Intersex, Theology, and the Bible

Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society

Susannah Cornwall, Susannah Cornwall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137349019
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Intersex bodies have been figured as troubling by doctors, parents, religious institutions and society at large. In this book, scholars draw on constructive and pastoral theologies, biblical studies, and sociology, suggesting intersex's capacity to 'trouble' is positive, challenging unquestioned norms and assumptions in religion and beyond.

PART I

Biblical Approaches

CHAPTER 1

Who Are You Calling a Eunuch?! Staging Conversations and Connections between Feminist and Queer Biblical Studies and Intersex Advocacy

Joseph A. Marchal

Introduction

Given the use of religious, theological, and biblical materials upon categories of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that constrain and cut (physically and psychically) those with ostensibly ambiguous bodies, what should scholars of religion and the Bible do for the best? I contend that those interested and invested in religious materials should attend to feminist and queer perspectives on authoritative discourses, in order to trace what can be done in solidarity with and as people with intersex conditions. The purpose of this move is not to “speak for them” or to subsume (further) biblical authority for ourselves, but rather to recognize that certain feminist and queer resources have already been helpful for intersex advocacy.¹ To extend such efforts with biblical images, ideas, and arguments requires staging new conversations between feminist and queer biblical studies and intersex advocacy. Such resources can help address and complicate questions about whether (and how) the Bible speaks to the conditions that generate the stigmatizing and dehumanizing treatment of intersex people. After all, the Bible includes reflections about and depictions of eunuchs and circumcised members, thus acknowledging genitalia that have been surgically altered, likely because they operate as one overdetermined site for the accumulation and circulation of a range of significations around difference and identification, desire and power. A form of feminist and queer biblical studies attuned to the commitments and concerns of intersex advocacy should be able to help us untangle such significations and engage fraught figures of potential insight and identification.

This might be significant given that well-intentioned scholars in religious and theological studies have sometimes used intersex conditions as a test case to “think with,” particularly, but not only within ecclesial debates about homosexuality. However, intersex is not just an interesting limit case for scholars, theologians, and religious professionals to consider. We need to not treat intersex people as some kind of fetish object. Here I am urging caution against making arguments too abstract or distanced from intersex people, or simply using intersex people to “score points” in other contexts. An engagement with and commitment to addressing the stigmatizing conditions of intersex people necessitates doing more than just using these bodies as instruments for other purposes.

Feminist and Queer Approaches in Biblical Studies

Feminist and queer biblical studies are excellent conversation partners for the projects of intersex advocates: they are accustomed to challenging authoritative discourses so as to transform the conditions of those whose safety, survival, and social justice have been threatened. Feminist approaches to biblical materials prioritize critique and change, connecting them with other movements for social change. Historically, feminists focused upon women’s oppression, yet interrogations of structures of domination must grapple with how dynamics of gender intersect with sexuality and status, race and ethnicity, economy and empire (among others). Such theoretical and practical commitments make it possible and necessary to collaborate with antiracist, postcolonial, and queer efforts.

An early feminist biblical interpretation strategy maintained feminist links to other liberationist projects by highlighting liberating even prophetic traditions as central to the biblical corpus.² Here, the Bible, properly understood, sides with the oppressed. Another related strategy stresses that certain texts, traditions, or figures that present liberating or at least countercultural forces for women and, or as, others have been obscured, marginalized, or misinterpreted. However, since these texts also reflect and result from oppressive structures and societies, there are limits to these strategies. Mary Ann Tolbert notes the potentially paradoxical place of feminists engaging the Bible, wherein one encounters “the same God as enemy and friend, as tormentor and savior . . . the same Bible as enslaver and liberator.”³

This tension has led to alternative interpretive practice that emphasizes historical reconstructions of the communities behind and beyond textual traditions. Such reconstructions allow greater roles for those marginalized and subordinated. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work fits within, but then elaborates upon this kind of strategy. Discussing the paradigms for feminist biblical interpretation, she reflects upon the possibilities for creatively re-membering the historically marginalized, with concomitant suspicion about how texts and interpretations construct visions that produce and reinforce domination and subordination.⁴ Consequently, it is important to analyze such dominating structures and become critically conscious of them (and one’s own place within them), on the way to evaluating their effects. Ultimately, the point of such critical processes is not to recuperate the biblical corpus nor resurrect an alternative salvific or saintly figure, but to transform those intersecting dynamics of oppression that affect so many still.

Queer approaches to biblical studies tend to use similar or overlapping strategies, in many ways influenced by and situated within and as feminist approaches.⁵ As with feminist approaches there is no one strategic practice for queerly countering oppressive forces that pathologize and marginalize some as “abnormal” or “unnatural,” but they share in efforts to critique, challenge, and change such forces. The term “queer” contests and resignifies the negative valence of being (ostensibly) abnormal, odd, or nonconforming. While queer approaches historically have focused upon Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) people, Ken Stone notes that these approaches work through “a critical interrogation and active contestation of the many ways in which the Bible is and has been read to support heteronormative and normalizing configurations of sexual practices and sexual identities.”⁶ This contestation has been achieved by highlighting marginalized biblical figures, or obscured aspects of texts, to find positive ancient parallels for modern-day queer folks. Pointing to David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, or Jesus and the beloved disciple could reinforce the possibilities of a liberationist biblical tradition for what Nancy Wilson calls “our tribe.”⁷

Nevertheless, as with feminist approaches, there remain some overwhelming problems with the biblical texts and the cultures that created them. People still frequently use “clobber passages” to bash (physically, socially, and religiously) LGBT folk. There are “texts of terror” for women and (or as) sexual minorities between those authoritative covers.⁸ Tolbert sounds a paradoxical and ambivalent note when addressing the prospects for queer approaches, because biblical texts remain dangerously prone to “a barrage of killing interpretations.”⁹ Thus, queer approaches to the Bible involve “attempts to obviate its potential for harm while engaging its message of liberation and love.”¹⁰ One strategy for limiting the possible damage these ancient texts can do is situating them in their historical contexts. However, these contexts themselves make it clear that biblical images, arguments, and ideas were based upon rather different conceptions of gender, sexuality, and the body than present-day ones.¹¹ In some ways this strategy attempts to demonstrate the irrelevance of the Bible for contemporary discussions.

However, the persistent ways biblical arguments are still used, and the possible continuities between images, ideas, and arguments “then” and “now,” suggest that one must continue grappling with these texts in light of present-day contexts.¹² Ideas about what constitutes the “normal” and the “natural” recur across times, places, and cultures. However, this persistence can also carry a subversive possibility, as Stephen Moore notes about queer’s meaning as “a supple cipher both for what stands over against the normal and the natural to oppose, and thereby define, them, and what inheres within the normal and the natural to subvert, and indeed pervert, them.”¹³ There are certainly dangers to examining and reusing biblical argumentation; however, this is not a reason to stop, but a clearer reason to continue the critical process. As Stone and Schüssler Fiorenza recognize, one must acknowledge the dehumanizing and dominating things people have done with biblical texts, but this does not mean adopting a practice of “textual abstinence.”¹⁴ Rather, it raises the stakes and ultimately the potential payoffs and pleasures of biblical interpretation, beyond falsely simplified op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Troubling Bodies?
• Part I   Biblical Approaches
• Part II   Pastoral and Practical Approaches
• Part III   Theological Approaches
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index