Landscape, Garden, Monster: Rethinking the Female Body in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is filled with peculiar, striking metaphorical representations of the female body. A woman is (like) a land or landscape. At the same time, the land itself is (like) a woman. The female body is a garden of delights—and certain landscapes of delight, like the garden of Eden and the Promised Land, are (like) the female body. Other bodies are less pleasurable, more threatening: the female body is often portrayed as a leaky threat, posed to contaminate the social body and social order. Sometimes, it, or she, even becomes monstrous, an especially terrifying kind of “monstrous feminine.” In this talk, Rhiannon Graybill proposes that reading these metaphors of the female body together with the equally Weird bodies of contemporary feminist and queer speculative fiction. Dr. Graybill will argue that this practice of interpreting the biblical text with and through literature destabilizes conventional (paranoid) readings of female embodiment and opens new spaces of feminist and queer possibility. In addition to the biblical texts, she will discuss work by Vandana Singh, Callum Angus, Sara Maitland, Kathryn Harlan, and Julia Armfield.

Rhiannon Graybill is the Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein & Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. She is the author of Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (2021) and Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (2016). Together with John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie, she is co-author of Jonah: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (2023) and What Are They Saying about the Book of Jonah? (2023). She has published widely on feminist, queer, and literary approaches to biblical texts and co-edited multiple books, including, most recently, Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (2023). She holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California, Berkeley.

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