Bibles That Matter: Biblical Theology and Queer Performativity

Abstract

Discussions of Bible and homosexuality, and discussions of postmodern biblical interpretation, have often taken place in isolation from one another. However, Judith Butler's “queer” approach to sex, gender and performativity may allow biblical scholars to rethink their objects and procedures in a manner that brings such discussions together. Grounded in a reading of speech act theory, Butler's work explores the possibility that gender, rather than being conceived in a modernist fashion as the social interpretation of stable sexed bodies, is best understood in terms of collective practices that produce perceptions of fixed sexes and genders as performative effects. So too the Bible, often conceived as a fixed object, may be reconceptualized in terms of the collective practices, including conventional modes of scholarly and popular analysis, that produce perceptions of a single, stable Bible as performative effects. Postmodern queer theory's appreciation of complexity and pluralism as resources rather than threats can thus be extended from bodies to bibles. Just as Butler examines processes whereby bodies come to “matter” (in both senses of that term), biblical scholars can examine processes—including those associated with biblical theology and those associated with sexuality debates—whereby bibles, too, “matter.”