Response

Abstract

Response Bernadette J. Brooten (bio) Thank you to Joseph Marchal, who organized this special section, to the respondents, each of whom has taken such care in engaging my work, and to the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion for publishing it. First, a word about the time in which I wrote. Jennifer Glancy and Mónica Rey have observed that, when I published Love Between Women in 1996, same-gender marriage was illegal. Beyond that, same-gender sexual contact itself was actually a crime in many states until 2003. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the United States Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 Supreme Court case, and declared that a Texas statute criminalizing consensual same-gender sex between adults was unconstitutional under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.1 As this goes to press, the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy is at risk, which could mean turning back the clock on same-gender marriage and other hard-fought rights.2 [End Page 191] When New Testament scholars discussed Rom 1:26–27 at all, many assumed that Paul was speaking hypothetically about sexual relations between females: "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse with females, were consumed with passion for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error" (NRSV, slightly altered). I vividly recall speaking with a fellow, male member of the Society for New Testament Studies, who insisted to me that sexual relations between women did not exist in Paul's world, that Paul was simply hypothesizing such relations. Similarly, one well-known feminist theologian in Germany, speaking about my plans to write this book, once told another German feminist theologian, "I don't know any lesbians," to which her friend responded, "You know me." Silence. I cannot stress enough how wonderful I feel seeing more junior scholars working to interpret some of the same texts and artifacts about which I wrote and introducing new ones into the discussion. While writing about some of the more obscure texts, I felt as if I were excavating by drilling through ice in Antarctica, with no other experienced scholar in sight. I did, of course, discuss these sources with talented research assistants Denise Kimber Buell, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Caroline Johnson Hodge, and many others. But how encouraging it is now to be able to communicate with each of you in this panel, and to read of other interpretations, such as in Joseph Marchal's Appalling Bodies.3 Marchal deeply engages a broad range of ancient sources, proposing new meanings of being a receptive erotic partner. Angela Standhartinger has outlined some of the difficulties that I faced in the 1980s in Tübingen with Hans Küng, who opposed the very subject of the research. Numerous German feminists, LGBTQ+ individuals and groups, and simply fair-minded persons supported my work in numerous ways. I want to single out for special mention my friend of over four decades, Sheila Briggs, who spent countless hours with me in long-distance phone calls between Claremont, California, and Tübingen, counseling me on how to fight for the academic freedom necessary to write this book. Thank you, also, Angela Standhartinger, for mentioning my early work in addressing anti-Judaism within feminism and some of my other experiences and initiatives in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. I am thrilled about all that has lasted and grown since the meaningful years that I spent in the lovely small city of Tübingen. Thank you, Mónica Rey, for highlighting Love Between Women's contributions to women's history. I set out to establish that people in the Hellenistic and [End Page 192] Roman Mediterranean world knew of female homoerotic desires and acts. This largely involved studying male fantasies, some of them bizarre and distorted. I did, however, also find fragmentary evidence for women's history. Now, some people are not interested in history. That's all right. Not everyone has the same interests. Some think that a desire to write...