Full Description
Texts after Terror offers an important new theory of rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. While the Bible is filled with stories of rape, scholarly approaches to sexual violence in the scriptures remain exhausted, dated, and in some cases even un-feminist, lagging far behind contemporary discourse about sexual violence and rape culture. Graybill responds to this disconnect by engaging contemporary conversations about rape culture, sexual violence, and #MeToo, arguing that rape and sexual violence - both in the Bible and in contemporary culture - are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky, and that we need to take these features seriously. Texts after Terror offers a new framework informed by contemporary conversations about sexual violence, writings by victims and survivors, and feminist, queer, and affect theory. In addition, Graybill offers significant new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 34), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1-2), and the unnamed woman known as the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). Texts after Terror urges feminist biblical scholars and readers of all sorts to take seriously sexual violence and rape, while also holding space for new ways of reading these texts that go beyond terror, considering what might come after.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reading Sexual Violence
1. Fuzzy, Messy, Icky: How to Read a Rape Story
2. The Edges of Consent: Dinah, Tamar, and Lot's Daughters
3. Narrating Harm in the Bathsheba Story: Predation, Peremption, and Silence
4. Rape and Other Ways of Reading: Hagar and Sarah in the Company of Women
5. A Grittier Daughter Zion: Lamentations and the Archive of Rape Stories
6. Sad Stories and Unhappy Reading
Conclusion: After Terror
Bibliography
Index
