Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (review)

Love Between Women posseses gravitas. Its 412 dense, meticulously annotated pages weigh in heavily against a historiographic tradition that has been inclined to dismiss female homoeroticism in antiquity as light on “documentation.” Resisting such a doubled erasure of “lesbian” history, Bernadette Brooten undertakes to reinscribe the text in a firm, clear hand. Having methodically sifted the ancient sources, she neatly aligns the culled fragments of evidence for woman-woman love (many already thick with layered accretions of scholarly commentary), soberly considering various interpretive possibilities before carefully recording her own conclusions. The result is an immensely informative book that will surely succeed in persuading most readers that homoerotic relations (even perhaps marriages) between women in the Roman era were both widely acknowledged to exist and generally denounced as “unnaturally” transgressive of the gender hierarchy inscribed by phallic penetration.

Love Between Women is really several books at once. The “mothertext” alluded to in the subtitle, Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, is a work of New Testament scholarship in the form of a commentary on Romans 1:18–32, a passage containing the only probable Pauline reference to female homoeroticism. Embedded in the center of her book (ch. 9), Brooten’s commentary unfolds to encompass broader questions concerning the interpretation of Paul’s letter as a whole (ch. 8), as well as the most immediately relevant “intertexts” for interpreting the language of Romans 1:18–32 (ch. 10). She argues that verse 26 (“their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural”) does indeed refer to female homoeroticism, which Paul labels an “unnatural” form of sexual relation because of its disruption of women’s “natural” passive social and sexual roles. Both his awareness of and the terms of his objection to female homoeroticism place Paul comfortably within the spectrum of contemporary attitudes, argues Brooten further; there is nothing uniquely “Christian” about his position, which is, moreover, of a piece with his broader conservatism regarding gender roles. “. . . Paul’s condemnation of homoeroticism, particularly female homoeroticism, reflects and helps to maintain a gender asymmetry based on female subordination,” concludes Brooten (p. 302).

This commentary has, within its own covers, given birth to two further studies that significantly expand the scope, relevance and readership of the book. The first—which occupies an initial 186 pages of text—is a survey of the evidence for female homoeroticism in non-Christian, Roman-era sources (Jewish as well as pagan), including literary references to same-sex relations between women in antiquity (ch. 2), as well as the evidence of magical papyri (ch. 3), astrological (ch. 4) and medical textbooks (ch. 5), and guides for dream classification and interpretation (ch. 6). Particularly incisive is Brooten’s analysis of the interdependence of the ancient discourses of gender and sexuality, both organized centrally around phallic penetration. If the penetrated and therefore feminized male (kinaidos, cinaedus) remained an often troubling figure in antiquity, the existence of such “pathic” men did not necessarily represent a serious challenge to the social order. Brooten shows how sexual relations between women, in contrast, produced the greater scandal of the masculinized woman (virago) who resisted male penetration and possibly even subverted the economy of penetration itself (though Brooten documents well ancient authors’ difficulty in imagining sex between women that didn’t involve an enlarged clitoris or an artificial phallic substitute); the woman-loving tribas or frictrix (“rubber”) was frequently associated with the figure of the prostitute in ancient texts, similarly marked by her all too public sexual desires, as Brooten demonstrates. These first six chapters ultimately add support to Brooten’s reading of Romans as culturally “mainstream” and are partially recapitulated in the explicitly “intertextual” considerations of ch. 10; however, they also stand independently and will surely be of interest to classicists and Roman historians as well as New Testament scholars and historians of Christianity.

The second, briefer, but (to my mind) also partly independent study that emerges from Brooten’s commentary on Romans is her review of treatments of female...