Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch

Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts

Sean D. Burke

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781451465655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451469882
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have received dramatically different answers over the centuries of Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized figure at a key place in the narrative—as the gospel has expanded beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named—in such a way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense, Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new community.

3

Ancient Masculinities

Queer theorists have developed effective strategies for reading differences and ambiguities as sites for deconstructing and denaturalizing identity categories, in order to create space for more bodies to be recognized as fully human. By applying these strategies to the story in Acts 8:26-40, I will demonstrate that it is possible to read the Ethiopian eunuch as a figure who queers ancient identity categories of gender, sexuality, race, and class. In order to understand how the Ethiopian eunuch may be read as a queering figure, however, it is first necessary to understand how particular identity categories were constructed in antiquity. In this chapter, therefore, I will analyze ancient constructions of masculinity. I choose to describe these as constructions of masculinity because I thereby foreground gender, and it is first and foremost the ambiguous gender of eunuchs that produces the possibility of reading them as queering figures. Ancient masculinity, however, was not simply a gender identity; rather, it was a site in which discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and class intersected.

Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality provides an important starting point for the analysis of ancient constructions of masculinity.^[1] Foucault has been rightly criticized, however, for privileging “homiletic and didactic” (especially philosophical) texts among the many discourses that produced masculinity in antiquity.^[2] In my analysis, therefore, I utilize primary literary sources from a wide range of genres, including apologies, biographies, comedies, dream literature, epics, fables, histories, novels, philosophical texts, religious texts, satires, scientific and medical treatises, and tragedies. In addition, I consider material sources, including graffiti and visual art. Because Acts was written in the latter part of the first century c.e., I focus primarily on sources from the fifth century b.c.e. through the second century c.e.

Masculinity and Gender

That the penis was a signifier of power in Greco-Roman antiquity is evidenced by the popularity among the Greeks of statues of the god Hermes with a prominent erection and the popularity among the Romans of statues of Priapus, a god with a large penis.^[3] The penis, however, was an unstable signifier of power. First, some ancient medical writers, such as Aristotle, argued that what distinguished males and females was not so much their sexual organs, which could be seen as inverted versions of one another, but rather differences in heat, λόγος (power or faculty), and/or πνεῦμα (hot air).^[4] Second, while possession of a penis marked one as a male rather than a female, it did not guarantee one social recognition as a man, ἀνήρ in Greek and vir in Latin. The social construction of masculinity depended not only on anatomy but also on what I call discourses of excellence, a concept expressed in Greek and Latin words that could also be translated as “virtue” or “manliness.”^[5] These discourses posited a series of intersecting binary oppositions in which the first term marked excellence: free/enslaved, native/foreign, superior/inferior, hard/soft, active/passive, dominant/submissive, inviolable/violable, impenetrable/penetrable, sexually insertive/sexually receptive, hairy/smooth, and self-disciplined/ruled by the emotions.^[6]

Some of the binary oppositions that defined excellence simply privileged biological characteristics of sexually mature males, but others cannot be explained on the basis of biology.^[7] The fact that some of these binary oppositions were not based on anatomical features points to one of the crucial distinguishing features of the dominant Greco-Roman construction of masculinity: its inextricable intertwining of anatomy, gender, race, and class. A male could be denied social recognition as a man if he was not a free adult citizen or native; if he did not prove his excellence by dominating his inferiors, defending his own body against domination, and dominating his own emotions;^[8] if he was not perceived to be a penetrator,^[9] one who inserted his penis into the orifices—vagina, anus, or mouth—of his inferiors; or if he was perceived as one who failed to defend his own orifices against penetration.^[10]

Insofar as masculinity depended on excellence, it had to be learned, and insofar as it depended on the social recognition of excellence, it had to be earned by means of one’s performance in public arenas of competition.^[11] One such arena was warfare. Among the Spartans, for example, boys were removed from their homes at an early age and assigned to groups of men and youths with whom they lived and engaged in military training, in order to prepare them to prove their masculinity in battle.^[12] Similarly, according to John J. Winkler, in classical Athens masculinity was personified by the hoplite, the free adult male citizen-soldier.^[13] Other public activities provided arenas of competition analogous to warfare, including athletics, politics, lawsuits, public displays of wealth, rhetoric, and even philosophy.^[14] Demosthenes, for example, praised a youth’s success in athletic competitions as excellence, and he commended the study of philosophy as a means for free adult male citizens to achieve excellence in public life.^[15] Aeschines and Cicero both utilized challenges to an opponent’s masculinity in political discourse.^[16] As Maud W. Gleason observes, masculinity was a state that was never definitively achieved but was always open to contestation,^[17] and thus as Winkler concludes, ancient men came to believe “that male life is warfare, that masculinity is a duty and a hard-won achievement, and that the temptation to desert one’s side is very great.”^[18] Competition for social recognition as a man even encompassed the activities of daily life, such as diet, clothing, appearance, public deportment, and household management.^[19]

The dominant discourses of gender in Greco-Roman antiquity produced two groups of human beings that Jonathan Walters labels men and unmen.^[20] The identity category “men” could be limited to those who were recognized as hard, active, dominant, inviolable, impenetrable, sexually insertive, self-disciplined free adult male citizens or natives. The identity category “unmen” could include women, foreigners, slaves, and children, all of whom were defined as soft, passive, submissive, violable, penetrable, sexually receptive, and ruled by the emotions.^[21] While foreigners and slaves could be distinguished as male and female on the basis of anatomy, their racialization as foreigners or their classing as slaves made it possible to deny them social recognition as men. Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, for example, argues that Cicero carefully distinguished between the term vir, which he applied to senators, upper magistrates, notable equites, those who distinguished themselves in politics or the military, and those whom he wished to flatter, and the term homo, which he applied to lower magistrates, members of the lower classes, foreigners (even those considered aristocrats in their own societies), freedmen, slaves, and upper-class males whom he wished to insult.^[22] The male children of free male adult citizens or natives occupied a particularly ambiguous position in this construction of masculinity. On the one hand, as children they could be identified as unmen. On the other hand, they could also be expected to achieve soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• The Meaning of Eunuch
• Queer Theory
• Ancient Masculinities
• Eunuchs
• Queering Acts
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Biblical References and Ancient Literature