The Exceptional Proves who Rules: Imperial Sexual Exceptionalism in and Around Paul's Letters

Abstract

ABSTRACTDespite the recent spike of scholarship on ‘Paul and empire,’ there is still a remarkable gap in considering the imperial and colonial politics of sexuality in Pauline epistles and interpretation. Yet, as scholars and theorists equally at home in feminist, postcolonial, and queer studies (like Jasbir Puar and M. Jacqui Alexander) have shown, sexual and gender norms interact profoundly with racial, ethnic, national, and colonial formations, including in the dynamics of ‘sexual exceptionalism.’ Though most postcolonial and queer theorists are reflecting upon more recent formations, such conceptualisations are also helpful for identifying similar imperial-erotic echoes in the Roman empire, and the literature it influences, like Paul's letters. This article briefly describes sexual exceptionalism and the ways imperialist and nationalist formations have deployed interwoven perversities (gendered, sexual, racial, and religious). Identifying how these sorts of argumentative moves persist and recur across the centuries and can be found reflected in the Roman empire, then, should reframe those passages in Paul's letters that are ostensibly ‘about homosexuality’ (or even ‘heterosexuality’) and qualify some of the more enthusiastic evaluations of the letters as anti-imperial in impulse.