Feminine Subjectivity in Tertullian’s Writings on Women’s Dress

In conversation with post-colonial studies that hold sexuality, gender, ethnicity and race to be co-constitutive and integral to the workings of empire (e.g., Bhabha; McClintock; Puar; Stoler), this paper argues that ancient Christian discourses about “women” and femininity (to which feminist historians have been critically attentive, e.g., Boyarin, Burrus 1994, Clark, Cobb, Cox Miller, Kraemer) are implicated in colonialist projects in ways that we have not thoroughly considered. Feminist historiography of late antiquity has tended to privilege, at times even isolate, gender from other aspects of subjectivity (Kotrosits 2021). Problematic for what this treatment of gender signals about the racial politics of the academy and late antique studies, this paper, however, is more concerned with attempting a modest redress to our inattention to gender and sexuality as colonial figurations in the Roman period thoroughly entangled in the production of ethnicity and “race” (see also Burrus 2005; Drake; Frilingos).

Specifically, I consider how the discourse about “women” in Christian anti-adornment rhetoric reflects complexities of ethnic, civic and imperial belonging and positionality in Roman colonial life. Tertulllian (fl. 192-212 CE) De cultu feminarum and De virginibus velandis serve as test cases and ground my discussion. A Christian writer from Carthage in Roman Africa, Tertullian rhetorically trades chameleon-like on his ethnic and colonial positionality, as Roman, Carthaginian, African, and Christian (Daniel-Hughes and Kotrosits; Wilhite). Why, I ask, would such a mercurial colonial figure, a self-styled rhetor, jurist, and sometimes philosophizer, be concerned with women’s fashion and toilette? Departing from other feminist readings, I suggest his aim is not principally exerting power over women in his Christ assembly (e.g., Upson-Saia; Daniel-Hughes 2010 and 2011). His discourse does not refer to “real women” in any kind of easy way; rather, it is comprised of literary tropes and encyclopedic bits about things sartorial and cosmetic: fabrics, gems, dyes, changing hair fashions—things that also materially signified, for its inhabitants, the expanding borders of empire and the influx and mixing of peoples this entailed (Wallace-Hadrill). I show that Tertullian constitutes a monstrous feminine subjectivity through these objects of self-fashioning in what Anne Anlin Cheng, addressing Asiatic femininity, describes as a “fusion of between ‘thingness’ and ‘personhood’” (Cheng). This synthetic femininity mimes Roman colonial fantasies and anxieties about Roman austerity and foreign excess, borders and trespass, purity and adulteration, preservation and decay, authenticity and deception. Her antithesis—the modest, unadorned, and veiled Christian women whom Tertullian idealizes—likewise registers these fears, but she promises their resolution by taking responsibility for and mitigating the shameful affect attaching to them. Ultimately, I read Tertullian’s gender discourse in these treatises as an affective archive capturing particular felt aspects of Roman colonial subjectivity (Kotrosits 2015; 2020; Bewes).