Liberating Female Scapegoats: Mimetic Theory, Feminist Theory, and the Biblical Representation of Gendered Violence and Victimhood

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with girls’ and women’s experience of men’s violence as a particular phenomenon apparent within the Bible, and one that is ‘hidden in plain sight’ in the contemporary world. This study is especially concerned with the problem of biblical narratives that depict men’s extreme victimisation of women, for, as feminist scholarship has found, these texts are dangerous and difficult to redeem in light of their capacity to proliferate and normalise men’s enactment of violence against women. The following investigation offers an important response to these issues. It devises and implements an interpretive model that illuminates how biblical narratives of persecuted women may be redeemed for inherent positive value and relevance to the contemporary issue of gendered violence. Specifically, this investigation shows how the biblical witness to women’s victimhood may be perceived as demystifying and subsequently undermining enduring patterns and processes of gendered violence. The interpretive model put forward in this dissertation is constructed from concepts drawn from Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, and feminist theory of sexual difference as informed by scholars such as Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva. These two theoretical frameworks are shown to provide analytical tools that 1) combine to enable detailed examination of the biblical representation of gendered violence; and 2) determine how the representation of women’s victimhood exposes and disrupts patterns and processes of violence that are characteristic of androcentric contexts. This interpretive model is applied to two biblical narratives depicting men’s extreme victimisation of women: Jephthah’s daughter of Judges 11 and the unnamed woman of Judges 19. Analysis establishes that these texts, contrary to other comparable contemporaneous mythology, are salient in their witness to men’s enactment of violence against women. In particular, the two victims within these narratives become perceptible as distinctive, potent female scapegoats with liberatory value as they demystify and disrupt clandestine patterns of gendered victimisation so human experience might work free from them. This study importantly contributes to biblical scholarship as it brings forward new ways of reading dangerous texts that counteract their capacity to proliferate violence against women. Significantly, this dissertation provisions women and men with an alternate interpretive model that enables them to encounter violent biblical content as redeemable and relevant to women’s experience, and to ameliorating the contemporary global issue of pervasive male-performed violence against girls and women.