| abstract | The post-exilic book of Ruth is celebrated by queer and feminist scholars for its ostensibly affirmative depiction of
woman-identified, erotic love. Yet, while the story foregrounds an interethnic, female partnership, the patriarchal and heteronormative institutions of marriage,
motherhood and nation are all reinforced at the narrative's conclusion. Moreover, Ruth is one of the most ambiguous books in the Hebrew Bible, rendering the
relationship between its female characters exceedingly complex. How then should woman-identified readers approach Ruth, a book that appears to exploit the
very woman-identified relationships they seek to lift up in order to reinscribe the very invisibility they seek to overcome? With these matters in mind,
this dissertation offers a critical paradigm for reading Ruth through the lens of "narrative desire." Steeped principally in the ideas of Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan, narrative desire brings together insights from narratology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, philosophical studies and queer theory.
As an interdisciplinary way of reading, narrative desire provides a versatile approach to indeterminate texts, highlighting the erotic interplay between a
narrative's structure and content, and the reader's response. Through exegetical analyses with several contemporary intertexts, I investigate the workings
of desires that shape the text's formation and its reception and trace ways of negotiating the book of Ruth that deny, limit or affirm the subjectivity of
woman-identified readers. Deryn Guest's principles of woman-identified hermeneutics form the methodological backdrop for my exegesis. Drawing on the
principles of resistance and rupture, I read Ruth alongside Fanny Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and John Avnet's
film adaptation, Fried Green Tomatoes, in order to interrogate the ambiguity that shapes Ruth and Naomi's relationship and to uncover what Leah Ceccarelli
calls "strategic ambiguity," a form of polysemy intended to appeal to divergent audiences. Next, I offer a reclamation of the text, drawing on Jeanette
Winterson's treatment of the relationship between a lesbian daughter and her mother in the novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit to argue for an alternative
interpretation of the character of Ruth as a woman-identified daughter in search of both autonomy and ongoing connection to "the mother's house." Finally, I turn
to the critical question of re-engagement. Reading Ruth alongside Amos Gitai's film Golem, The Spirit of Exile, I examine the hidden presence of
heterosexual and racial melancholia, terms coined by Judith Butler and Anne Anlin Cheng, David Eng and Shinhee Han respectively. Shedding light on the forestalled
grief that attends the exilic experience and shapes the thwarted eroticism between Ruth and Naomi, one discovers a history of loss that continues to touch readers
in the present. Drawing historical gleanings from each of these readings, I conclude that an expanded woman-identified perspective on Ruth is both viable and
crucial to understanding the complex negotiations of identity and communal boundaries in the ancient context of Yehud.
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