The Politics of Reading: US Latinas, Biblical Studies, and Retrofitted Memory in Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue

When I was asked to participate in this discussion, I intended to address a demographic problem in biblical studies: Why are there comparatively few US Latinas with PhDs in biblical studies? Obviously, larger socioeconomic injustices and histories of exclusion and differential inclusion shape Latina absences from biblical scholarship but such an explanation insufficiently accounts for the multifaceted ways in which biblical studies has participated in, challenged, and reinforced larger social injustices.¹

Academic fields at large, but perhaps biblical studies especially, are circumscribed by a certain politics of reading: the “acceptable” canon of scholarly sources within any particular field, the authority that adheres to the reading of certain texts and not others, and the practices of authorization that surround and enable only certain ways of reading those texts. Scholarly practices may rely upon a politics of reading that remains a politics of authorization—a narrow approach invested in perpetuating kyriarchal power structures both within and outside the academy. If a politics of reading serves as a politics of authorization perpetuating unjust power structures and if the narrow canons of biblical studies and religious studies scholarship exclude texts, reading practices, and other aspects of most US Latina communities, then it is no wonder that so few US Latinas pursue a PhD in biblical studies.² Still at present, a limited cross section of biblical studies PhD programs provide a space in which US Latinas may study the questions, texts, practices, or issues that matter to many potential US Latina biblical scholars and their communities. Other ways of reading and other politics of reading are thus possible in the academy.³

To suggest that ways of reading beyond popular biblical scholarly practices exist is not to suggest that all biblical scholars are invested in a narrow reading politics. I write this roundtable contribution because earlier but proximate generations of scholars (many of whom are still alive and active within the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL] and the American Academy of Religion [AAR]) opened up significant scholarly spaces and possibilities for us.⁴ I would not be a biblical scholar, albeit a highly interdisciplinary one, were it not for the work of earlier biblical scholars from feminist, Latina, and other minoritized and allied contexts—scholars such as Denise Kimber Buell, Elizabeth A. Castelli, Musa W. Dube, Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz, Lynn Huber, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Erin Runions, David A. Sánchez, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fernando Segovia, and Vincent L. Wimbush to name but a few. Although tracing diverse interpretive paths, these scholars each sought a politics of reading that interrupted the politics of authorization and created a space, albeit tenuous and still somewhat marginal to the SBL, for me to ask questions.⁵ These biblical scholars each practice different modes of interdisciplinary reading and are often committed to practices of reading outside of the academy.

Recognizing the import of this shift in biblical scholarship, I wanted to move beyond diagnosing biblical studies to instead wrestle with different reading practices. Ruiz suggests that new strains of interdisciplinary biblical scholarship not only transgress the academic borders of disciplines but also the borders of the academy, forcing us to engage practices of reading from contexts outside the academy while also recognizing that meaning and reading are themselves fluid practices.⁶ Broadening the methods and sources of biblical scholarship means that we can question not only the meaning of texts but also how readers create and negotiate meaning with texts.⁷ More than that, we may even consider the practices that surround texts that are not always delimited by ideas of “reading” and “meaning.”⁸

With such a broadening of biblical scholarly questions and sources, I wanted to think about whether there might be some strategy for collaborative transformation—some strategy I could offer from the multiple overlapping and competing communities meaningful to me. Although my work tends toward the excavation of how other people read, this roundtable pushed me to ask another question: What other possibilities might I...