Abstract
Despite the lack of both historical and exegetical clarity that has emerged from scholarly study of 1 Cor 11.2-16, this passage has often been fundamental to understandings of gender and sexuality in many Christian traditions. Although both hierarchical and egalitarian models of gender have been supported by this text, with regard to sexuality there is almost always an assumption of heteronormativity. Within Christian traditions these models are often presented as “natural” and “God-ordained,” yet they are in fact profoundly political as they are viewed as foundational to notions of identity and thus determinative for power relations at individual through to societal levels. Because misogyny and homophobia are still present in Western societies, an androcentric heteropatriarchal model of gender and sexuality tends to dominate. That 1 Cor 11.2-16 can be read as supporting such a model highlights the importance of examining the sex-gender ideologies as well as the politics and power relations that lie behind both the text itself and various interpretations of it.
This thesis engages queer theory in order to enable such a critical examination. Queer theory reveals models of gender and sexuality as ideological constructs but goes further than this and challenges these models by both exposing the instabilities of the supposedly normal model and presenting alternative models of gendered and sexed being. This thesis therefore intersects various biblical, theological and queer lines of inquiry across 1 Cor 11.2-16 in order to trouble the androcentric heteropatriarchal norm that has dominated this field.
Accordingly, the materialist lesbian theory of Monique Wittig provides the theoretical basis for discussion in this thesis. Unlike many previous studies on this passage that focus on the “problematic women” of Corinth, Wittig’s challenge to both “particularise the masculine” and “lesbianize the men” means that the Corinthian men come under scrutiny in the first part of this thesis. The possibility that Paul is addressing the behaviour of the men in this passage and the suggestion that he is dealing with “a horror of homosexualism” reveals that inadequate attention has been given to the ways in which ideology influences biblical studies and also to the range of differences between the first and twenty-first century understandings of sex, gender and sexuality.
Wittig also challenges us to “attack the order of heterosexuality in the texts” and to “produce a political transformation of the key concepts.” Therefore, the second half of this thesis explores three key terms from 1 Cor 11.2-16, namely kephale (“head”), the imago dei and fusis (“nature”). A diverse range of material is examined, including the primary evangelical groups that debate the meaning of kephale (“head”), Karl Barth’s theology on “Man and Woman” and the imago dei, and Robert Gagnon’s work The Bible and Homosexual Practice. By critically investigating these in light of Wittig’s theories, the androcentric heteropatriarchal systems of thought that Wittig calls “the straight mind” are both revealed and challenged. With regard to Gagnon, in Chapter Six Wittig’s fictional work The Lesbian Body even physically forces his work to disappear altogether through the inter-play of columns on the page.
Rather than continuing the debates on the various exegetical and historical issues that occupy much of the scholarship on this passage, this thesis shifts the discussion of 1 Cor 11.2-16 into what Stephen Moore describes as “a radically different register” – traversing, troubling and transgressing the normal – and ultimately affirms Wittig’s proposal that, “a new personal and subjective definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex (woman and man).”