Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul's Letters

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters. The letters repeat ancient stereotypes about women, eunuchs, slaves, and barbarians--in their Roman imperial setting, each of these overlapping groups were cast as debased, dangerous, and complicated. Joseph Marchal presents new ways for us to think about these dangers and complications with the help of queer theory. Appalling Bodies juxtaposes these ancient figures against recent figures of gender and sexual variation, in order to defamiliarize and reorient what can be known about both. The connections between the marginalization and stigmatization of these figures troubles the history, ethics, and politics of biblical interpretation. Ultimately, Marchal assembles and reintroduces us to Appalling Bodies from then and now, and the study of Paul's letters may never be the same.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Prelude: Before and After Romosexuality Queer Reconfigurations Past Paul After This Before Chapter One: Touching Figures: Reaching Past Paul Between Brooten and a Halperin Place How to Get Stuck in "the Middle" with Sedgwick and Butler Toward Some Touching Connections? Chapter Two: A Close Corinthian Shave: Trans / Androgyne Corinthian Citations, Pauline Performativity, and Echoes of Androgyny Ancient Androgyny, Reconsidered Hair-Raising Androgyny and the Corinthian Assembly? Transgender and Other Mobilizations of Masculinity Resembling and Assembling Female (Masculine) Prophets Chapter Three: Uncut Galatians: Intersex / Eunuch "They tried to write their Gospel on my body": Defining, Treating, Resisting An Ancient Pal, Against Genital Cutting? A Cutting Joke Facing the Phallus, Cutting to the Fore(skin) "Don't Quote Ovid to Me" (and Don't Bother with Paul Either?) Conclusion Chapter Four: Use: Bottom / Slave The Use of Slaves The Use of Onesimus: Chresis and Consent, Puns and Patrons Switching Biblical Bonds Other Uses of History How Not to Race Past Attending to the Past Whipping Through Time Chapter Five: Assembled Gentiles: Terrorist / Barbarian Exceptional Sexual The Epistles' Exceptionalism Barbarians, Among Other Perverse Figures Exceptionalism Rules An Unexceptional Paul Some Alternative Assembly Required Analogy, Anachronism, Assembly: A Contingent Conclusion Epilogue: Biblical Drag Bibliography Indexes

About the Author :
Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at Ball State University. Marchal is the author and editor of ten books, most recently: After the Corinthian Women Prophets: Reimagining Rhetoric and Power (2021), Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles (2019), Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (2018), and Philippians: Historical Problems, Hierarchical Visions, Hysterical Anxieties (2017).

Review :
This book is rich in theory, in history, in how breaking rules (e.g., using anachronisms) and 'dwelling longer in zones of confusion' can be strategically effective in forming intersectional coalitions. Marchal reaches across history—with an acknowledged debt to Carolyn Dinshaw's queer historiography (1999, 2012)—not to locate forebears from those distant years, but rather to illustrate the ways that gender and sexuality are constructed and contested in these texts, and to resist the ways they still influence the shape of gender and sexuality in our contemporary moment. In thinking about the androgyne, the eunuch, the slave, and the barbarian, Marchal performs a tour de force of theoretical and exegetical work. Appalling Bodies is such a rich analysis of lives touched, traumatized, destroyed, and resurrected by sex. Paul's letters are the occasion. History and theory are the modes of inquiry. But joy, sorrow, love, and pain are the true subjects of this work, or that's how it seemed to me. Simply stunning and exhilarating! Marchal travels back and forth in time to juxtapose fascinating (and often threatening) figures of the first and the twentyfirst century to show us a whole new way of reading Paul's letters without placing Paul at the center. This carefully researched, conspicuously erudite, and compellingly readable book will surprise, delight, and impress you. Joseph Marchal has emerged as one of today's leading practitioners of queer biblical scholarship, and this volume amply demonstrates why. It will be required reading not only for scholars who are interested in the letters attributed to Paul and the assumptions made by those letters (and by their interpreters) about gender and sexuality, but also for anyone who seeks a model for queer engagement with ancient texts. Appalling Bodies takes us beyond a kyriarchal focus on Paul to appreciation of the other figures that populate his letters for rhetorical effect- prophetic women, eunuchs, and slaves, whose gender and sexuality do not conform to imperial Roman elite male sexuality. Making partial and contingent touches across time to contemporary LGBTQI communities, Marchal troubles and complicates the sexual regimes Paul's letters are used to enforce. This brilliant book is sure to become a classic in studies of scripturalized sexual norms and queer engagements with the Bible. This is an immensely exciting book, exceptionally original and stunningly creative, the first to limn out in full the contours of a queer historiography in biblical studies. It amounts to a dizzying defamiliarization of ground that has been endlessly trodden and retrodden by Pauline scholars. But it is not a specialist tome. It richly merits an audience beyond the boundaries of biblical studies, and even beyond religious studies. Appalling Bodies is a deeply ethical book meant to improve human lives, especially those of the most marginalized among us. Theories can be opaque to general readers, but to show how these theories can make human lives more livable, Marchal explains them clearly. Marchal employs deliberate anachronism to shake up readers' belief that they know what Paul meant, thereby undercutting fundamentalisms. Fundamentalisms are resulting in deaths, whether through hate crimes or suicides, and Marchal understands the urgency of truly alternative biblical interpretation in which marginalized figures become central. In Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul's Letters-an excellent, detailed, and thorough study of queer figures in the Greco-Roman environment in which Paul writes his letters-Joseph Marchal engages in intentionally "anachronistic juxtaposition," a queering of time and history to highlight ancient attitudes towards androgynes, eunuchs, slaves, and foreigners. The book rewards the reader with a wealth of insight into both ancient and modern topics and will prove an essential text for any further scholarly engagement with corporeality in Paul.