Intersectionality and the Archives in Love Between Women

Abstract

Intersectionality and The Archives in Love Between Women Jennifer A. Glancy (bio) To return to a classic work of scholarship after a quarter century invites reflection on the passage of time. Published in 1996, Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism appeared in a world in which two women or two men could not yet marry each other, at least not with civic recognition. According to Wikipedia, which in 1996 had not yet come into existence, the Netherlands was the first country to recognize same-sex marriage, in 2001. The ways we speak about sexuality and gender identity have evolved in the past twenty-five years. Contrasting ancient to modern views, the introduction to Love Between Women reads, "Whereas we often dualistically define sexual orientation as either homosexual or heterosexual, they saw a plethora of orientations. (When we in the late twentieth century think about it, we also recognize bisexuals and transsexuals, leading us to speak of a spectrum, rather than a bifurcation)."1 Since those words were published, broader discourses around gender identity and sexuality have become more fluid. There are exceptions—think of the vogue for prenatal gender-reveal parties, for example. Nonetheless, both in the popular media and in academic publications, there is an increasing sensitivity to the inadequacy of binary thinking about gender. Although not a central point of my response, evolving conventions around the expression of gender and sexuality invite additional perspectives on ancient female homoeroticism. Love Between Women has contributed to our ability to frame such academic conversations. Engaging Joan Nestle's exploration of butchfem relationships, for example, Brooten writes, "We can see how a first-person account significantly augments our grasp of the cultural and economic meaning of the fem role. Imagine how many more interpretive clues we need to read the [End Page 149] cultural signals of antiquity."2 In light of growing awareness of trans and gender-nonbinary identities, I am curious whether Brooten would recategorize any of the evidence on which she relies, or whether she might frame parts of her argument differently.3 I focus my response on two dimensions of Brooten's scholarship where the prescience of her approach has become ever more apparent—her commitment to intersectional analysis and her unflagging efforts to recover and reclaim archives for women's history. Although in 1996 the term intersectionality was not yet in use among biblical scholars, what we would now recognize as intersectional work was certainly being published by a vanguard of womanist and some feminist biblical scholars and theologians.4 Love Between Women both drew on and contributed to that expansion of vision in feminist scholarship. Insisting that gender should not be treated as a singular category of analysis, divorced from other elements of power relations, social status, and relational identity, Brooten self-consciously endeavored to identify "the social location and the ethnic and cultural identit[ies]" of ancient authors and the women about whom they wrote.5 To see how this approach played out in Brooten's analysis, we might start with her critique of historian John Boswell's thin treatment of female homoeroticism in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.6 Brooten takes issue with Boswell's pointing to Perpetua and Felicitas as "paired saints," a designation creating "the impression of church tolerance of erotic love between women."7 Dubious of the designation on multiple counts, Brooten concludes her discussion by observing, "Boswell did not address as a problem for an erotic relationship the fact that Felicitas was a slave, while Perpetua was a woman of an elite social stratum. If the relationship were to have been erotic, the power imbalance between a slave woman and an elite woman raises the question whether we would need to classify the sexual contact as sexual abuse, especially since the sexual use of slaves was commonplace in the Roman Empire."8 In 2022, drawing attention to the power differential between a woman of elite status and an enslaved woman may seem like an obvious move. However, [End Page 150] for many circles in the context of the 1990s, broadening a feminist lens to interrogate intersections of social status and relational identity could be seen...