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13 PHYSIOTHERAPY OF FEMININITY IN THE ACTS OF THECLA WILLI BRAUN Paul apparently laid down a reconstituted charter for gender equalitywith his claim that in the Christ associations"there isneither male nor female, for ... all are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28; cf. 2 Clem. 12:1­6). But, as Dennis MacDonald has pointed out, one ought here to pay close attention to the gender ofthe one. The Greekmasculine eig, ratherthan the gender­neutral ev, expresses the gender quality of the Pauline one. That is, the Pauline dcvSpoyuvog—if that is how we would think of the "one"—neither levels gender hierarchynor erases the value distinction between male and female. Rather, if the Galatian gender­unification formula reflects an androgynous ideal at all, it suggests that the female will be subsumed within a humanideal that has a masculated form. MacDonaldnotesthat "the androgynemyth is not antiquity's answer to androcentrism; it is but one manifestation of it." Androgyny "is reconstituted masculinity: the female must become male" (MacDonald 1988: 285, correctly criticizing Meeks 1973)." 1 The avSpdyuvcx; is not a term that occurs in Galatians. Indeed, the language of androgyny may not be appropriate to describe Christian attempts to imagine a reconstitution ofredeemed humanity in de­ or re­gendered terms. There isgood evidence to think that to be labelled androgynes was considered an opprobrium, a slur for someone "who is between man and woman" (qui inter virum estetfeminam, Andre 1981: 396). This was recognized in some Christian circles where androgynyisnot "a redemptive condition," but "an imperfect state, because it represents the absence of clear gender distinctions" (Castelli 1988:365; see also R.Smith 1988) and thus the confusion ofcategories. See also, for example, Pollux's list of reproachful terms synonymous with androgynes (Onomasticon 6.126­27). The Greco­Roman physiognomists delight in stories about the androgynes asa way ofexploring the bizarreextremesof "normal" female­male parameters (Gleason 1995: 39­40). What Lucian said about eunuchs seems to represent a dominant thinking also about androgynes: "[T]hey are neither man nor woman . . . but hybrids [auvGeuov], mixtures [U.IKTOV], monstrousfreaks [lepccTtoSec,] outside the bounds of human nature" (Eunuch 3; LCL6). For cross­cultural analogiessee O'Flaherty (1980) andRoscoe (1996). 210 TEXT AND ARTIFACT In post­Pauline Christian groups manliness (virtu virile or dcvSpeia) would come into its own as a preached value and performance, enjoined by early Christian men and not infrequently pursued by women themselves. The idea of the masculinization of the female in Christian salvation myths comes to repeated expression in the so­called gnostic tradition where salvation is envisioned as a return to "the unchangeable unborn state" (Zostrianus 130.24, in Robinson 1988) ofmale perfection: "Flee from the madness and the bondage of femininity, and choose for yourselves the salvation of masculinity" (Zostrianus 131.5­9). The aim is not to set rules for a men's club that bars women; rather, femaleness "is something that can enslave everyone, and its opposite, masculinity, does not appear to be a natural quality of males but a state that all must seek in order to be saved" (Wisse 1988: 301). Similar injunctions to flee from the horror of femininity toward the redemption of masculinity are scattered across other gnostic writings (see R. Smith 1988; Wisse 1988; generally, the essays in King 1988), often describing the therapy of humanity's gynopathology in fantasies, myths and metaphors of a phallicbig bang: "Gnostics are trapped in a woman's parts and rescue comes down out of the sky as a logos­penis­snake with its potent and perfecting semen of salvation" (R. Smith 1988: 358; cf. Castelli 1988: 366). The famous sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are not exceptional in that they advocate erasure of gender dimorphism in the "single one" (22); not, however, by blending male and female into an androgynous one (Castelli 1991: 30­33) but, as the much­ discussed saying 114 has it (Buckley 1985; Meyer 1985), by "becoming male" (cf. Gospel of Mary; Hennecke 1965: 1.342). This notion that the company of the transformed, including its women members, must become wholly male isnot limited, however, to gnostic circles. The "works of the female" appear elsewhere as a feared sign of unredeemed creation and humanity (Clement, Strom. 3.6.45.3; 3.9.63.1­2; citing the encratite Gospel of the Egyptians). Clement of Alexandria, whose ideas of femininity and masculinityappear to be thoroughly steeped in dominant Greek cultural traditions within whose scope he attempts to make some allowance for...

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