Love, Sex, and Nature: The Enduring Relevance of Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women

One of the advantages of having a dinosaur feminist or dinosaur feminist theologian like me in this special section is that we remember the early days of feminist scholarship. In the mid-1970s it was still possible to read everything written in any discipline in the field of women's studies. For most of the 1980s that was still possible within the field of religion. Today it is impossible to know the entire literature in gender and sexuality studies, even within such a subfield as New Testament/early Christianity. Bernadette Brooten belongs to that earlier generation of feminist cross-disciplinary scholars, and this is evident in Love Between Women. The scope of its scholarship is vast and includes fields that did not play a role in the scholarship of New Testament/early Christianity in the 1980s and early 1990s when Love Between Women was being written. Today it is common to use medical texts to explore social constructions and cultural representations of gender and sexuality in early Christianity and other fields of ancient history, but this was not the case a quarter of a century ago. Prior to Brooten's work, the discussion of Rom 1:18–32 and Paul's attitude to homosexuality depended on ancient philosophical texts and the opinions of elite writers on moral topics; Brooten broadened the scope of what counts as evidence for the context of Paul's views to include such areas as astrology and erotic magic. This expansion of the archive of New Testament/early Christianity has had far-reaching consequences beyond the study of gender and sexuality. Brooten not only increased the breadth of the archive but also transformed the methods of its exploration. She was not just asking how ancient medical writers talked about female homoeroticism or what spells women cast to attract female partners. She was also demonstrating how these diverse currents, both popular and elite, interacted and often coalesced within a common cultural framework.

It was within this common cultural framework that ancient women who loved women and their detractors lived—not in a rarefied philosophical debate. Yet, because Brooten recognizes the complexity of the context, she eschews a historical determinism that would limit the experience of same-sex love between women to the discursive boundaries set by the Christian apostle Paul or the Roman poet Martial, who despite their obvious differences condemned such love in similar terms. In the conclusion to chapter 10, Brooten offers us an imaginative reconstruction of the original audience of Paul's letter in the first-century Christian community in Rome in order to exemplify how a wide and varied range of associations would have arisen in the minds of the earliest hearers of this letter. She writes: "And perhaps women who loved, or had loved, other women were also among Paul's first hearers. Did they listen silently, feeling guilty and afraid that the congregation would find out? Or did they speak up, confident in their love for one another and for Christ? We cannot know. Their voices are absent."¹ Brooten is not making an "argument from silence" so vilified by the conventional New Testament scholarship of the twentieth century. Rather, her meticulous scholarship allows the silences of the past—the silenced voices of those women who loved other women—to disrupt the arguments and assumptions that have been used to condone or explain away Paul's condemnation of love between women.

Love Between Women is encyclopedic in its approach. I have often retitled this book as Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Ancient Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)—which I may need to explain to younger scholars is a spoof on the title of a popular sex manual of the 1960s that got a cinematic parody in a 1972 film by Woody Allen. Given the wealth of exploration and insight into ancient sexuality that this book offers, I can only engage a small part of it. So, I am going to limit my remaining remarks to what is central to Brooten's interpretation of Rom 1:26: the claim...