AJR continues its conversations series with an exchange between Rhiannon Graybill and Jill Hicks-Keeton on Graybill’s new book, Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Below is the transcript.
JHK: Rhiannon, hi! Thank you for your stunning book Texts after Terror. I have found it immensely generative, and I’m looking forward to talking with you about it.
RG: Thanks so much, Jill—I'm looking forward to our conversation too! And thank you so much for your kind words about my book—I'm so glad it resonated!
JHK: The title, by the way, is brilliant. I came across it and immediately felt relief, “yes! I want to know what comes after!” In case any AJR readers are unfamiliar with the legacy of “texts of terror,” let me start by asking you to share how you frame this project as both provocation and extension of an existing conversation in feminist biblical criticism.
RG: “Texts of Terror” is a phrase that's familiar to almost anyone who's spent some time in biblical studies, especially around stories of sexual violence and other horrific things. It's used as a shorthand for a certain subset of texts that are really terrible—rape, genocide, gender-based violence. It's also closely associated with Phyllis Trible and her classic work of feminist biblical criticism, Texts of Terror. Trible’s book is a study of four such texts: the rape and expulsion of Hagar, the rape of Tamar, the gang rape and murder of the Levite's concubine, and the murder of Jephthah's daughter. In it, Trible describes the task of feminist biblical criticism as “telling sad stories” and emphasizes the emotional and ethical role of bearing witness and feeling sadness. I want to be clear that Trible’s book is an incredibly important and generative work of feminist criticism, and it still shapes the way we talk about these stories to a remarkable degree. But at the same time—and this where the after comes in for Texts after Terror—I want to insist that feminist criticism can do more than just feel sadness. I also think that it's important that feminist criticism doesn't just remain in the same position it was when Trible wrote this book, almost forty years ago. I'm interested in what else we can do—including finding ways to respond to biblical rape stories besides “telling sad stories.”
JHK: So after carries the valence of beyond. And the possibility of affective reactions to these biblical texts beyond fear or grief.
RG: Yes, absolutely. It might be helpful here to say a bit more about “after.” “After” can certainly be temporal—I'm obviously writing this book after Trible wrote hers, and after a great deal of other feminist biblical criticism. “After” can also have a sense of tribute or “in the style of”; you see this a lot as a title in classical music, or poetry (something like “after Chopin”). But “after” also signals a kind of space after pain and trauma, like you mention in your question. I found myself thinking a lot about Emily Dickinson's poem “After Great Pain”—that’s the space this book is interested in, the “after” of great pain. Another poem that I came back to several times was Mary Ruefle's “After a Rain,” which talks about another kind of “after”, where things are lost, but also renewed. There can be possibility and hope in the after, even when it’s after horrible things.
JHK: Your book productively challenges readers of biblical texts to think with, alongside, and through a variety of contemporary literary works and genres—from poems to speculative fiction to archives. It strikes me that this move neutralizes any notion of biblical texts as “scripture.” Our field writ large is a bit disjointed when it comes to whether and how our treatments of the Bible are constructive projects or not. I do wonder if part of the terror that attends these stories is their position in a canon so often used as scripture in normative ways to authorize existing power structures.
RG: I think you’re definitely right about the terror—these aren’t just rape stories, they’re rape stories in the Bible, and they’ve been used against victims and survivors in many ways. I think this is also one of the reasons that many of the scholarly responses to these stories that take the rapes seriously are theological in some way, even when the scholar doesn’t typically engage in theological work.
One reason I use so many different contemporary texts in my book is that I want to emphasize the points of connection between biblical rape stories and everyday sexual violence. My complaint isn’t so much against the category of scripture as it is against the ways biblical rape stories are treated as somehow special or different or unthinkable, even as we’re surrounded by rape and sexual violence all the time. I also wanted to challenge what “counts” as acceptable knowledge or ways of knowing in our field (which remains dominated by older white men). This is why I place such an emphasis on fiction written by millennial women—both because it represents sexual violence differently, and because I want to argue that someone like Sally Rooney or Kristen Roupenian, in their critiquing of sexual ethics and sexual narrative, can help us do biblical criticism differently and better.
JHK: You and I teach in a similar geographical area, and I imagine that some of the students who enter our classrooms bring with them such enmeshed presuppositions about the Bible as “The Good Book” that they struggle to see sexual violence at all in the Bible. (To be honest, I think this is true in some corners of the guild as well.) Trible’s work, focused around “telling sad stories,” can disrupt that. Hagar is enslaved, sexually exploited, and then rejected by both her enslaver and her deity. This is certainly sad. But the story exceeds my, or anyone’s, sad telling. You offer an alternative language meant to “crack open our reading practices” (106). Tell me how you came to develop unhappy reading as a more promising strategy.
RG: Unhappy reading is my answer to “telling sad stories.” “Telling sad stories” seems like a modest gesture—I'm just telling, nothing more. But there's also a way that telling a sad story fixes it—it makes the meaning something stable, and it elevates the critic into the person who knows and tells. This is especially true when we’re telling other people’s stories or stories from a text such as the Bible (telling or retelling personal trauma can be quite different!) Unhappy reading, in contrast, is something more dynamic. It’s a process without a predetermined outcome. Readings can be unhappy because, like Trible says, they’re about sad stories. Or we can be unhappy about how a particular reading or interpretation makes us feel—here, I think about the sense of being bored by reading the same sad stories over and over, and then feeling bad or unhappy about feeling bored. Or a reading or story can be unhappy in the sense of infelicitous—it's not a “good” plot; it doesn't cause us to feel catharsis. That may be because it's not sad enough. Often, we want our female victims to die—here I think a lot about Alice Bolin's great book Dead Girls—and most of the biblical rape victims survive.
One thinker whose work has really helped me to think through unhappiness is Sara Ahmed. In The Promise of Happiness, she talks a lot about the ways the idea of happiness is used and abused, especially against women, queer people, and migrants. She has a great analysis of how coercive the phrase “I just want you to be happy” can be, particularly when used by parents toward their children. She writes about unhappiness as holding all kinds of possibilities, and that’s something I found fascinating, and tried to bring out in my work as well.
JHK: As you challenge us to read rather than (merely) tell, your book shifts agency around from how it is often conceived in biblical scholarship. With this model, we are readers rather than interpreters.
In my own research lately, I’ve been thinking about how some first wave feminists in the late 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. worked stridently to conscript the Bible—against all odds!—into a project of liberation for women. They argued that if interpreted properly the Bible can be good news for women. (This sort of reasoning still pops up today.) Trible’s Texts of Terror (1984) is a landmark detour from that trajectory. Her analyses of Genesis 16 and 21, 2 Samuel 13, Judges 19, and Judges 11 insist that we resist reading biblical stories of rape, violence, enslavement, and other terrors as being easily wrapped up by pointing to some grand scriptural metanarrative that gets resolved with Jesus. At the same time, her framework and methodology remain fundamentally Christocentric (as you point out).
Texts after Terror lets us—and the text—be improper. Your work, as I see it, breaks out of a scripturalization trap that haunts our field. With your framework, we can read the text, be unhappy, and feel more things too. Rage, ambivalence, maybe even hope. But none of it is mandated by the text itself! Or by a power structure that demands the text be generative only within certain bounds, spun by “interpreters” (vs. “readers”). You empower readers with intellectual tools that encourage us to attend to what we are actually feeling when reading these texts. You invite us to exercise imagination beyond “exegesis,” a task that makes us pretend we have no positionality (let alone emotions). You challenge us toward multiplicity. We do not control the text. And neither does it control us.
RG: This is so perfectly put, thank you! Yes, this is absolutely what I’m trying to do—I want to make space for multiple readings and multiple and conflicted feelings, like those ones you listed: rage, ambivalence, hope. To this I would also add playfulness and pleasure—I think there should always be space for us to be playful, even when we are interpreting difficult or painful things. And there should be more to feminist criticism, or any criticism, then just Feeling Bad about Very Bad Things. Sometimes it feels to me like feminist criticism is asked to do this work on behalf of the field as a whole. Think about the common grad seminar where you do a week on “feminist methods” or “women,” you read a couple of classic feminist texts, everyone pauses to feel bad about women in the Bible, and then you move on. And I want to insist that we can do something else—multiple things.
JHK: I want to ask if you’ll indulge me to think about “unhappy reading” and a biblical text that does not appear in your book: the end of Judges 5, where Sisera’s mother gets ventriloquized in the “Song of Deborah.” This whole vignette is replete with violence. It alternates between titillating—Jael seduces enemy general Sisera toward his shocking death by tent peg—and disturbing—we anticipate Sisera’s mother’s grief as she worries about why he isn’t home yet…until she goes on to comfort herself by imagining that he’s delayed pillaging captive women. I wonder if this story might be a fitting candidate for exploring further possibilities of Cooper Minister’s concept of “compromised pleasures” that you commend early in your book. Thoughts?
RG: It’s so interesting that you would pick this story, because in an earlier version of this book project, there was a whole chapter on Jael and Sisera! I have a side interest in the Bible and horror, especially feminist perspectives on horror, and a few years ago I wrote an article about reading Jael as a “final girl” and the Jael/Sisera story as a rape revenge narrative. The “final girl” is the female survivor in the slasher film, who ultimately kills the killer, usually with a phallic weapon of some kind—think of Sydney in Scream, or Laurie in Halloween, or a host of others. A fun sidenote is that like Jael, she usually has a masculine name and some gender ambiguity. (The key text on the “final girl” is Carol Clover’s fantastic Men, Women, and Chain Saws).
When I started writing my book about rape, I thought about including this reading, as a different kind of rape story. But I also started to question some points of my reading of Jael—in particular, I was influenced by an article by Steed Davidson about Jael and Rahab as “Native Women,” which points out some of the colonizer/colonized dimensions of the story. I started to rework my argument to address ethnicity as well, which complicates the position of Jael as a hero we should unreservedly praise. I also was influenced by Amy Cottrill’s work on Ehud and Jael (Judges 3-5) and her point about how the violence in the story makes us feel. And then there’s also Sisera’s mother, who you bring up, and that mix of sympathy and revulsion she engenders.
All this to say—the story of Jael and Sisera is such a fuzzy, messy, and icky story, and the pleasures it gives us are complicated and compromised (and maybe even compromising?) pleasures. It didn’t ultimately make it into the book (as you know from reading it, ha!), but it’s another great place for exploring this sort of reading.
JHK: Thank you, Rhiannon, for the conversation—and for your book! Texts after Terror takes us to new places and I’m excited to see more / other / further conversations it surely will animate.
RG: Thank you, especially for your careful engagement with my book—and for these wonderful, challenging, and generous questions. I know we have to end here, but I’m already looking forward to more conversations around these issues…
Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible, she is the author of Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (2016), also published with Oxford University Press. She has also co-edited three books, including, most recently, “Who Knows What We’d Make It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (Gorgias 2020), co-edited with Peter J. Sabo.
Jill Hicks-Keeton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel’s Living God in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018) and coauthor of Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation, with Cavan Concannon (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She’s currently at work on a book entitled Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves. Find her on Twitter @JillHicksKeeton.