Paul, the "Woman Question & the jewish Problem[s]"



The best representation
of an androgynous status for Christian celibate women in late antiquity
is the story of Thekla.


This apocryphal
female companion to Paul
refuses to marry,
cuts her hair short like that of a man,
dresses in men's clothing,
and accompanies Paul
on his apostolic
missions.


It is striking
that in all of these narratives
in this and similar stories,
the women who perform these outward gestures of stretching dominant cultural expectations related to gender
are also embracing a form of piety
[sexual renunciation and virginity]
which resists dominant cultural expectations
vis-a-vis social roles.


If my reading of Philo & Paul
and of the general cultural situation is compelling, however,
this connection is not so much striking
as absolutely necessary.


Insofar as the myth of the primal,
spiritual androgyne is the vital force for all of these representations, androgynous status is always dependent
on a notion of a universal spiritual self
which is above the differences of the body,
and its attainment entails necessarily
one or another
[or more than one as in the case of Perpetua]
of the practices of renouncing the body:
ecstacy or virginity
or physical
death.


We thus see
that from Philo and Paul through late antiquity
gender parity is founded on a dualist metaphysics and anthropology,
in which freedom and equality are for pre-gendered,
pre-social,
disembodied souls,
and is predicated on a devaluing and disavowing of the body itself
as female.


On my reading, then,
Christian imaginations of gender bending/blending
do not really comprehend a "destabilization
of gender identity."


Rather,
insofar as they are completely immured
in the dualism of the flesh and the spirit,
they represent no change whatever
in the status
of gender.


All of these texts
are mythic or ritual enactments of the "myth of the primal androgyne" and, as such, simply reinstate the metaphysics of substance,
the split between Universal Mind and
Disavowed Body.


It is striking
how closely they match Beauvoir's critique of
"the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject,":

That subject
is abstract to the extent
that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and,
further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body
as female.


This association of the body
with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity
whereby the female sex becomes resticted to its body,
and the male body,
fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically,
the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly
radical freedom.


This trap is,
I claim, based in the material conditions of heterosexual marriage,
if not - even more depressingly -
in the material conditions of heterosexuality itself,
and precisely to the extent that Paul was unwilling to disallow
or disparage marriage,
as some of his more radical followers were to do,
something like the pronouncements of Corinthians 11 and the Haustafeln became almost
a necessary superstructure.


Rather than
"resting on the assumed natural differences between the sexes institutionalized in patriarchal marriage,
I would imprudently suggest that patriarchal marriage." I would imprudently suggest that patriarchal marriage - that is, at least until now - produces such naturalized
gender differences.


To be sure
Christian women had possibilities for living lives of much greater autonomy and creativity than their rabbinic Jewish sisters,
but always on the stringent condition and heavy price
of bodily renunciation.


Let me make myself absolutely clear:
I am not allying myself with Christian conservatives
who argue that Paul's pronouncements in Galatians 3:28
did not have
social meaning.




Paul's
entire gospel
is a stirring call to human freedom
and universal
autonomy.




I think that,
within the limitations of Realpolitik, he would have wanted all slaves freed, and he certainly passionately desired the erasure of the boundary between Greek and Jew.




In arguing
that "no male-and-female"
did not and could not mean a fundamental change in the status of wives,
I am not arguing that he was inconsistent
[nor being inconsistent myself]
in the name of the preservation of male privilege,
but rather I am suggesting that Paul held
that wives are/were slaves
and that their liberation would have meant
an end to marriage.




Jews and Greeks
need ultimately to cease being Jews and Greeks;
slaves need to cease ultimately being slaves,
and the equivalent is that husbands and wives need ultimately to cease being husbands and wives,
but Paul feels that the last is unrealistic for most people,
even Christians:
Because of immorality,
let each man have his own wife
and let each woman have
her own husband
[7:2].




When Paul says,
"the form of this world is passing away" [7:31],
it seems to me that he is doing
two things.




On the one hand,
he is emphasizing why it is not necessary to engage in radical,
immediate social change, in order to achieve the genuine radical reformation of society that he calls for,
and on the other hand,
he is explaining why having children and families
is no longer
important.




Procreation has no significance for Paul at all.




From Paul on
through late antiquity,
the call to celibacy is a call
to freedom
[7:32-34].




Virgins are not "women."




Rabbinic Judaism,
which rejected such dualism and thus celibacy entirely,
strongly valorized the body and sexuality
but cut off nearly all options for women's lives other than maternity, trapping all women in the temperate and patronizing slavery
of wifehood.




This should not be read,
however, as in any sense a condemnation of Christianity,
nor, for that matter, of rabbinic Judaism,
for I suspect that all it means is that people in late antiquity
had not thought their way out of a dilemma
which catches us on its horns even now -
in very late
antiquity.

~!gemeen!~
engel

15 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 19 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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