class, gender/sexuality might prove to be heuristically productive in this respect, too, because the constitution of these axes of inequality and difference is itself mediated by particular rationalities and historical constellations of abstracting, constructing and substituting.

OUTLOOK

In recent years, the paradigm of intersectionality has been welcomed by more and more feminists as not only broadening the scope of theory but also as offering a new perspective for a critical project. Undoubtedly, the methodological and theoretical implications that go along with intersectional analyses will yet have to be investigated in more detail. To me two questions are of particular interest. The first concerns the relation between -in McCall's terms -anti-categorical approaches, intra-categorical approaches and inter-categorical approaches. My suggestion is that these approaches represent different but not necessarily mutually exclusive perspectives on questions of race/ethnicity, class and gender/sexuality. The strength of the anti-categorical approach lies in its deconstructive impetus, keeping at bay terminological closures and reifications including those presupposed by one's own analysis of categorical divisions. Intra-categorical approaches and inter-categorical approaches seem to be interdependent and their respective potentials unfold best by holding on to both poles of this interdependency. While the first -most obvious in the case of race, ethnicity and genderoften refer to identitarian foundations of analysis, and thus can be strong in securing a horizon for taking up questions of 'difference' as something that cannot be excluded because it matters 'within' a politico-epistemological community (see earlier), the inter-categorical approach transcends the unavoidable parochialism of identitarian framings because questions of 'differences' posed from 'within' point to relationalities the constitution of which cannot be fully comprehended by intra-categorical analysis.

The second question relates to the challenges intersectionality poses for social theory. I understand the transatlantic traveller of race, class and gender as presenting a focus for an integrated analysis apt to correct biased and reductionist views of European modernity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, European societies develop as simultaneously modern, bourgeoispatriarchal, national and capitalist societies. Analyses focusing on only one of these respective structural characteristics (the modern, patriarchal rule, national constitution, the capitalist mode of production) will not be able to discern the specific constellation of interdependent structures whose reconfiguration we witness in the wake of European integration and globalization. Trying to understand contemporary changes in the structural set-up of European societies presupposes an adequately complex analysis of this constellation of differently composed but intermediated structures.

It should be kept in mind, though, that this critical archaeology of modern Europe cannot be pursued in a Eurocentric way or by comparisons following the premises of 'methodological nationalism' (Beck). The European constellation of nation-states also represents a long history of transnational interlacements, including those with the extra-European world, based on violence, hegemonic interests and exchange. NOTES 1.

To name just a few of the numerous variations and contexts in which the metaphor has been taken up: in ethnography, James Clifford's travelling theories, theorists and travelling cultures [START_REF] Clifford | Traveling Cultures[END_REF]; Katie [START_REF] King | Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in US Women's Movements[END_REF] Theory in its Feminist Travels; Kathy Davis's fine piece on 'Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller' [START_REF] Davis | Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves[END_REF]; in cultural analysis, Mieke [START_REF] Bal | Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide[END_REF] Travelling Concepts; see also the Athena European Women's Studies Network project on 'Teaching Travelling Concepts in Women's Studies'. For an overview on cultural studies, see [START_REF] Wolff | On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism[END_REF]. 2.

The annual meeting of the German Sociological Association (DGS) in 2004, which took place under the heading 'Social Inequality and Cultural Difference', documented a renewed interest in theorizing social inequalities in terms of class structures.

Knapp: Race, Class, Gender

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 12(3)