Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal Teresa Hornsby joseph a. marchal, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Pp. xi + 311. $99. I have always been an admirer of Joseph Marchal’s work; I often refer to him as the Robin Williams of biblical studies. His work is brilliant, at times manic, evocative, provocative, exhaustive, and at times exhausting in its depth. The introduction to Appalling Bodies (“Prelude: Before and After”) and the first chapter (“Touching Figures”) are excellent resources that give genealogies/trajectories of how M. sets out to grapple with the intersections of history and queer theory, while looking forward to the potential of disruption found through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. M.’s emphasis here is that, while [End Page 153] various approaches to “queer” subjects in biblical studies (i.e., historical [Bernadette Brooten], or queer theory [David Halperin, Judith Butler]) have been necessary, they have not been effective in disrupting the biblical proliferation of heterosexist essentialism, or of the “untroubled use of the Bible as timeless, eternal, primordial” (p. 23). M. sets out to juxtapose those queer beings launched by Paul (androgynes, eunuchs, slaves, and barbaric foreigners) with more recent marginalized and punished identities: “drag kings or trans butches, or people with intersex conditions, or those engaged in BDSM practices, or those targeted as terrorists” (p. 28). Each chapter thereafter deals with “touching” these figures within and beyond Paul’s letters: androgyny and female masculinity in Corinthians; eunuchs and intersex conditions in Galatians; the slave and the sexual bottom in Philemon; and foreign barbarians and terrorists in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians. M. seeks to expose the crevices and instabilities in Paul’s literary bodies and to manipulate those instabilities by connecting Paul’s appalling bodies to our present marginalized bodies; this is to illustrate that biblically constructed norms can be “malleable, contestable, and . . . transformable” (p. 24). Further, the anachronistic juxtapositions seek to form coalitions for undoing what has been done by “the biblical.” (Briefly, “the biblical” troubles the kind of periodization with which historians can be obsessed—the term encompasses all that the Bible has touched—past, present, and future; see discussion of “the biblical” on pp. 17–18). Each chapter adeptly weaves modernist historiographical methods with postmodern critique. In the second chapter, “A Close Corinthian Shave,” M. draws upon biblical historical works on the women prophets in Corinthians, then augments this with his own considerable examination of androgynes in the ancient world through the lens of postmodern sex and gender theory. This provides an elegant segue to the topic of female masculinity as observed in more recent “gender-troubling figures, including butch lesbians, female-to-male trans men, transgender butches, and drag kings” (p. 50). By juxtaposing, anachronistically, the Corinthian women prophets with recent figures of feminine masculinity, M. seeks to highlight their shared features “shaped by their practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that depart from oppressive perspectives (then or now)” (p. 66). Not only does observing the Corinthian women prophets inform interpretations of “dyke boys,” and so on, but dyke boys and so on should also inform constructions of the Corinthian women. In the third chapter, “Uncut Galatians,” M. uses the juxtaposition of castrated bodies (Paul’s sarcasm of cutting in 5:12) and intersex bodies that have been made to conform to a constructed binary through cutting. Within this conversation comes a word of caution: these “touches across time” can damage as much as heal (p. 111) just as biblical texts always have. M. builds upon the central tenet that the biblical is a cog of the machinery that produces norms that denigrate some bodies in relation to others, and the anachronistic juxta-positions are necessary to trouble that production. That “troubling” is increasingly complex in chap. 4, “Use,” where M. demonstrates the ubiquity of the sexual utility of slaves. Again, M. engages in solid historical inquiry that demands that ethical readers confront the horrifying atrocities, including the glossed over sexual use of enslaved people that Paul condones in Philemon. M. writes, “[I]nterpretative depictions of a benevolent Paul and a...