Les études de genre et la reconfiguration de la féminité dans les textes monothéistes : l’histoire de Joseph

Abstract

Taking its start from La beauté Joseph, a novella by Algerian francophone writer Assia Djebar, and
from the gender-sensitive account Djebar makes of the archetype of St. Joseph and his temptress Zuleikha, the
present paper defends the following claim: religious studies have a lot to gain from the epistemological
questions and gender analyses that were formulated by feminist religious scholars in the eighties and nineties of
the twentieth century, especially with regard to the representation of femininity. I proceed further to comparing
the three monotheist versions of the story of Joseph. Focus will be laid on the scene of seduction in which Joseph
and Zuleikha are protagonists, and on such questions as moral responsibility, the naming of religious concepts
and the gendering of religious symbols. I hope to shed light on the contribution to religious studies of both new-historicist thought (Mohamed Arkoun), hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur) and feminist religious thought ( Kathleen
B.Jones, Valerie Savings and June O’Connor). All question the authenticity of religious concepts and they all
call for a new hermeneutics in the study of religious texts, where contextualisation of human experience and
gender considerations are taken into account. Their insights help bring to the fore certain details which have
been deliberately omitted from or ignored in the accounts that religious orthodoxies made accessible to the
world monotheist imaginary.