Amy Milligan's wonderful and clearly written book affirms how illuminating the discipline of folklore can be, with its attentiveness to embodied practice, gender, silenced voices, marginality, and the spiritual creativity of everyday people. Standing respectfully on the shoulders of a range of interdisciplinary scholars, Milligan forges her own contemporary methodologies that allow us to see new and emerging practices in a fresh light. I will surely assign this book in my classes in ethnography, ritual, feminism and religion, and contemporary Judaism. -- Vanessa Ochs, University of Virginia Milligan traces the intersections of queer theory, feminist theory, and bodylore. The effect is not to assemble these discourses into an overarching theoretical approach but to make them bump up against each other, disturbing their essentialisms, assumptions, angles of entry, dominant concerns, and material underpinnings. In her unusually accessible writing, Milligan does not so much argue these juxtapositions and their displacements rhetorically as demonstrate them corporeally in, on, and through the bodies of Jews, queers, and women. -- Katharine Young, San Francisco State University
