This essay is part of a review panel of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that took place at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Read the full panel here.
In a footnote to the introduction of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, Rafe Neis distinguishes their project from the kinds of writing “exemplified by Saaidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation,’ Donna Haraway’s ‘speculative fabulations,’ and Banu Subramaniam’s “fictional science… nor do I venture,” Neis writes, “to emulate the science or speculative fiction of those such as Octavia Butler or Ursula Le Guin… Nonetheless, I am indebted to these distinctive writers who in a variety of modes model what it is to imagine otherwise,” beyond an overdetermined historical hegemony.[1] These prominent writers and thinkers of SF, which can stand for Speculative and Scientific Fiction/Fact/Fabulation/Feminism, enjoin their readers to tell new stories. By engaging in transformative world-imagining, we can, in Haraway’s words, engender “a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind.”[2]
I suggest that Neis’s work itself takes part in making worlds, despite demarcating their project from SF strategies. In When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, Neis uncovers a world of reproductive uncertainty, making a convincing case for taking the rabbis’ scenarios and debates at face value – as constitutive of ancient world-making.[3] Much like how SF writers and thinkers envision the liberatory possibilities of other worlds, Neis’s project stages the possibilities beyond rigid classification and traditional approaches to generation, gender, and the (always already hybrid) human. In their artistic and multi-media work they engage directly with these themes as creative and constructive forms of staging and imagining otherwise.
Rafael Rachel Neis, Birds Born of Humans. Mixed media, photograph, 7.5 in. x 10in., 2020.
Examples of these strategies include their piece “Birds Born of Humans,” which appears at the end of the book’s Introduction, depicting figurative ceramic birdheads (one of which evokes the more familiar form of a ceramic human bust), poised atop a page of Talmud; and their comics series “In pictures: how ancient rabbis upend ‘traditional’ ideas of reproduction, gender, and humanity,” as part of the University of California press blog promoting the book.[4] Here are some excerpts from that series:
I am reminded here of my own reliance on SF writers in my teaching and scholarship. In my class on Animals and Religion, for example, I often assign two short stories at the end of the semester – Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.”
Le Guin’s story, in particular, has always confounded students in a way I thought I needed to anticipate and avoid. The story presents itself as excerpts from a scientific journal in which the scientists have finally decoded the seed-language of politically dissident ants, the kinetic water-flying communication of penguins, and eventually even the slower, more deliberate speech of lichen and eggplant. In their reading responses, some students seem to take the fictional story at face value, as if it came from an actual scientific journal. So I have become more and more intentional each time I taught it, deliberately framing it as fiction. But now I find myself questioning these impulses: why am I so insistent that my students know that this story is fiction, not scientific journalism? And why am I so careful to try to set up Butler’s evocative story about male pregnancy by aliens, “Bloodchild,” instead of just letting the story take the class where it will?
Haraway argues that in addition to scientific facts, we need experimental science fiction and speculative fabulation in order to address contemporary multispecies crises and to represent a world of more-than-human multiplicity. But as Rafe convincingly illustrates, scientific facts are and have always been just as much SF as speculative fabulation. This approach is not attempting to reify or elevate the idea of science, but rather arguing that the rabbis should also be included in this weird category of thought. In placing the rabbis’ worldviews within the history of science, Rafe shows how the material is metaphorical, that we can recognize the centrality of creatureliness in all its forms when we think about the world, and that various forms of life are and have always been multiple and entangled, beyond more commonly represented teleologies.
The Introduction of Rafe’s book begins by challenging Haraways’ invocation of a supposed “Judeo-Christian” tradition, which is an invented category and, furthermore, not really Jewish at all.
Christian interpretive approaches to the Bible as unmediated do not take into account how rabbinic sources queer assumptions about kinship, reproduction, and species differentiation. Similarly, “our own limitations in languaging or conceptualizing sexgender beyond duality,” as Rafe writes, are not reflective of the late ancient rabbinic worldview.[5]
Why was I trying so hard to insist that my students disengage from Le Guin’s and Butler’s rich and messy world-building? And why have we resisted the possibility that the rabbis’ peculiar scriptural and ritual idioms worked alongside their own SF scientific observations and speculative processes to make up their literal conception of the world? What might it mean, in Rafe’s words, “to take rabbinic words and worlds in earnest,” to take seriously how the materiality of various sexgender embodiments, creatures, demons, and animal others matter?[6]
I return to the pedagogical scene, but this time to my previous experience as a Jewish studies student – how many times have I heard the Talmudic story of the beautiful Rabbi Yohanan and the voracious Resh Lakish? And yet, of course, it never occurred to me that we might, as Rafe puts it, “consider a more radical possibility for the kind of conception that Yoḥanan proposes at the mikveh.”[7] Yohanan’s gender and genealogical difference troubles a stable binary sexgender scheme. The book’s fifth chapter on “Generation” demonstrates how a reflexive interpretive assumption of cisnormativity takes cis-ness to be transhistorical; this reflects a scholarly and “cultural commitment to reading a variety of data—be they “cultural” or “biological”—in a binary fashion, rather than recognizing their multiplicity and variety,” even when deploying queer reading strategies.[8]
The women who gaze at Yohanan as they enter and emerge from the ritual bath and subsequently become pregnant with progeny that resemble Yohanan’s beauty might literally be taking part in an alternate form of generativity, a kind of ocular reproduction that bypasses their husbands and maps erotic agency onto queer desire for Yohanan’s nonbinary embodiment.[9] What generative and generational possibilities! As Rafe points out, the assumption of male-female binary procreation is an interpretive choice, and it fails to reflect the late antique rabbinic worldview in which sexual, reproductive coupling was already a tripling, between the heterosexual dyad and the divine. The couple was always in a throuple with God.[10] And this recognition provided an entryway for others – whether human or nonhuman, divine or demonic – to intervene in the circuit of marriage and reproduction.
Of course, these alternate and non-dyadic forms of reproduction “always end up affirming marriage and babies” in one way or another, and even in the re-reading of Yohanan and the women by the mikvah, we must “face the problematic generative imperative that insists on progeny begotten by women.”[11] Women’s bodies are still the biological reproductive vessels, despite the unexpected circuits of propagation. Perhaps this marks the limits of the rabbis’ imagination; and this is where imagining otherwise can take us.
Andrea Dara Cooper is the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Scholar in Modern Jewish Thought and Culture and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[1] Rafael Rachel Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023), 205 n. 60.
[2] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 19.
[3] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 196.
[4] https://www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/64217-in-pictures-how-ancient-rabbis-upend-traditional-ideas-of-reproduction-gender-and-humanity
[5] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 163.
[6] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 197.
[7] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 158.
[8] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 161.
[9] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 167.
[10] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 173.
[11] Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, 172.