Dionysus, Disidentifications, and Wandering Pauline Epiphanies

Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles. Edited by Joseph A. Marchal. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019. 191-207.

Read at Google Books.

This essay follows, with [José Esteban] Muñoz and some other writers as traveling partners, a disidentificatory Bacchic scene less obvious than [Jack] Smith’s—that is, 2 Corinthians, viewing Paul’s writing as a style of performance that makes room for new ways of being. In so following Dionysus, Paul, Smith, and Muñoz, I contend that future study of Paul’s letters and communities should pay more attention to productive moments of misrecognition in Pauline interpretation—from his first communities’ reception of his message and mission to our own attempts to map his rhetoric—since such moments are, in most new social movements, the ones that join to build a previously unseen community. 

Excerpt, page 192.

Leave a Reply

Leave a comment