The Bible and Feminism Remapping the Field

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.

1 - The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field
2 - Death and the Maiden: Manifestos, Gender, Self-Canonisation, and Violence
3 - Joanna Southcott and Mabel Barltrop: Interpreting Genesis and Revelation
4 - The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women's Movement
5 - Reflections on Reading the Bible: From Flesh to Female Genius (Jane Leade)
6 - Another Esther: Sor Juana s Biblical Self-Portrait
7 - Reading The Revelations of the Book / Whose Genesis was June : Emily Dickinson s Hermeneutics of the Heart
8 - Toni Morrison's Shulamites: The African-American Song
9 - Stood Weeping Outside the Tomb: Dis(re)membering Mary Magdalene (Gospels)
10 - Feminist Re-Mappings in Times of Neoliberalism
11 - The Wandering Jewess: Feminism Seeks the Shekinah
12 - The Inheritance of Gehinnom: Feminist Midrash as a Vehicle for Contemporary Bible Criticism (Genesis)
13 - Moses, Feminism and the Male Subject (Exodus)
14 - Home at Last: The Local Domain and Female Power (Deuteronomy/Joshua)
15 - Jacob and the Queer Hermeneutics of Carnophallogocentrism (Judges)
16 - Forget It: The Case of Women s Rituals in Ancient Israel; Or, How to Remember the Woman of Endor (Samuel/Kings)
17 - Sexual Politics and Surveillance: A Feminist, Metonymic, Spinozan Reading of Psalm 139
18 - A Foolish King, Women and Wine, and Sons of Oppression: A Dangerous Cocktail from Lemuel s Mother (Proverbs 31:1-9)
19 - My Mother was a Wandering Aramaean: A Nomadic Approach to the Hebrew Bible (Ruth)
20 - Queen Vashti's No and What It Can Tell Us About Gender Tools in Biblical Narrative (Esther)
21 - Miriam Ben Amram, or, How to Make Sense of the Absence of Women in the Genealogies of Levi (1 Chronicles 5.27-6.66)
22 - The Politics of Remembrance: Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1-9 and Haunting Memories in China
23 - Corporal Ignorance: The Refusal of Embodied Memory (Gospels)
24 - Can an Adulteress Save Jesusa The Pericope Adulterae, Feminist Interpretation, and the Limits of Narrative Agency (John)
25 - Pinkwashing Paul, Excepting Jesus: The Politics of Intersectionality, Identification, and Respectability (Paul)
26 - Embodied Temporalities: Health, Illness, and the Matter of Feminist Biblical Interpretation
27 - Unveiling the European Woman (Paul)
28 - The Ancient Goddess, the Biblical Scholar, and the Religious Past: Re-imaging Divine Women
29 - Double Vision: Textual and Archaeological Images of Israelite Women
30 - Limping, Yet Made to Climb a Mountain! Re-Reading the Vashti Character in the HIV and AIDS South African Context
31 - "The Reproductive Rite: (In)Fertility in the Ashanti & Ancient Hebrew Context"
32 - But I Still Read the Bible! : Post-Christian Women s Biblicalism
33 - Sneaky Snakes: Seduction, the Biblical Imagination, and Activating Art
34 - Material World: Gender and the Bible in Evangelical Purity Culture
35 - Muslim Liberative Approaches and Legal Dilemma Towards Gender Justice
36 - Scripturalizing and the Second Amendment
37 - The Impossibility of Queering the Mother: New Sightings of the Virgin Mother in the Secular State

Yvonne Sherwood is Professor of Biblical Cultures and Politics at the University of Kent. Her publications include Biblical Blaspheming: Trials Of The Sacred For A Secular Age (Cambridge University Press, 2012).