Rethinking the Female Body in the Hebrew Bible

Dr. Rhiannon Graybill

University of Richmond

September 12, 2024 • 5:30 PM (EST)

Lecture at Gilman Hall room #17

followed by a reception at the Smokler Center.
3109 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21218

The Hebrew Bible is filled with peculiar, striking metaphorical representations of THE female body. A woman is (like) a land or

landscape. At the same time, the land itself is (like) a woman. The female body is a garden of delights—and certain landscapes of delight, like the garden of Eden and the Promised Land, are (like) the female body. Other bodies are less pleasurable, more threatening: the female body is often portrayed as a leaky threat, posed to contaminate the social body and social order. Sometimes, it, or she, even becomes monstrous, an especially terrifying kind of “monstrous feminine.” In this talk, I propose reading these metaphors of the female body together with the equally Weird bodies of contemporary feminist and queer fiction. I will argue that this practice of interpreting the biblical text with and through literature destabilizes conventional (paranoid) readings of female embodiment and opens new spaces of feminist and queer possibility. In addition to the biblical texts, I will discuss work by Vandana Singh, Callum Angus, Kathryn Harlan, and Julia Armfield.