Use

Chapter 4 seeks another way to approach Onesimus, the enslaved figure and object of negotiation in Paul’s letter to Philemon. Onesimus is also the butt of another casual “joke,” this time about the bodily vulnerability of enslaved people, including for the sexual use of the owner (Philemon 11). To work more creatively with this slim epistle, the coordinates of such arguments are rearranged by a juxtaposition with an alternative ethic that reconfigures constraint in relation to consent. The role of the bottom in BDSM practices (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadomasochism) can help to challenge the ancient ethos around enslaved people, without swerving away from its horrors and lingering heritages, most especially when it attends to the role of race and historical reference in such practices. This juxtaposition foregrounds other ways to configure scripts of consent and submission, while grappling with the distinctly racialized heritages of our embodied practices.

Uncut Galatians

Chapter 3 reconsiders the multiple ways Paul’s letter to the Galatians argues with and about bodies and two practices of genital cutting—circumcision and castration. Though it quotes a baptismal tradition (3:28) prized for its scrambling of several embodied factors (Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female), it also violently wishes for, even joking about, those seeking circumcision to be castrated, bringing the eunuch as a lingering point of contrast into the foreground of the letter’s argument. Critical reflections on the meaning of modifying bodies with intersex conditions contrast with such uses of eunuch figures, subverting the persistent scholarly focus on Paul focusing on the circumcised penis, a focus that reinstalls a normative view of “member”-ship in the community. The juxtaposition of intersex advocacy with castrated people in antiquity shifts the significance of embodied differences and bodily modifications for the baptized bodies addressed in Galatians.

Assembled Gentiles

Chapter 5 resituates figurations from both Paul’s letter to the Romans and Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, particularly within the two “clobber” passages more recent users claim condemn homosexuality (in Rom 1:18–32 and 1 Cor 6:9–10). The role of Gentiles in Pauline epistles and interpretations are troubled by the figurations of the barbarian and foreign Other that appear in both of these “bashing” passages, highlighting a larger role for sexual exceptionalism than sexual orientation for understanding these arguments. Pauline repetitions of Roman imperial claims about the sexual aberration and inferiority of barbaric foreigners reflect a recurrent, yet altered significance, particularly given ongoing imperial and colonial tendencies. The unexpected resonances between those people addressed in these passages and named in the conclusion of Romans (16:1–16) and those targeted as especially barbaric or terrorizing today name the racialized stereotypes of monstrous sexuality that frequently accompany empires’ insistence about their own sexual exceptionalism and, then, provide an alternative angle on assembly and the intersecting dynamics that bring contingents together.

Touching Figures

Chapter 1 further situates queer approaches to history and temporality as a way forward and out of persistent debates about whether and how the past is different from the present. These debates have been of particular interest in the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This project charts and performs a third way of approaching figures from the past, presenting options beyond a stress on identity or alterity, as positioned by scholars of ancient materials like Bernadette Brooten and David Halperin. Queer thinkers focused on other premodern periods provide insights for this approach, particularly Carolyn Dinshaw’s conceptualization of “touches across time.” Inspired by this approach, each of the following chapters is structured by a specific anachronistic juxtaposition that provides an alternative angle on those who have been marginalized and vilified in both the past and the present.

Prelude

The opening prelude of Appalling Bodies establishes some of the contours for the interaction between biblical studies and queer studies in this project by briefly introducing both areas and their broader contexts. The prelude surveys key ideas about the Roman imperial context, the development of queer theory, and the letters of Paul. Readers who are unfamiliar with one or more of these domains become further acquainted with key concepts including ancient views of penetration and receptivity, and feminist conceptualizations of kyriarchy, intersectionality, and history, particularly as they might help us create alternative angles on the subjects marginalized within Pauline epistles and interpretations. In doing so, the prelude sets up the audacious juxtapositions of these domains in the chapters to follow, providing new insights on those targeted by figures of vilification in the first and in the twenty-first centuries.

Epilogue

Appalling Bodies concludes with a brief Epilogue, reflecting further on the kinds of drag these chapters and queer temporalities more broadly perform. Because our encounters with the biblical can be such a drag, the epilogue considers multiple meanings of drag, in both scholarly and colloquial ways, as it might reframe the strange temporalities of scriptures. Drag is a key early example for Judith Butler’s explication of gender performativity. Elizabeth Freeman suggests the utility of drag for describing ambivalent, even complicated temporalities, all of the ways the past pulls on, impresses on, lives within, or simply haunts the present. As the examples of temporal drag within Paul’s letters also indicate, not all touches across time should be valorized. Bodies are marked by histories, including the histories of surgery and slavery, with all their unwelcome forms of contact. The drag of history demonstrates that anachronism is the least of our worries.

A Close Corinthian Shave

Chapter 2 grapples with 1 Corinthians 11:1–16, one of the letter’s attempts to limit women’s prophetic speech in the community. Allusions to androgyny appear in a couple of places in this text, but most especially in strange references to head hair (11:5–6). This is just one vexed marker of gender variety and multiplicity, which can be reimagined with more recent figures of female masculinity like drag kings, butch lesbians, transgender dykes, or gender queers (especially as examined in transgender studies). Alternative practices of masculinity alter the perspective on prophetic females addressed by the arguments in the first letter to the Corinthians. Through the lenses of gendered performativity and female masculinity, these juxtapositions qualify and challenge Pauline prescriptions for the initiation and participation of women.