In her 1998 article “The Lady Vanishes,” Elizabeth Clark issued a challenge to the foundationalisms of feminist historiography of Late Antiquity through developments in poststructuralist theory. This article proposes its own reorientation to historical work on gender, but it does so now in light of recent developments in Black feminist, tra…[Read more]

A response to Erin Runions’ monograph, The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)

Most scholarship of the last few decades on the book of Revelation has focused on its
colonial conditions and heated, even forceful, political engagement, making conflicting
conclusions about to what extent it “reproduces” or “resists” imperial ideology. Of particular
focus has been the striking image of the lamb on the throne, an image that
a…[Read more]

The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts – a tale about a hapless Arab peasant who uncovers the buried secrets of early Christianity – has accompanied most scholarly and popular explorations of Nag Hammadi literature. As a colonialist relic, however, it is more than a quirky tale of the accidents of history. It represents and per…[Read more]

The notion that sexuality in the Greek and Roman periods was predicated on a
social-sexual hierarchy that casts relationships in the binary terms of
active/passive and penetrator/penetrated has been both influential and
controversial over the last 30 years. Both the articulation of this hierarchy and its
critique have been haunted by various…[Read more]

This essay is an intellectual history, one of affect theory both within and without biblical
studies, rendered as an ecology of thought. It is an “archive of feelings,” a series of
thematic portraits, and a description of the landscape of the field of biblical studies
through a set of frictions and express discontentments with its legacies, as…[Read more]