Thy Signet and Thy Bracelets Identity, Becoming, and Vulnerability in the Biblical Story of Tamar

Employing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of becoming, this paper elaborates on the option of political resistance as revealed in the biblical story of Tamar. This interpretation refigures Tamar's actions as a special path of becoming, actions which make a unique use of gendered reality and gendered categories so as to create new subject positions that transgress the binary of gender. This dynamic utilizes privileged sites of masculinity, while at the same time searching for an existence that echoes embodied experiences of sexual specifity. This kind of identity politics, I argue, does not glorify vulnerability and marginality, but rather paves the way to utilize women's increasing accessibility to social and cultural resources in creative and transformative ways