Wednesdays 5:00-7:00 PM
September 14, 2022 - October 12, 2022
Application Deadline: August 14, 2022
This microseminar will be offered in person on the MIT campus.
What does the supposedly most queerphobic text (at least, as deployed in the culture wars) have to say about contemporary debates about queerness? Are there queer characters in the New Testament? What happens to biblical texts when queer readers explore them? Is sex in the Bible “straight”? This seminar introduces these questions applying Queer Theory’s insights to biblical texts while exploring how New Testament narratives illuminate, contradict, or challenge queerness. Queer biblical interpretation centers “gender” and “sexuality” as categories of analysis that are both heuristically productive and need deconstruction. Consequently, “Queerness of Biblical Proportions” situates itself at the intersections of Queer Theory, a field of studies devoted to theorizing sex and power, and New Testament Studies, a field of studies traditionally invested in marginalizing queer people. At this interdisciplinary crossroad, the course theorizes queerness at the textual, hermeneutical, historical, and cultural levels.
Faculty
Dr. Luis Menéndez-Antuña is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Boston University School of Theology. He is interested in liberation theologies, cultural studies, and critical theory. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and served as Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, CA). His current research explores the queer and postcolonial afterlives of the biblical texts. He has published his research on journals such as Estudios Eclesiásticos, Ilu. Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones, Biblical Interpretation, Journal of Religious Ethics, Early Christianity, Critical Research on Religion, and Journal of Biblical Literature. His first monograph on Revelation, Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation (Routledge) offers an emancipatory reading of Revelation 17-18 using postcolonial and queer historiographies to explore emancipatory paths for identity formation in Biblical texts. He is currently working on his second monograph (New Testament Studies after the Cultural Studies Turn) that focuses on theoretical and hermeneutical developments in New Testament Studies.