Dancing Across Identities

Through the study of Queer Biblical Hermeneutics, I have found freedom from the heteronormative, imperialist, marginalizing and essentialist interpretation of the scripture which allow me to dance across the intersectionality of my identities. Coming out in the early nineties to my family and Christian community was a liberating and heart-breaking time. I was in college in California where one might think of this setting as liberal, but I found myself at an Assemblies of God College in the middle of Orange County California. One of the most conservative colleges and counties in the State of California. My new found acceptance of my sexual identity was at odds with my religious upbringing, the bible, church doctrine, and even some in the community…Or was it?  I found a freedom I never had experienced while dancing the night away in gay clubs across Southern California. Where did God fit into this new found freedom? Or where did I fit as a child of God? Did I have a place in God’s house at God’s table? I knew God loved me just the way God created me but could I find a home where people had the same understanding as I.

I moved back to Texas and tried several churches and finally started going to a church that accepted gay people. Then enrolled in Seminary. Now, in my final semester, I enrolled in a class called Queer Biblical Hermeneutics. I have found the class again liberating.  In a book called In the Arms of Biblical Women,[1] Suzanne Scholz outlines a hermeneutic in a Postcolonial Feminist, Queer and Ethnic lens[2]. Scholtz starts with an example: the positive view of Rehab in Joshua 2 is read with suspicion.[3] To take this hermeneutic further, Dube uses a “hermeneutic for life” in reading this text. She says, “When I read through Rahab’s prism, I read for justice: justice for women of various backgrounds; justice against historical and contemporary imperialism and justice for all people who are subjected to various forms of oppression. I read for life”[4] This hermeneutic deconstructs the normalized understanding of scripture that are traditionally viewed through colonialism, patriarchy, androcentric, and hegemony, interpreting in a non-essentialist way. Liberating the woman in the text from conventional understanding to one of power.[5] Where Rahab has her own agency of her own body. Others see her in this text through her intersectionality or hybridity as both a Canaanite and Israelite.[6] In these perspectives, Scholz say; “they reject compliance to the forces of empire, patriarchy, the sexual status quo, and the ethnic-racial hierarchies, and instead read with the ‘outsiders,’ the ‘Others,’ the different one, the Canaanite.”[7] Through this hermeneutic one can gain the understanding that the scriptures can be viewed in many ways.

My final example in interpreting is a queering of the heteronormative text that has been used as a clobber passage against the gay community-Leviticus 18:22. This Queer Hermeneutic use linguistic studies to proof the text. This process shows the “grammatical ambiguities which gives a different meaning to the verse”.[8] Lings shows how the noun and verbs have been interpreted incorrectly. Through his grammatical analysis he cross references other text using the same “verb constellation” and is able to see the true meaning of the text.[9] Scholtz concludes; “When [Lev 18:]22 is read in a queer way, it does not not universally prohibit same-sex love at all. Rather, it forbids incestuous rape among males, including boys.”[10]  The queering of the text through linguistic studies gives a new more detailed analysis of the writing through linguistic constellations and crossing referencing. Through the study of Queer Hermeneutics, I have found freedom from the heteronormative, imperialist, marginalizing and essentialist interpretation of the scripture which allow me to dance across the intersectionality of my identities.

[1] The Arms of Biblical Women, John T. Green and  Mishael M. Caspi (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 145-178.

[2] Scholz, “Convert, Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 169.

[3] Scholz, “Convert, Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 169.

[4] Scholz, “Convert, Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 171; Scholz cites Musa W. Dube, “Rahab in Hanging Out a Red Ribbon: One African Woman’s Perspective on the Future of Feminist New Testament Scholarship,” in Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives, ed. Kathleen O’Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, Musa W. Dube (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 180.

[6] Scholz, “Convert, Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 175.

[7] Scholz, “Convert, Prostitute, or Traitor?,” 176.

[8]  K. Renato Lings, “The ‘Lying’ of a Woman: Male-Male Incest in Leviticus 18:22?” Theology & Sexuality 15, no. Suzanne Scholz, Introducing the Women’s Hebrew Bible (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 139.

[9] Scholz, Introducing the Women’s Hebrew Bible,140.

[10] Scholz, Introducing the Women’s Hebrew Bible, 140.