Gender, Power, and the Body in Late Antiquity

In Jane Gallop’s Sexuality, Disability, Aging, she proposes thinking about gender, sexuality, and identity at large as “longitudinal.” In so doing, she invites us to consider the ways bodies cut across categories through time – and, I would add, space.

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.

In De virginibus velandis, Tertullian asserts that girls beyond the age of twelve have undergone an irrevocable transformation that requires them to be covered in public: the “inner covering” of pubic hair (uelamen extrinsecus habenti tegumen intrinsecus [12.1]) also demands an outer covering of her “shame” (pudor ubique uestitur [11.8]). In Carthage, as elsewhere, consecrated virgins were expected to veil themselves when venturing outside.

Since the advent of the linguistic turn, the field of late antique Christian asceticism has hotly debated whether or not we can access the agency of any hagiographical subjects given the totalizing narrative of the male author. Following in the footsteps of Jasbir Puar (2012), I propose that we are asking the wrong questions. Instead of focusing on the identity formation of the ascetic, we should cease asking who an ascetic was and instead examine how an ascetic functioned. To do so, we must think beyond the bounds of the modern concept of the body as container.

In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men were popular among Christian audiences. Within these hagiographies, the subjects changed their gender presentation and lived as men, often in monasteries intended for those assigned male. However, current historiography explains away these acts of gender variance from the historical record. Scholars often view these saints’ presentation as a means to negotiate patriarchy, such as to attain authority reserved for men (Lubinsky; Davis; Bennaser).

The necrosima, a collection of 85 Syriac funerary madrāshê ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian, encompasses hymns in a variety of meters, commemorating Christians of all ages, genders, social stations, and professional backgrounds. Scholarly interest in this collection peaked in the nineteenth century; in the intervening decades, the hymns have retreated into relative obscurity, a fate precipitated in part by the recognition that few appear to be of genuinely Ephremic vintage.