Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets
Rhiannon Graybill
Abstract
Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. The book argues that prophecy destabilizes the category of masculinity and alters the ways in which the Hebrew prophets overwhelmingly men experience their bodies. Furthermore the body of the prophet becomes a queer body. The book explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies including Isaiah Moses Hosea Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from ph ... More
Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. The book argues that prophecy destabilizes the category of masculinity and alters the ways in which the Hebrew prophets overwhelmingly men experience their bodies. Furthermore the body of the prophet becomes a queer body. The book explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies including Isaiah Moses Hosea Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from philosophy psychoanalysis and horror films: Isaiah meets the poetry of Anne Carson; Hosea is seen through the lens of possession films and feminist film theory; Jeremiah intersects with psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria; and Ezekiel encounters Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. The book also offers a careful analysis of the body of Moses. This method of reading highlights unexpected features of the biblical texts and illuminate the peculiar intersections of masculinity prophecyand the body in and beyond the Hebrew Bible. Attending to prophecy and to prophetic masculinity is an important task for queer reading. Biblical prophecy engenders new forms of masculinity and embodiment; Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers a valuable map of this still-uncharted terrain.
Keywords:
queer,
masculinity,
prophecy,
gender,
Bible,
body
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190227364 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190227364.001.0001 |