Editors’ Introduction

The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion begins its thirtieth year with some important changes in personnel. After eight years of superb leadership, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre has stepped down as co-editor. During her tenure, she not only provided overall guidance for the journal but also streamlined the production side of JFSR in such a way that it could be handed over with ease to the next editor. We bid a reluctant farewell to Melanie with many thanks for both her years of service and her help in facilitating the transition to new leadership. We look forward to continuing to work with her on the JFSR board. Traci West, Professor of Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School, steps into Melanie’s place as co-editor and will be working with Judith Plaskow through the remainder of her term. We also welcome Veronica Golos as our new poetry editor. Veronica is a prize-winning poet with several books to her credit, including, most recently, Vocabulary of Silence.¹

A strong theme unites many of the articles in this issue: a focus on the body both as symbol and material reality with particular, though not exclusive, attention to female sexuality. Julia Watts Belser’s leadoff piece, “Sex in the Shadow of Rome: Sexual Violence and Theological Lament in Talmudic Disaster Tales,” shows how the rabbis of the Talmud used sexual violence as a dominant motif to express their horror over Roman destruction of the Temple. Drawing on Roman symbolism that linked imperial domination with sexual conquest, but turning it on its head, they used rape narratives to show the moral degradation of the conqueror rather than the shame of the conquered. The trope of sexual violation constitutes a form of rabbinic protest against Rome, Belser argues, but one that makes instrumental use of women’s suffering to articulate rabbinic and divine loss. The effect of this language is to erase the actual suffering of victims of assault by using rape as a marker of the nation’s vulnerability.

Michelle Fletcher’s “What Comes into a Woman and What Comes Out of a Woman: Feminist Textual Intervention and Mark 7:14–23,” begins by noting that much so-called gender-inclusive language is not necessarily experienced that way by marginalized groups. What would be the effect, she asks, of challenging such language by reversing gender in the biblical text itself, changing “he” to “she” and “man” to “woman”? She tries this experiment with a passage in Mark in which Jesus talks about what goes into and comes out of the body, a text that has generally been interpreted as addressing issues of purity and impurity in relation to food. When “woman” becomes the subject, Fletcher argues, the text suddenly opens up to refer to many other things that exit the body: menstrual flow, newborns, unnatural discharge. Gender reversal greatly expands the meaning of the passage, highlighting its many wordplays and allowing for reassessment of traditional interpretations and the acquisition of fresh insights.

In “Bearded Woman, Female Christ: Gendered Transformations in the Legends and Cult of Saint Wilgefortis,” Lewis Wallace examines the functions of gender blending and gender crossing in the cult of a late-medieval Christian saint. Saint Wilgefortis, a young princess who prayed to be disfigured to avoid an unwanted marriage, miraculously grew a beard and then was crucified by her angry father, who is imaged as a crucified virgin martyr that clearly retains her female identity yet is bearded like a man. Wallace suggests that the saint’s gender crossing was the key to her popularity, enabling her to be read on many different levels. For women, Saint Wilgefortis may have represented their ability to integrate the masculine and become Christlike, while men may have identified with her manliness. For both, the humiliation of bodily disfigurement becomes simultaneously ennobling and spiritually transforming, placing Jesus’s bodily marginality at the center of Christian self-understanding.

Kathryn Kueny’s “Marking the Body: Resemblance and Medieval Muslim Constructions of Paternity” addresses issues of embodiment from a very different direction, by raising the question of how medieval Muslims established paternity in...