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Dedication
To Ward and our most remarkable children: Zoe, Life Girl
Adam (‘da-man’), son of Eve Sophia, Wisdom
Acknowledgements
Has there ever been a feminist study of the nouns and verbs associated with the production of printed books? In the course of writing my own essay for this volume, I accidentally discovered that it was once possible to mother a book—even though copyright laws have always been laws of property and paternity. Working on this collection, I found myself thinking about the term ‘editor’, which seems simultaneously to say too little and say too much. Since 1793, ‘to edit’ has meant ‘to supervise for publication’. Contemporary online dictionaries upgrade the concept to ‘management’, reflecting the current obsession with managerialism. The word also means to correct, improve, censor, redact. Traditionally the editor is (massively), the manager/overseer, and (minutely) the patient corrector/ redactor. He (?) is the God-like figure who shapes the whole according to his intention (a figure that is decidedly lacking, but also longed for, when it comes to the edited collection, the Bible). But he is also the redactor: a figure who is very familiar to those who work with biblical texts. The editor is imagined as at once organizing super-consciousness and minor clerk.
What is missing from the traditional connotations of the ‘editor’ is the crucial element of hosting. But this is not surprising, since the gendered word ‘to edit’ locates itself in the public space of the production line, the desk, the office, the contract, rather than the home, the sphere that modernity genders as female space.
Editing/hosting is risk. That’s part of the attraction. So much is outwith the host’s control. One of the many paradoxes of hospitality is that so much—in fact everything— depends on the guests. There is nothing to come to, unless everyone—or at least the first one, and then some others, show up. In this case this was by no means a foregone conclusion. Some of the contributors have major leadership roles in their universities. Many are leading scholars, with an invitation list as long as their arm. Many of the careeryounger scholars, but not just these, are feeling the pressures of the neoliberal university and the increased casualization of academic work. At least one has spent the last few years fighting hard for the future of an institution. Some of these life stories show up in the essays. Others do not.
So I would like to take the unusual step of dedicating my thanks to the contributors, who RSVP-ed their willingness to join this virtual print collective, and then showed up. Like a good party, this collection has far exceeded the host’s expectations. Particular thanks go to Anna Fisk, who in conventional terms would be described as the project’s ‘assistant’, but is perhaps better described as its ‘party planner’. After joining the project in
its final year, Anna spent hours, with me, editing the essays and commenting on how I had organized the seating arrangements and set the table of contents. She also did some excellent work in managing (!) the host. Thanks too to the team at Oxford University Press. Tom Perridge, Karen Raith, Matthew Humphrys, and Elissa Connor have been extremely helpful editors, in every sense of the word.
Yvonne Sherwood, University of Kent, March 2017
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction—The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field 1 Yvonne Sherwood
PART I PROPHETS AND
1. Death and the Maiden: Manifestos, Gender, Self-canonization, and Violence 15 Jorunn Økland
2. Joanna Southcott and Mabel Barltrop: Interpreting Genesis and Revelation
Jane Shaw
3. The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement
Holly Morse
4. Reflections on Reading the Bible: From Flesh to Female Genius
Alison Jasper
5. Another Esther: Sor Juana’s Biblical Self-Portrait
Pamela Kirk Rappaport
6. Reading ‘The Revelations of the Book / Whose Genesis was June’: Emily Dickinson’s Hermeneutics of the Heart
Jennifer Leader
7. Toni Morrison’s Shulamites: The African-American Song
Ilana Pardes
8. Stood Weeping Outside the Tomb: Dis(re)membering Mary Magdalene
Anna Fisk
9. Feminist Remappings in Times of Neoliberalism 170
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
10. The Wandering Jewess: Feminism Seeks the Shekhinah 186
Alicia Ostriker
PART II AN UNCONVENTIONAL TOUR OF THE BIBLICAL CANON, BEYOND THE ‘CANONS’ OF FEMINIST/WOMANIST CRITICISM
11. The Inheritance of Gehinnom: Feminist Midrash as a Vehicle for Contemporary Bible Criticism 203
Deborah Kahn-Harris
12. Moses, Feminism, and the Male Subject
Jennifer L. Koosed
13. Home at Last: The Local Domain and Female Power
Rachel Havrelock
14. Judges 3 and the Queer Hermeneutics of Carnophallogocentrism 261
Ken Stone
15. Forget It: The Case of Women’s Rituals in Ancient Israel, or How to Remember the Woman of Endor 277
Ann Jeffers
16. Sexual Politics and Surveillance: A Feminist, Metonymic, Spinozan Reading of Psalm 139 296
Erin Runions
17. A Foolish King, Women, and Wine: A Dangerous Cocktail from Lemuel’s Mother
Mercedes L. García Bachmann
18. My Mother was a Wandering Aramaean: A Nomadic Approach to the Hebrew Bible
Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter
19. Queen Vashti’s ‘No’ and What It Can Tell Us about Gender Tools in Biblical Narrative
Deborah F. Sawyer
20. Miriam Ben Amram, or, How to Make Sense of the Absence of Women in the Genealogies of Levi (1 Chronicles 5.27–6.66) 355
Ingeborg Löwisch
21. The Politics of Remembrance: Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 and Haunting Memories in China 371
Wong Wai Ching Angela
22. Corporal Ignorance: The Refusal of Embodied Memory 390
Jennifer A. Glancy
23. Can an Adulteress Save Jesus? The Pericope Adulterae, Feminist Interpretation, and the Limits of Narrative Agency 402
Jennifer Knust
24. Pinkwashing Paul, Excepting Jesus: The Politics of Intersectionality, Identification, and Respectability 432
Joseph A. Marchal
25. Embodied Temporalities: Health, Illness, and the Matter of Feminist Biblical Interpretation 454
Denise K. Buell
26. Unveiling the European Woman 477
Fatima Tofighi
PART III OFFPAGE: ACTUALIZATIONS AND PERFORMANCES OF SCRIPTURE BEYOND PROTESTANT MODELS OF ‘READING’
27. The Ancient Goddess, the Biblical Scholar, and the Religious Past: Re-imaging Divine Women 495
Francesca Stavrakopoulou
28. Seeing Double: Textual and Archaeological Images of Israelite Women 514
Carol Meyers
29. ‘Limping, Yet Made to Climb a Mountain!’ Re-Reading the Vashti Character in the HIV and AIDS South African Context 534
Madipoane Masenya (ngwan’a Mphahlele)
30. The Reproductive Rite: (In)Fertility in the Ashanti and Ancient Hebrew Context 548
Janice Ewurama De-Whyte Sarfo
31. ‘But I Still Read the Bible!’: Post-Christian Women’s Biblicalism 569
Dawn Llewellyn
32. Sneaky Snakes: Seduction, the Biblical Imagination, and Activating Art 589
Mieke Bal
33. Material World: Gender and the Bible in Evangelical Purity Culture 608
Sara Moslener
34. Muslim Liberative Approaches and Legal Dilemmas Towards Gender Justice 622
Zayn Kassam
35. Scripturalizing and the Second Amendment 634
Rosamond C. Rodman
36. The Impossibility of Queering the Mother: New Sightings of the Virgin Mother in the ‘Secular’ State 651
Yvonne Sherwood Index 687
List of Figures
32.1 Edvard Munch, Tulla Larsen (1898–99). Oil on canvas. 119.5 x 61 cm. Oslo, Munch Museum. 592
32.2 Edvard Munch, Nude with long red hair (1902). Oil on canvas. 120 x 50 cm. Oslo, Munch Museum. 593
32.3 Nalini Malani, Transgressions, 2001/2014, Three-channel video/ shadow play with four reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, 4 rpm, sound, 7 minutes. Detail installation, 3,5 x 6,75 x 12,75 m. Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, knma, New Delhi, 2014, Photograph Gireesh gv, Courtesy of knma and the artist. 596
32.4 Nalini Malani, Transgressions, 2001, Three channel video/shadow play with four reverse painted Mylar cylinders, rotation 4 rpm, sound, 7 minutes, installation view with snake, size 4 x 12 x 6 m, Unpacking Europe, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2001, Photograph Johan Pijnappel, Courtesy of the artist. 597
32.5 Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, video installation, 2012–2014, Detail: Charles as Emma sees him, video still. 602
32.6 Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, video installation, 2012–2014 Detail: Emma flirting, video still. 603
32.7 Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, video installation, 2012–2014 Detail: Emotional capitalism in practice, video still. 604
32.8 Set photos of Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Madame B: Thomas Germaine as, from left to right: Léon, Charles, Rodolphe. Photos: Thijs Vissia 605
36.1 Suffragette Madonna by Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Co. 1909. 652
36.2 Suffragette Madonna Crop of 1910. 653
List of Contributors
Mieke Bal is a renowned cultural theorist, critic, and video artist. Her interests range from classical and biblical antiquity, seventeenth-century to contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, migratory culture, mental illness, the critique of capitalism, and rationalism. Her book Narratology (1985) continues to be reprinted. Her many other books include a quartet on political art: In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays (2013), Endless Andness (2013), Thinking in Film (2013), and Of What One Cannot Speak (2010). A Mieke Bal Reader (2006) samples her interdisciplinary work, with Loving Yusef (2008) the most recent of her important contributions to biblical studies.
Denise K. Buell is Cluett Professor of Religion at Williams College. Her contribution to this volume is part of a current book-in-progress that explores the intersectional interface of species and temporality, as well as race, ethnicity, gender, and ability to demonstrate the value of early Christian studies for contemporary feminist, race-critical, and ecocritical work. She is also the author of Making Christians: The Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Clement of Alexandria (1999) and Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (2005).
Janice Ewurama De-Whyte Sarfo is Assistant Professor of Old Testament and Theology at the School of Religion, Loma Linda University. Her work focuses on the interplay between culture, gender, and socio-economics in biblical interpretation.
Anna Fisk (volume editorial assistant) works in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow, and is Editorial Assistant of the journal Literature and Theology. She is the author of Sex, Sin, and Our Selves: Encounters in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Women’s Literature (2014), and journal articles and book chapters on feminist biblical revisioning, craft and spirituality, contemporary animism, and literature and theology.
Mercedes L. García Bachmann is an ordained minister of the Lutheran church. Born and raised in Argentina, she did her undergraduate studies at home and her graduate studies at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (MTh and PhD). She taught at the Instituto Superior Evangélico de Estudios Teológicos in Buenos Aires (Isedet) from 1999 to 2016. She is the author of Women at Work in the DtrH (2013) and is currently completing a commentary on the book of Judges.
Jennifer A. Glancy is Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of Slavery in Early Christianity (2002), Slavery as Moral Problem: In the Early Church and Today (2011), and Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (2010).
Rachel Havrelock is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Long engaged with questions of gender and geography, she is the coauthor of Women on the Biblical Road (1996) and the author of River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (2011). Rachel served as the Early Judaism editor for The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies (2015) and as a commentator for The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (2007). She is currently at work on a monograph about political power, the book of Joshua, and modern Israel, tentatively titled The Joshua Generation: Politics and the Promised Land.
Alison Jasper is Senior Lecturer in Religion and Gender Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She is the author of The Shining Garment of the Text: Gendered Readings of John’s Prologue (1998) and Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius (2012).
Ann Jeffers is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at Heythrop College, University of London. Her research focuses on magic and divination in the ancient world, and in the Hebrew Bible in particular. Her work is interdisciplinary and includes a variety of methodologies, including feminism, ancient construct of space, and collective memory. Her book, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria, was published by Brill in 1996 and was followed by a number of articles developing new methodologies in the field of ancient magic. She is currently writing a book on the book of Ruth and on women’s rituals in the Hebrew Bible and the Second Temple period, as well as a completing a project on the illustrations in Luther’s Bible of 1534.
Deborah Kahn-Harris is the Principal of Leo Baeck College (LBC) in London, where she also lectures in Hebrew Bible. She has worked as a congregational rabbi and served as the Teaching Fellow in Judaism at the School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds an MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from LBC and a PhD in Biblical Studies from the University of Sheffield. She has published articles in a number of journals and contributed to a variety of edited collections.
Zayn Kassam is the John Knox McLean Professor of Religious Studies at Pomona College, Claremont, California. She has been honoured with three Wig Awards for Distinguished Teaching at Pomona College, as well as an American Academy of Religion Excellence in Teaching Award. She is the author of Introduction to the World’s Major Religions: Islam (2006), and editor of Women and Islam (2010).
Pamela Kirk Rappaport is Professor (ret.) of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, St John’s University, New York. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from Indiana University and her Dr Theol from Ludwig Maximillian’s University, Munich, Germany. She is the author of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art and Feminism (1997) and the introduction and translations of the volume Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Writings (2005) in the Classics of Western Spirituality series. She is currently working on a biography, Sor Juana’s Secret, which incorporates Sor Juana’s Jewish heritage for the first time.
Jennifer Knust is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Boston University. She is the author of Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire (2011) and editor of Ritual Matters: Material Residues and Ancient Religions (2017), among other books, articles, and essays.
Jennifer L. Koosed is Professor of Religious Studies at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Her works include (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book (2006), Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives (2011), and Reading the Bible as a Feminist (2017).
Jennifer Leader is Professor of English at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. She is the author of Knowing, Seeing, Being: Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and the American Typological Tradition (2016).
Dawn Llewellyn is Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies and Deputy Director of the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Chester. She is the author of Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality: Troubling the Waves (2015) and has published on motherhood, voluntary childlessness, and Christianity; and on the relationship between religion and feminism. In addition she has co-edited with Sonya Sharma Religion, Equalities and Inequalities (2016); and with Deborah F. Sawyer, Reading Spiritualties: Constructing and Representing the Sacred (2008).
Ingeborg Löwisch is an ordained minister of the Lutheran church, currently located in Hamburg, Germany. She is the author of Trauma Begets Genealogy: Gender and Memory in Chronicles (2015).
Joseph A. Marchal is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University. He is the author and editor of several works, most recently Philippians: Historical Problems, Hierarchical Visions, Hysterical Anxieties (2014, 2017), The People Beside Paul: The Philippian Assembly and History from Below (2015), and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (with Kent L. Brintnall and Stephen D. Moore, 2017).
Madipoane Masenya (ngwan’a Mphahlele) is Professor of Old Testament Studies in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. She has published numerous scientific articles and chapters in specialist books in the area of the Hebrew Bible and gender, especially in African contexts. She served as one of the associate editors of The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (2010). Her book, How Worthy is the Woman of Worth? Rereading Proverbs 31:10–31 was published by Peter Lang in 2004.
Carol Meyers is Mary Grace Wilson Professor of Religious Studies Emerita at Duke University and works in the fields of biblical studies, women’s studies, and Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Her book Rediscovering Eve (2013) is a landmark study of women in ancient Israel.
Holly Morse is Lecturer in Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. She recently completed her DPhil with Susan Gillingham at Worcester College, University
of Oxford. Her doctoral work was on the biblical figure of Eve and her cultural reception, with a focus on marginalized readers and readings. Research interests include gender, visual arts, and the Bible, female biblical interpretation, and hermeneutics.
Sara Moslener is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Central Michigan University. She is the author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (2015) and is currently working on a new project about the racist origins of sexual purity in American evangelicalism.
Jorunn Økland is Director of the Norwegian Institute at Athens and Professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at the University of Oslo. Recent publications include Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred (2016) and a special issue of Biblical Interpretation (v. 23 2015) on hegemonic masculinities. She is founding editor of Journal of the Bible and its Reception. Previous books include Women in Their Place: Paul and the Corinthian Discourse of Gender and Sanctuary Space (2004), The Way the World Ends: The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology (2009), and Marxist-Feminist Criticism of the Bible (2008).
Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2010, for The Book of Seventy. She is the author of several books on the Bible, including Feminist Revision and the Bible: The Unwritten Volume (1993); The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1996); and For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book (2007). Ostriker is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University where for many years she taught a graduate seminar entitled ‘The Bible and Feminist Imagination’.
Ilana Pardes is Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the PhD Honours Programme. Her work has focused on the nexus of Bible, literature, and culture as well as on questions of aesthetics and hermeneutics. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (2000), Melville’s Bibles (2008), Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (2013), and The Song of Songs: A Biography (forthcoming).
Rosamond C. Rodman is a lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. Her work focuses upon scriptures and American culture, and she is the editor of Ever the Twain Shall Meet: Religion and Politics in the United States (2015).
Erin Runions is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. Her publications include The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex and Sovereignty (2014), How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (2003), and Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation, Future in Micah (2001).
Deborah F. Sawyer currently teaches at the John Felice Centre, the Rome campus of Loyola University, Chicago and lives in the Umbrian city of Perugia. For many years she was Reader in Gender and Religion and Head of the Religious Studies Department at
Lancaster University, UK. Her published works include: A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden (with P. Morris, 1992), Midrash Aleph Beth (1993); Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries (1996); Is There A Future for Feminist Theology? (with D. Collier, 1999); God, Gender and the Bible (2002); Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred (with D. Llewellyn, 2008). Among her numerous published articles and chapter contributions is her recent research on Teresa of Avila, ‘Teresa in una prospettiva di genere’, in Proceedings of the festival celebrating 500 years since the birth of Teresa of Avilia, (2017).
Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter is currently head of the Department of Bible Advocacy at the Dutch Bible Society and Associated Researcher at Leiden University and at the Centre for Contextual Bible Interpretation (Free University Amsterdam and Protestant Theological University). She holds a PhD in Biblical Studies from Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the negotiation of gender, ethnic, and religious identity in the Hebrew Bible, with a special focus on the traumatic experience of exile and defeat.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is the Krister Stendahl Professor at Harvard University Divinity School, co-founding senior editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and the first woman president (1987) of the Society of Biblical Literature. In Memory of Her (1984), her landmark work, was translated into more than twelve languages. Her latest works are Empowering Memory and Movement: Thinking and Working across Borders (2014); Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century (ed. 2014); 1 Peter: Reading Against the Grain (2015); and Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Culture and Kyriarchal Power (2016).
Jane Shaw is Professor of Religious Studies and Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University. She is the author of Miracles in Enlightenment England (2006) and Octavia, Daughter of God: the Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (2011).
Yvonne Sherwood holds degrees in English Literature, Jewish Studies, and Biblical Studies and has been teaching Religious Studies for the last twenty years. She is currently Professor of Biblical Cultures and Politics at the University of Kent. She is the author of many articles, edited collections, and monographs, including, most recently, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar (with Stephen Moore; 2011) and Biblical Blaspheming (2012), which was shortlisted for the American Academy of Religion Awards for Excellence. One of the real pleasures of her career is working with postgraduate students: PhD candidates (including several students working on Sexuality/Gender and the Hebrew Bible) and also Masters students on the University of Kent’s new Canterbury and Paris Religious Studies MA.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses primarily on the religious and social realities of ancient Israel and Judah, their (mis)representation in the Hebrew Bible, and their distortion in modern Western scholarship. She is the author of a number of scholarly works, including King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice (2004), Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (2010), The Social Life of the
Corpse—Within and Without the Bible (forthcoming), and co-editor of Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (with John Barton; 2010). She also appears regularly on TV and radio to discuss the Bible, religion, atheism, and feminism.
Ken Stone is Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics and Academic Dean at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (2004); Sex, Honor, and Power in the Deuteronomistic History (1996); the forthcoming Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies; and editor of Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible and Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (2001). A Lambda Literary Award winner, Stone focuses his research on biblical interpretation and matters of gender, sexuality, animals, and ecology.
Fatima Tofighi is Assistant Professor of Women and Religion at the University of Religions, Qom, Iran. She completed her PhD in Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Paul’s Letters and the Construction of the European Self (2017).
Wong Wai Ching Angela is currently the Vice-President for Programs for United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, and she teaches at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the former CoDirector of Gender Research Centre of the University. Her latest publications include ‘Between Two Patriarchies: Chinese Christian Women in Postcolonial Hong Kong’, in Gendering Chinese Religion (2014), and two co-edited books: Gender and Family in Asia (2014) and The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality (2015).
introduction
The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field
YVONNE SHERWOOD
When I began work on this book, back in 2013, I had no nightmares of a man who would be elected to presidential office despite having been recorded bragging openly about ‘grab[bing]’ women ‘by the pussy’: a statement that echoes the worst of biblical pornoprophetic insults, as in Isaiah 3:17. Even the darkest of prophets could not have foretold the appointment of so many North American cabinet members accused of sexual assault, or such a concerted and centralized attack on Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, and queer and migrant/refugee rights. As the essays in this collection clearly show, issues such as hardening borders, guns, and Roe v. Wade were very much on our minds long before Brexit and the Trump election. Trump did not create this toxic backlash ex nihilo (his narcissistic god-fantasies aside). Nevertheless, the essays bear witness to a different political climate in Euro-America. Our targets were the bad faith of liberal ‘pinkwashing’ (as in Joseph A. Marchal’s essay), or the darker practices behind the public discourse of progress and equality. In the years before 2016, it was possible—though never very plausible—for some colleagues and students to argue that feminist criticism was now marginal or superfluous as the main battles had been won.
It is impossible to make these arguments now. Without being reductive about the complex issues at stake in the American elections, few can have failed to notice how violent and triumphant the attack on the political establishment became as soon as that establishment was embodied, for the first time, in a (‘nasty’) woman. Those who prefer to think that feminist politics are about softer issues such as unconscious bias or equal pay, can hardly have missed the overt violence against women—and non-white, non-Christian, and queer lives—that was clearly more than an accidental byproduct of a gender-blind sphere of ‘politics’. The women’s movement has emerged as a public rallying point for solidarity. The Women’s March on Washington—and women’s marches across the globe— have reminded us of older and nastier histories of ‘the people/the demos’ and ‘equality’,
in which rights had to be taken. The politics of the nice, polite (optimistic) feminist is being overtaken by the necessary opposition of the ‘nasty woman’, as put so memorably in the words of the poem by nineteen-year-old Nina Donovan, read by Ashley Judd.1
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood describes the Bible’s pages as ‘thin’ and ‘oniony’, ‘powdery’ and ‘exhausted’.2 In the first draft of this introduction, which had to be hastily updated, I claimed that this exemplified the traditional image of the Bible in the women’s movement. For some feminists, the feminist biblical scholar is (still) an oxymoron—not least because in our mythologies of the emergence of modern time, the Bible is that which we have moved beyond and the icon of the past. I argued that by accepting that their task is essentially, and almost exclusively, the quest for historical origins, traditional biblical scholars have tacitly reinforced the association between the Bible and the Past. Feminist biblical critics, in contrast, have been pioneers in promoting anachronistic encounters between the Bible and contemporary socio-political issues, so betraying the traditional contract between biblical studies and the study of the past. This betrayal of traditional scholarly time has now become newly timely. Few can now doubt the power of this always resurgent ‘past’. ‘I am my sister’s keeper’; the United States cannot be a ‘house divided’; Union Theological Seminary’s denunciation of Trump’s Muslim ban as a ‘heretical’ reading of the Bible; sanctuary cities, cities of refuge; ‘welcome the stranger’; Robert Jeffress’s creative rereading of Nehemiah ‘the builder’ to show that ‘God is not against building walls’. . . . The rewired biblicisms come thick and fast. As recently as 20 March 2017, women dressed in red robes and white bonnets, like Atwood’s ‘handmaids’, entered the Texas Senate to protest against anti-choice legislation (including Senate Bill 25, which would essentially allow doctors to lie to pregnant women if they detected a foetal anomaly but were concerned the parents may opt for abortion). Alongside Orwell’s 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale has now become a mass-selling tract for the times. Atwood’s apocalyptic Christian Theocracy of Gilead—a bleak realization of darker strands of biblical androcentrism—is newly relevant for a reactionary politics obsessed with the regulation of women’s bodies. Staged, sermonized, and converted into banners, counter-metonyms of ‘the Bible’ fight furiously in the forcefield of competing truths and fake gospels, fake (good) news.
Whereas mainstream and increasingly Manichean theologio-political rhetoric works at the level of biblical icons and soundbites, the essays in this collection engage ‘the Bible’ as a complex, composite text that always exceeds the representational form ‘the Bible’. Scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Norway, East Africa, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Hong Kong, and Iran use a rich array of methodological and theoretical frameworks—feminist materialisms; kyriarchy; spatial theory; memory and trauma; visual activism and the politics of the image; intersectionality; post-identitarian ‘nomadic’ politics; gender archaeology and ethnoarchaeology; lived religion, material religion and material Bibles; postcolonial theory; queer theory; and theories of the ‘human’, the posthuman, and ‘social flesh’—to explore a range of social
1 For this defining moment of the Women’s March on Washington, see http://www.huffingtonpost. ca/2017/01/23/ashley-judd-womens-march-speech_n_14334944.html.
2 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Virago, 1991), 99–101.
and political issues. These include neoliberalism and the neoliberal university; hate crimes and hate crimes prevention; the interaction between the human and the ‘nonhuman’/the ‘environment’; divorce and family law; migration and xenophobia; abortion; the politics of publishing; children and ‘childlessness’; misogyny and anti-feminism; ‘pinkwashing’; the legacies of colonialism; LGBTI rights; the second amendment and gun legislation; terrorism (‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’); Islamophobia; nationality and nationhood; memory and state-sponsored acts of commemoration and forgetting; the politics of ‘the veil’; sexual violence, trafficking, and AIDS. Feminist biblical criticism did not and could not look like this in the 1970s—and not just because the events that bear upon this collection are dated 9/11; 2011 (22 July); or 1989 (Tianamen Square).
In this introduction I want to resist the customary introductory tour of the essays, one by one, since each author has written his/her own abstract, which can be found on Oxford Scholarship Online*. Instead, I want to highlight some links between the essays and highlight some aims. When I was invited to prepare this book for Oxford University Press, I set out to disturb canons on at least three levels. First, the canon-within-the-canon of texts assumed to be of particular interest to feminist biblical scholars: for example, books with female names and protagonists (Judith, Susanna, Ruth); female metaphors (the ‘prostitute’ in the Prophets, and Hokhmah/Sophia); and women and their absences in the New Testament and early Christianities. Second, I set out to disturb those canonical versions of the history of the discipline of feminist biblical studies orbiting around a canon of established scholarly signatures all located within biblical studies and tracing disciplinary origins as far back as Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the first pioneer. I wanted, third, to move beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading. In our disciplinary histories, religious studies has been defined as a rebellion against Christian theology and biblical studies, as well as a Protestant understanding of religion as reading, based on scriptures. Colleagues in religious studies sometimes miss how a robust challenge to the reification of ‘the text’ has been generated from within biblical studies—for example, by work on archaeology or the Bible and media. And yet biblical studies remains primarily a philological/textual discipline. I wanted to encourage a focus on material Bibles and lived religion and to invite scholars from Anthropology and Sociology of Religion as well as History, Theology, and Literature. I wanted to challenge the presumed boundaries between ‘biblical studies proper’ and other disciplines, without endorsing too simple dichotomies between textual disciplines and ‘the real’.
To reflect these three disruptions of canon, the collection has been organized into three Parts: Part I, Prophets and Revolutionaries; Part II, An Unconventional Tour of the Biblical Canon; and Part III, Offpage.
Part I features lost predecessors and forgotten names alongside foundational figures in the field of feminist biblical scholarship. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Alicia Ostriker reflect on new critical histories of feminist biblical studies and their personal contributions to the field, and Jorunn Økland and Ilana Pardes write as prominent figures in what could be thought of (not unproblematically) as the next generation. Anna Fisk offers a moving tribute to Jane Schaberg’s written legacy on Mary Magdalene.
Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza critically analyses intergenerational transmission and matricide, and the neoliberal co-optation of gender. Her reflections on the problematic concepts of dynastic transmission and supersession introduce one of the major themes of the collection: memory and inheritance. Historians and literary scholars write alongside well-known (canonical) signatures in biblical studies, and bring new immigrants (resident aliens?) into the ‘field’. If we were to think of feminist as an etic rather than an emic category (as Økland suggests in her essay) what would our genealogies of feminist biblical studies look like?3 Could they include strange names like Christine de Pisan, Rachel Speght, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Joanna Southcott, Mabel Barltrop, Jane Leade, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison? Could the genealogy of feminist biblical studies pass through Venice, Paris, and Mexico City as well as Amherst or Bedford (England)? Some of these figures have been dropped from history, accidentally or deliberately. Others are known in other disciplinary spheres.
The idea of integrating these alien names raises the question of feminist biblical criticisms’ canonicity, and its relationship to mainstream biblical studies, as an enterprise of Wissenschaft. Biblical studies emerged as a modern university discipline when the ‘authority of the Bible and of the Protestant theological tradition [was folded] into the . . . programmes of Verwissenshaftlichung (scientisation), Entkonfessionalierung (deconfessionalisation), professionalisierung (professionalisation) and Verstaatlichung (nationalisation)’.4 The state-sponsored task of biblical studies was ‘to head off religious extremism’ and promote proper forms of engagement with religious tradition, largely through a very delicate and specially learnt balance of confessional commitment and historicization (proper objective distance).5 Much was invested in the idea of the epiphany of the critical, and the modern scholar’s separation from pre-critical, pre-modern, potentially fanatical modes of engagement with biblical texts. It seems scandalous to import figures like Jane Leade, Joanna Southcott, Mabel Barltrop, or Sor Juana into the histories of feminist biblical criticism or scholarship, because these figures saw themselves as living and actualizing scripture, and becoming Esther, Peter, or Christ or the new female messiah. How closely does feminist biblical studies mimic mainstream biblical studies? Does Alicia Ostriker’s poetry and feminist midrash seem too overtly ‘literary’ to be incorporated into the more sober prose of feminist biblical criticism? Can Toni Morrison only be understood in the para-sphere that we now habitually call ‘biblical afterlives’ and ‘reception’—a zone that we reserve for literature, film, and art? Though feminist biblical critics draw on the work of figures like Julia Kristeva or Hélène Cixous, there are no works by feminist biblical scholars that look anything like Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Stabat Mater’. While feminist thea/theologians and feminist scholars of
3 For other attempts to reinstate lost feminist predecessors, see Nancy Calvert Koyzis and Heather Weir (eds.), Strangely Familiar: ProtoFeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Texts (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009).
4 C. Michael, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 29.
5 Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 38.
religion have been bolder (as have some male biblical critics), feminist biblical studies has witnessed few adventures in l’écriture féminine.
The opening essay for this opening section—and the book as a whole—is, Jorunn Økland’s contrapuntal reading of Anders Behring Breivik’s European Declaration of Independence alongside Valerie Solanas’s SCUM (the ‘Society for Cutting up Men’) manifesto, and the book of Revelation. The essay is a chilling reminder of the strong cultural power of the very idea of ‘Feminist Biblical Studies’—which for Breivik (and many others) stands as an ultimate icon for the absurd and dangerous ‘P.C.’ attack on embattled Western cultural canons. Økland’s essay makes for a disturbing and timely read in a moment when politics are becoming increasingly Manichean. The overt misogyny against Hilary Clinton and Trump’s exhortation to his audience to exercise their ‘second amendment’ right against her, provides a chilling parallel to Breivik’s (failed) plan to kill Gro Harlem Brundtland, the imposter woman head of state. How nice should feminism and feminist biblical criticism be in the face of the graphic association of authority with homo and vir and the virile strength of the adult male? Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto have not just been accidentally excluded from the official histories of feminism. Their violence and vitriol disturbs feminism’s more reasonable, progressive public faces. They also remind us that the development of women’s and minority rights have never flowed organically from the concept of ‘democracy’ as a natural outworking of equality and justice, as a certain discourse of liberalism wants to claim. The benefits of liberté, egalité, and fraternité were parsimoniously guarded at the very moment that they were given to ‘the people’. Strong and violent intervention has been required to counter violent apartheids of gender, sex, race, and class and to (always belatedly) distribute the goods of democracy to those habitually excluded from that carefully managed concept, ‘the people’. Solanas (ironically only remembered, now, for her attack on Andy Warhol) is a fitting companion for John of Patmos and Anders Behring Breivik—but there is something additionally disturbing about a feminist manifesto of hate. The ‘Robespierre of feminism’ raises the uncomfortable spectre of feminist/female violence, that becomes even more disturbing when read in parallel to the misogyny and anti-feminism that is not just a renegade position, but echoed in mainstream Norwegian debate.
Part II is An Unconventional Tour of the Biblical Canon. The essays are loosely organized in canonical order (following the order of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament). Some of these essays take up familiar subjects. There are studies of Ruth and Lot’s wife (Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter); Genesis 1.26 (Deborah Kahn-Harris); the woman of Endor (Ann Jeffers); Vashti (Deborah Sawyer); the adulterous woman in John 7 (Jennifer Knust); and the headcovering debate in 1 Corinthians 11.5–16 (Fatima Tofighi). Deborah Sawyer’s focus on Esther is echoed in other parts of the collection in essays by Pamela Kirk-Rappaport and Madipoane Masenya. You can never quite avoid Eve— but she is dispersed in essays by Mieke Bal, Yvonne Sherwood, Sara Moslener, and Holly Morse. Even where the subjects are familiar, they are treated in unfamiliar and even unheimlich ways. In Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter’s essay, Ruth and Lot’s wife become figures of nomadism, as defined by Rosi Braidotti. Like so many essays in this collection, Schol-Wetter also focuses on memory. Lot’s wife becomes a figure of remembering gone
