Description
Trans Biblical provides some of the most exciting new scholarly work in trans biblical interpretation to help us better understand our Bibles, our bodies, and one another in a fraught and fractious world.
Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture offers a collection of wide-ranging essays exploring key issues animating trans biblical interpretation from a variety of angles and emphases. Contributors, who themselves represent a range of gender identities, answer the question "what makes a biblical reading trans, or a trans reading biblical?" in diverse and exciting ways. They also promote new ways of thinking about gender variation in the ancient world while more sensitively and critically addressing ongoing debates about gender and embodiment.
This collection is a helpful entrée into how biblical readers and interpreters can make new, more creative, reflexive, and accountable connections to influential texts and traditions. It represents a historic effort to situate, expand, and elaborate on the current trajectories of trans biblical interpretation. Gender variance is as old as stories about creation, and biblical texts are more variable than we have been trained to see. They disrupt present-day assumptions of a simple and stable gender binary, often deployed against trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. Taking us from Genesis through the Gospels and epistles and into rabbinic and early Christian scriptural engagement, Trans Biblical sharpens our awareness of what is in these texts and builds up our capacities for what can be done with our encounter with biblical texts and traditions. In short, the work of the scholars gathered in this one, convenient collection meets an important, even urgent, need by providing a range of entry points and approaches to biblical texts and traditions in a contextually and theoretically nuanced fashion.
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Reviews
“These essays offer a balm for troubled times through their oh-so-human efforts to make meaning anew, today, in relation to ancient sacred texts. In placing fraught contemporary questions of transness and gender squarely within traditions of scriptural hermeneutics, they reach below the superficial present to touch something profound in the depths that desperately needs to be surfaced in the here and now.”
—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History, coeditor of The Transgender Studies Reader volumes, and founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
“Trans Biblical is an essential collection that zooms both out and in, highlighting trans forms of analysis and action that can connect us, as well as forms of identity that make us unique. The contributors move boldly beyond passages and interpretations that have become staples in the genre, and I found myself pulled into new waters, buoyed by curiosity, wonder, and the sensation of being seen. I can’t wait to have this book on my shelf.”
—Austen Hartke, author of Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians and founder of Transmission Ministry Collective
“Joseph A. Marchal, Melissa Harl Sellew, and Katy E. Valentine have compiled an impressive work on biblical interpretation from trans perspectives and experiences that are not limited to trans persons. The contributions move beyond the theoretical to the practical and pedagogical, covering texts from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, rabbinic literature, and early Christian writings. Among the chapters are an excellent overview of the intersection of trans history and biblical interpretation and a reconsideration of the trans-cis binary and the trans*ness of John’s Jesus using an African communal hermeneutic. The volume is fresh, engaging, and insightful. Explicit and implicit pedagogies are among the book’s strongest features.”
—Wil Gafney, author of Womanist Midrash, vols. 1 and 2, and Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible,
“Trans Biblical gathers a remarkable collection of reflections, provocations, and interventions in biblical, religious, and gender, feminist, queer, and sexuality studies that together invite new ways of thinking and speaking about bodies, Scriptures, transformations, and historical as well as interpretive significance. Ambitious in theoretical and historical scope, the volume moves from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to rabbinic and early Christian literatures, addressing pedagogy, epistemology, (in)visibility, and corporeal change. Accessible, decisive, and nuanced, this book provides readers with urgently required words and concepts as together we face ‘the biblical’ in all its horror and potential.”
—Jennifer Wright Knust, Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University
“Trans Biblical is a landmark publication—a timely arrival amid the current flux of toxic debate, embattled positions, and violence. Always compelling, occasionally haunting, often surprising, the insights of its impressive contributors demonstrate the continued relevance of ancient texts for trans identities, bodies, histories, and culture.”
—Deryn Guest, Senior Lecturer in Biblical Hermeneutics, University of Birmingham
“Wide-ranging and comprehensive, Trans Biblical offers not just a window onto but an inviting doorway into the robust and sophisticated state of trans biblical studies, with contributions from many of the foremost scholars in this increasingly well-established field. This collection is a superb resource for anyone seeking a more informed perspective on transness in the Bible than what is generally on offer in contemporary politics and popular media.”
—Melissa M. Wilcox, Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair, Department for the Study of Religion, University of California, Riverside
“This exciting volume opens up a number of new paths in biblical scholarship. By highlighting the perspectives of trans people, the importance of gender variation, and insights from trans studies, the authors expand our understanding of both biblical texts and biblical interpretation. The diverse, innovative essays collected here will become necessary reference points for anyone working on gender in biblical studies.”
—Ken Stone, Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics, Chicago Theological Seminary
“Trans Biblical is not only groundbreaking but also important work that has potential to disrupt identitarian logics that have undergirded much of the queer scholarship in the study of theology and ethics. This book serves scholars and practitioners with insightful essays that will advance queer and trans scholarship in the study of religion, along with theology, biblical studies, and ethics. Embodying a somatic hermeneutical lens is at the core of Trans Biblical. I highly recommend it!”
—Roberto Che Espinoza, founder, Our Collective Becoming, and Visiting Professor,
Duke University Divinity School