Seeing is Feeling: Revelation's Enthroned lamb and Ancient Visual Affects

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 ambiguously imparts both conquest and victimhood. This essay builds on and steps to the side of this work by addressing the image of the lamb on the throne as an expressive and emotionally, rather than ideologically, ambivalent image. Placing this image alongside other affectively rich spectacles in Revelation’s context, I suggest that the enthroned lamb gives voice to conflicted feelings about imperial life: attachment and loss, extravagant dreams of sovereignty and victory, as well as the painful realities of vulnerability and subjection, all in complex inter-implication

Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi

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 perpetuates the orientalist epistemological tropes that have since been fixed onto the individual texts themselves: seeking/finding, secrecy/unveiling (esoterism), and sexual taboo/sexual excess (asceticism/libertinism). This paper explores the resonances of this story with the history of Nag Hammadi scholarship, as well as with popular renderings of Nag Hammadi texts. It uses the recent cultural studies interests in affect theory to ask: what is at stake in casting what is called “Nag Hammadi literature” as the romantic and dangerous “East” to the Bible’s domesticated and rational “West”

Babylon's Fall: Figuring Diaspora in and through Ruins

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

Penetration and Its Discontents: Greco-Roman Sexuality, The Acts of Paul and Thecla and Theorizing Eros Without the Wound

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 gendered and identitarian investments, leading to several theoretical and historical impasses. This essay offers up a second century Christian text, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, as an intervention into this debate and the impasses it produced -- that is, as an inquiry into the continuing predominance of penetrative models for relationality in contemporary theory, as well as the near-total subsuming of ancient erotic relations under the rubric of gender. Indeed I read the Acts of Paul and Thecla as an archive of erotic experiences that don’t fit comfortably within penetrative and active/passive frameworks, and do so with gender working as a language inflecting (but not determinative of) erotic life. I thus hope to widen our aperture for ancient sexuality, as well as for contemporary theories of sexuality that imagine penetrative wounding as primary models for sex and relational encounters at large

"How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect Theory, and the (Im)Personal"

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 well as a set of meaningful encounters under its auspices. That landscape is recounted with a fully experiential map, intentionally relativizing those more dominant sources and traditional modes of doing intellectual history. Affect theory and biblical studies, it turns out, both might be described as implicitly, and ambivalently, theological. But biblical studies has not only typically refused explicit theologizing, it has also refused explicit affectivity, and so affect theory presents biblical studies with both its own losses and new and vital possibilities

The Ethnography of Gender

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, transgender, and postcolonial feminist studies, arguing gender should be understood as always within colonialism and racialization. It describes the way gender appears in the linked projects of the medicalized body and ethnographic discourses, both in antiquity and modernity, and asks about the political stakes and ambivalent histories attending gender as an analytically separable facet of experience. It also offers a brief reframing of the Proto-gospel of James and select scholarship on late ancient Christianity to offer a constructive redirection for the field of Late Antiquity