Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Joseph A. Marchal (bio) One potential genealogy for this special section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) begins with a special session of the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Multiple program units (including the Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World section, the Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible section, and the LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics section) and status committees (including the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the recently established—if rather belatedly in comparison to other academic organizations—Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship) collaborated to recognize and reflect upon Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication (with the University of Chicago Press in 1996). The task required that many partners because of this work's immense influence and impact on the study of women, gender, sexuality, and enslavement, among other domains and topics in relation to both material and textual remains, history, and the ethics of interpretation. Given these themes and Dr. Brooten's innumerable contributions to both knowledge and community building, the session was critical and celebratory, lively and substantial in ways that strongly correspond with JFSR's historical interest in honoring influential feminist scholars and desire to think reflexively and prospectively about our scholarly pasts in relation to our presents and anticipated futures. Of course, in reflecting on such scholarly pasts, the contributors who have known Brooten the longest (Sheila Briggs and Angela Standhartinger, among them) explain how this project concretely, politically, and interpersonally began years, even decades, before the quarter-century publication date that partially inspired the session. Thus, the following contributions trace how Love [End Page 143] Between Women and Brooten's work within and beyond this book are part of longer histories of feminist, queer, and increasingly intersectional approaches to biblical, ancient Jewish, and emerging Christian materials. Yet to call Love Between Women just a book is a gross oversimplification. It was and is a phenomenon, likely because Love Between Women contains multitudes. As several of the contributors to this special section highlight, it is an incredible resource; its many different parts inspire and inform work in its wake. Its latter half is anchored by an indispensable commentary on Rom 1:18–32, in which Brooten meticulously examines the arguments in this notorious passage in light of the relevant interpretive frameworks and intertextual echoes. Just as importantly, though, Brooten also gathers, translates, and explains an unprecedented assemblage of ancient materials reflecting upon female homoeroticism in the ancient Roman world. In clearly and critically presenting a range of cultural sources, from erotic spells and astrological texts to medical treatments and manuals of dream interpretation, Brooten pressed beyond the "classical" (mostly elite, imperial, enslaving, and male) literary sources to provide multifaceted angles on these (still often depressingly kyriarchal) materials and the potential people behind them. Love Between Women, then, performs a massive mitzvah in providing essential context. It builds an archive and in doing so, gives generations of readers, "scholarly" and otherwise, a new, profound, and still unparalleled access to a matrix of sources on, about, and at times even from women in the ancient Mediterranean context. Yet the picture provided by this archive is far from rosy, and Brooten refuses to adopt either apologist or falsely idealizing approaches to the often disturbing materials within and beyond Paul's letters. Indeed, Love Between Women demonstrates how thoroughly Paul's letters and particularly the "bashing passage" of Rom 1:26–27 are conversant and concordant with most of the ancient kyriarchal ambiance that presumed and projected a fundamental asymmetry so that what counted as "natural" intercourse was only the penetrative use of a social and political subordinate by their superior. Brooten's work demonstrates, then, why and how histories of sexuality could, even should, also be feminist histories, attending to specifically gendered dynamics and differences. The broader project also cautions scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity against dismissing "religious" sources out of hand, particularly if one is at all concerned with the vast majority of people who lived distanced from the apex of kyriarchal power and privilege. For a great many...