CURA: “Early Christian Formation and the Ungendering of the Flesh”
- Starts12:00 pm on Friday, November 5, 2021
- Ends1:30 pm on Friday, November 5, 2021
CURA Colloquium with Luis Menéndez-Antuña, Assistant Professor, School of Theology
New Testament studies have studied the topic of enslavement almost exclusively from a historical perspective. Accordingly, biblical studies have gained important knowledge about the material conditions of the slaves, their social and political status, and the conditions of their everyday life amid Imperium. Similarly, through this strand of historical criticism, recent scholarship has shown the importance of the institution of slavery in some Early-Christian practices. However, the monopoly of historicism has left philosophical and historiographical topics unexplored. For instance, if slaves are not “men” or “women,” as the primary sources make clear, much of the gendered distinctions in Early Christian discourse (for instance, freedom, sin, inheritance) need to be revisited. This paper resorts to recent developments in the study of enslavement to explore how Pauline literature (most notably Galatians 4) creates a “grammar of enslavement” that is both highly gendered and explicitly mystified. More specifically, using the notions of “social death” (Orlando Patterson), “blackness as the unthought,” (Frank Wilderson), fungibility (Saidiya Hartman), and “ungendering of the flesh” (Hortense Spillers), this paper argues that the figure of Hagar (Gal 4:21-31) and the topos of the heir (Gal 4:1-10) resort to the figure of the female slave as a building block for a theology of inheritance that erases the slave once the argument has been made. Simply put, Galatians 4 participates in the “ungendering” of the enslaved (it divests the female enslaved of motherhood) and it creates a theological discourse of belonging through inheritance that relies on enslavement even as it dispenses with it.
Co-sponsored with the School of Theology *Reading the paper in advance of the session is required. Email arleneb@bu.edu for your copy.
Join Virtually at zoom meeting id: 978 5810 4239 passcode: 599536
- Location:
- 213 Bay State Rd. 2nd Floor
- Registration:
- https://www.bu.edu/cura/colloquium-21-22/