Queerly Christified Bodies: Women Martyrs, Christification, and the Compulsory Masculinisation Thesis

Abstract

Early Christian women martyrs have been studied from several angles, including especially critical readings that underscore their narrative masculinisation through various representational devices. I call this approach the “compulsory masculinisation thesis.” Accordingly, scholars have largely understood the martyrological narrative as a process of masculinisation of the female martyr that is often attributed substantive reifying force. I suggest, instead, that a series of changes in the apparatus of Roman sexual difference during the early imperial era complicate this picture. I argue, instead, that the female martyrs in view here, Blandina, Perpetua, and Febronia, were not masculinised in any substantive way, but rather were queered in their femininity as a strategy of subverting Roman gender systems through a logic of Christification that defies stable categorisation.