Stephen D. Moore

The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality

The arduous task of queering the Song of Songs, a book that is ostensibly an unequivocal celebration of male-female sexual love, was accomplished over many centuries by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church (as well as by Jewish Sages of blessed memory, though they were hampered by a modesty and restraint to which their Christian cousins were seldom subject). Night after night in their cells, by flickering candlelight, they queeried the Song of Solomon, strenuously inquiring after its spiritual meaning and confidently setting it forth. And as they did so their austere cells were transformed into lavish theaters. What follows is a series of preliminary portraits of some of the more remarkable performers.

UNSAFE SEX: FEMINISM, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE SONG OF SONGS

How should the Song of Songs be read? As that rarest of biblical texts, one that gives voice to female desire in the context of a sexual relationship characterized by equality and mutuality rather than domination and submission? Or as yet another vehicle for male pornographic fantasy and sexual aggression? Attempting to shift the (dualistic) terms of this burgeoning debate on the Song, this article explicitly situates itself at the intersection of feminist and queer theories, focusing especially on s/m eroticism as a site where these theories forcefully collide and delicately collude, and arguing that feminist and queer politics can ill-afford to exclude each other.

Performing sadomasochism in the song of songs

Preface: Writing Under the Influence Imet Lynda only once, not long after the publication of her Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. The occasion was a New Years party at the home of our mutual friend Catherine Keller. That evening Lynda listened with goodhumored patience and gentle encouragement as I (a historian of early Christianity under the influence of a few glasses of wine) enthusastically shared my own long-standing fascination with the performances of pleasurable suffering embodied in ancient literatures of martyrdom and asceticism. Soon thereafter I read her book, and if I feel I have come to know her a bit better since that evening it is because I have for the past few years been writing under the influence, having imbibed more than a little of Lyndas subtle and complex text. In the following essay, I have partnered with colleague and biblical critic Stephen Moore to stage a sadomasochistic performance of the Song of Songs.

Review of Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West and Thomas Bohache (eds), The Queer Bible Commentary

Stephen Moore reviews Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West and Thomas Bohache (eds), The Queer Bible Commentary (London: SCM Press, 2006).

Jacob's Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of the Hebrew Bible (review)

(as remarked by Michael Wilson), regardless of bohemian postures and artistic aspirations. And it hardly lionized the lesbian as heroic but, rather, painted her as degenerate and destructive to society, as I have suggested elsewhere. In spite of some of the reservations noted above, I found Chisholm’s Queer Constellations to be inspired, eloquent, and compelling. Its recuperation and rereading of Walter Benjamin with and against queer narrative is an ambitious and tantalizing intellectual project, and it produces a unique level of theorization of queer social space. It freshly and bravely revisits gay and lesbian cultural tropes and questions cultural assumptions from all quarters. The apparent hedonism and frivolity of consumerism is given a tough dressing down through its links to wreckage, displacement, and ruin, while its connection to cultural production and urban economies is underscored. And most significant of all, for my money, the powerful concept of “queer constellation” is developed and forged into a real tool for understanding the trans/formations of queer cultures. Notwithstanding silences, erasures, and prohibitions, it allows for a simultaneous reading of a space and time over which a locked-down exclusionary normative history has lost its hold.