Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul's Letters with Joseph A. Marchal
Dec. 4, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom
The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2020) reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters: androgynous females, castrated males, enslaved people, and barbaric foreigners. Each of these ancient figures deployed in these letters is situated within a specifically Roman imperial setting, an ambiance that cast them as complicated, debased, and dangerous. While the letters repeat and reinscribe the prevailing perspectives on this constellation of embodied figures, this project repositions them by implementing key insights from queer studies. In juxtaposing them against more recent figures of gender and sexual variation, also subject to vilification and marginalization, this project provides a series of alternative angles on these figures and the assemblies who spark and receive these letters, then or now.
