AJR continues its #conversations series with an exchange between Joseph A. Marchal and Jennifer Wright Knust on Marchal’s new book, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Below is the transcript.
Jenny: Joe, I want to begin by thanking you for this brave, complex, beautifully written book. 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. I’ve often thought that the worst things that ever happened to me were about sex, and the best ones too. How am I supposed to make sense of that? Part of what you taught me is that I can’t. The point is not to solve or resolve what sex, gender, and bodies are or what they should be but to notice what they have been, what they might be, what they have wanted to be, what they’ve been forced to be, and to care. As you say at the start, when confronted with “Romosexuality,” with its “Priapic protocol” of the free, male, impenetrable penetrators and their receptacles, wo/men might deserve some attention too.
Perhaps I could start by asking you to say a little bit about how difficult it is to make Paul go away. I sometimes think to myself: Damn. Here I am thinking and writing about Paul again. Your refusal to let Paul do all the talking—or really much of any of it—is inspiring. And yet, as you also say, Paul is forever being dragged into it. What are our best options as scholars now, living in a world where those who still care about Paul seem to fall into two camps: those who want to use his presumed authority as a cudgel and those who are trying to recover from abuses undertaken in his name?
Joe: Jenny, thank you! Those are some really kind words about a rather appalling book. I take your affective impressions and careful engagements here seriously, particularly as an “accidental Pauline scholar.” One way of answering is to highlight what I say when someone might introduce me as a “Paul scholar.” It’s also one of the ways I open this book: I write and think about Paul’s letters, but I think Paul is one of the least interesting things about these letters. So, I tend to focus on the rhetorics of the letters in order to look around or reach out for all of the other people—the figures who populate the letters’ arguments—as one route into knowing more about those who sparked and were addressed by these letters.
I am trying to learn from and build upon the innovations of feminist interpreters of the letters and those assemblies, particularly my teachers and inspirations, Antoinette Clark Wire and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.[1] These other people—the prophetic women, the castrated males, the enslaved people, and those cast as “barbaric”—are pretty good reasons to stick with the study of the letters. I would also say that how and how much the letters have been used means we cannot evade the them. We cannot entirely leave them behind because they’re already with us, making all kinds of impacts—both those that we have traced and those we haven’t yet (or completely). Indeed, as I suggest in the first chapter of this book, this might indicate one way in which biblical materials have a strange kind of temporality (or relation to history, time, periodization, schedule, or chronology, among other factors).
Grappling with the queer temporalities of our approaches to these texts and traditions of interpretation helps me to do something else with the letters and the queer figures before and after them. Reading these as other peoples’ mail reminds us that we are reading neither dogma nor doctrine and helps us to push beyond approaches that presume that the main object is figuring out what Paul was arguing—as if this is the real, full, or total picture historically for the first century, as if this will then tell us what we should be doing now ethically and politically in the twenty-first century.
Jenny: I love this point. Yes, we are reading “other people’s mail.” Thank you so much for reminding us of that! There is something voyeuristic about all of this peering through Paul’s letters, into some past we can’t quite make out, as if we might finally see something or someone we really want to see but can’t quite name. I, for one, would really love to “see” many of the people you conjure for us. I want to ask: Have you survived this? I’m so worried about you! I really want to know.
This fantasy of mine makes me want to ask you about another hard topic you raise: “use.” In Chapter Four, you confront the horror that is the letter to Philemon in a particularly compelling way, revealing just how incoherent a recourse to “consent” can be within the asymmetrical dynamics that characterize both this letter and contemporary bodily play. It is time, you conclude, to retroactively release Onesimus from the demand that he be “useful.” I wonder if you’ve had further reflections on practices that reduce bodies to things and people to a status of “good-for-use” now, in a world where “essential workers” are not invited to consent and where pleasures seem few and far between.
Joe: It seems the horrors of our present are only multiplying. And it was striking how certain groups this year were (and are) demanding not to return to work themselves but for other people to resume their service work roles, doing what is demanded of them, coerced to be of use. The longer I sat with the letter to Philemon and the way it presumes, perpetuates, and puns upon the embodied and specifically sexual vulnerability of enslaved people, the more I was haunted by the horror at how little (if anything) the letter’s arguments do to interrupt the demands on Onesimus to be useful according to the consent of the user-owning people negotiating over him. Thinking of what has been disowned or disavowed about the letters by way of juxtaposition with BDSM practices is one, initial way to think alternatively about the potential pleasures within scenes of constraint. Yet, unlike some of the more utopian claims of BDSM practitioners, I do not think these can be smoothly separated from the past through an intensive focus upon consent. BDSM people can teach us a lot, particularly since they focus on consent so much, but they also end up highlighting how much all sorts of bodily contact are tied to a past that is not yet past.
We should, then, be more haunted by Onesimus, or we should attend better to Onesimus and other enslaved people over the centuries. Indeed, Saidiya Hartman has particularly stressed how much slavery and their aftermaths survive by the intimate ties between consent and coercion, particularly for those alternately cast as person and thing. This intimacy is woven within the arguments of the letter to Philemon, too, but Hartman and Hortense Spillers point to the ways enslaved people were not only used, but also themselves negotiated an unsettling kind of agency with conditions of constraint and coercion.[2] We cannot slide past these dynamics, then, when writing in remembrance of Onesimus among other enslaved people.
Jenny: Your point about the intimate ties between consent and coercion links, I think, to another crucial argument in your book: your discussion of the often violent refusals of the “unnatural” body. In The Monstrous Middle Ages, Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills point out that “the monstrous is constitutive,” producing bodies that do and do not matter.[3] Could you say more about how “the monstrous” intersects with what you are saying about the ghastly treatment of queer bodies, “monstrous” sexualities, and racialized sexualities. Throughout your book, you reveal the monstrosity of kyriarchy (a social system of interconnected domination and submission), from the savagery of surgeries designed to “remedy” intersexed infants to the refusal to tolerate gender variation, the monster is to be found less in “unnatural combinations” than in the desire for purity. Can you say more about this purity policing monster and how a turn toward “the monstrous possibilities” of sex-gender variation might resist him/it?
Joe: I have long been struck by the way Susan Stryker reversed the attacks she experienced as a transgender woman by leaning into an identification with Frankenstein’s monster as an “unnatural” body. Indeed, in a key moment, she both reclaims the term with the hopes of not wounding others by it and connects the revelatory power of living things with “strikingly incongruous parts” as functioning prophetically in the ancient Roman context. In the second chapter, then, I wonder about the gender variation attributed to the prophetic women in Corinth, and whether their incongruous mixing of embodied signs—praying and uncovering in ways akin to having their head shaved—was part of their prophetic practices, an unnatural, but non-pathologized revelation.
As you noted, though I only hint at it in places in the second chapter, as the book progresses, I increasingly emphasize that the sexualized scare-figures Paul’s letters recirculate—androgynous females, castrated males, penetrated slaves, and conquered barbaric nations—are also ethnoracial stereotypes. This becomes most evident by the fifth chapter, as the monstrous reflects a complicated Roman imperial anxiety about their “others,” and influences various Pauline arguments about the Gentiles (including those circulating around the “bashing passages”). I am not so sure if this book reclaims the monstrous, as traces it as a site of alternative angles on the sexual exceptionalism that projects such images on a range of people lower in the kyriarchal orders of our past (and present).
Jenny: Yes, kyriarchal pasts and presents do seem to repeat, endlessly, or at least rhyme. Sometimes in your book, you seem to worry that you will be accused of anachronism, defending your choice to juxtapose the past and present in such a way that both can be illuminated. Inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw, you seek a “touch across time,” seeking to uncover resonances and nonidentical correspondences instead of temporal sequences and myths of origin. I think you are right to use the past in this way. Anyone who argues that they are simply setting straight some record so that “the truth about the past” can finally become known is lying. That’s not how the past or history actually work when they are brought up in the present. I wonder then: Why bother to apologize to these people? What do we owe them? Yes, we are engaged in anachronism. So? They aren’t? But, as your book also suggests, we do owe something to the past, in this case, the pasts of “the receptors,” those whose lives have been lost, obscured, and erased by official narratives and/or placed outside of the framework of “real history.” How should we walk this line between reading through and in the past toward a life-affirming present while also recognizing that we owe something not only to now but to then?
Joe: The answer I have attempted with this book is to just explicitly name how I am using anachronistic juxtapositions. This is not to say that one will not get historical contextualizations in this book! The core chapters examine predominant perspectives on androgynes, eunuchs, enslaved, and barbarians, yet my aim is to insist that we do more than this, or perhaps just more with our approaches to the past (whether you want to call this history-making or not might be in the eye of the beholder). Once you have situated a letter in a predominant kyriarchal point of view from the past, what else can one do if one does not seek to perpetuate these patterns or presume their part of the view for the whole—particularly for those cast as appalling figures of gender and sexual variation?
One route out of this impasse is to take inspiration from Dinshaw’s evocative notion of a “touch across time”—that those marginalized and stigmatized then and now might contingently link or connect, but neither perfectly nor absolutely. Thus, drag kings, butch lesbians, and transgender women can indicate other ways to consider female practices of gender variation in the past. One test will be how well this helps us to see other people and ourselves differently—and hopefully better. Yes, this might be anachronism, but in my final reflections on biblical drag, I highlight that all historiography is about bringing times in relation to each other—involving imagination, selection, and arrangements of materials like juxtapositions. Other times are already embedded or “in bed” with each other. Approaching the past need not just be about posing times against each other (that would be contra-chronistic), but to dwell within or admit ana-chronism foregrounds how time is on top of time. The question remains: how do we want to arrange or stack our relations to our present and our past (that is not yet past)?
Jenny: Thank you Joe, for your daring and necessary book and for taking the time to talk with me about it. You remind me of something Mike Chin said at a talk I was privileged to attend (back in the day when we used to go to talks!): “We are always anachronisms to the texts we study.” This reversal of who is doing anachronisms to whom resonates, I think, with the kinds of reversals you are also naming. If we are going to be anachronists, let’s do it with precision, compassion, and generosity, keeping vulnerable bodies at the forefront of everything we do and say.
Joe: Thank you, Jenny—it’s been a real pleasure to be in continued conversation with you.
[1] While I could point to multiple feminist scholars and projects in this vein, the two titles that have most inspired my approach to these letters and assemblies are: Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999).
[2] Indeed, Hortense J. Spillers’ work anticipated many of the points that came to define queer theory, even as it significantly reorients canonical narratives of that development. See especially Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 65-81.
[3] Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, “Introduction: Conceptualizing the Monstrous,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages (ed. Bettina Bildnauer and Robert Mills; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 2-4.