Dandy Discipleship

...and I'm back. Did you miss me? I would have missed you, except I've been far too busy moving house (nightmarey), sunning myself in Menorca (sunburny), writing a paper (stressy) and partaking of family festivities (overeaty). But now I'm settled into my new house, with approximately 80% of boxes unpacked, and settling into a work routine, so I reckon it's time to start blogging again.

First up on the blog-to-do list is an article by Robert J. Myles. The article, called 'Dandy Discipleship: A Queering of Mark's Male Disciples' comes from the Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. Myles starts out by pointing out that we never come to the Bible blind: we always bring with us all the baggage of our expectations, beliefs, culture etc. Our reading of the Bible says as much about us as it does about the text. So if we want to find things in the Bible that challenge our expectations rather than just telling us what we already think we know, sometimes we need to deliberately go looking for them. If we want to challenge our ideas about sexuality and gender, we need to deliberately 'queer' the Biblical text, which means looking out for ways of reading it that don't just fit in with our ideas about men and women, gayness and straightness. So in his article, Myles offers a series of queer rereadings of sections of Mark's gospel that talk about Jesus' disciples.

Fishing for Men (Mark 1:16-20)
Myles rewrites the text thusly:

While cruising the seashores of Galilee, Jesus began his ministry by fetching a number of seemingly attached men to join his cohort of male admirers. He saw Simon and his brother Andrew fishing in their boat, and as soon as Jesus invited them to accompany him in his quest to fish for more men, they dropped their rods and joined him. Shortly after, Jesus discovered James and John in their father’s boat mending their fishnets. Upon enticing them, they immediately left their father and their livelihood, to elope with the alluring Jesus.

The disciples quit their jobs. Our jobs tend to reflect our roles within society and within our families, not to mention our roles as men and women. Following Jesus, it would seem, challenges the social roles and relationships we're tangled up in. As societies, we tend to restrict male friendships to particular spaces: it's ok for men to hang out in pubs, at sports events, on fishing boats; but we're a bit freaked out by the idea that men might just spend time hanging out with each other, talking about deep and meaningful things. Isn't that a bit...gay? But what if following Jesus means spending time with other people in ways that aren't socially acceptable? What if we were to accept that some of the sorts of relationships God calls us to with other people are precisely that: a bit gay?


Whose is the Greatest? Measuring Manhood (9:33-37)

When they came to Capernaum Jesus asked his admirers, “What were you squabbling about on the way?” There was an embarrassing silence, for they had been comparing with one another to find out whose was the greatest. Jesus sat down, called his disciples, and said to them, “Whoever admires me the most will have the least, for truly I tell you, size doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with it that counts.” Taking a little one in his hand, he said to them, “Whoever is open to one such as this is also open to me, and whoever is open to me is open to the one who sent me.”

Greco-Roman culture tended to have a competitive view of masculinity: the more people you can beat, the more of a man you are. It looks like Jesus is challenging this, but at the same time he seems to just be rearranging the rules of the competition: that's not what leadership looks like, this - Jesus' leadership - is what leadership looks like. If masculinity's still about who wins the competition for most-like-a-leader, then isn't Jesus just trying to win the competition himself, even if he's doing it in an unusual way?


The Pash of Judas and a Streaker’s Nuddie Run (14:43-52)

Immediately, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd of men with shackles and whips eager to restrain Jesus. The betrayer had said, “The one who I will kiss is the maledom; restrain him and lead him away.” When Judas came, he approached Jesus, said “master,” and pressed his lips up against him. Then the crowd laid their hands on Jesus and tied him down. After an initial struggle his admirers deserted him and fled. Shortly after, a boy escort wearing nothing but a cover of cloth was admiring Jesus. As the crowd of men tried to grapple him, however, he dropped it and streaked off naked.

Why, says Myles, do we assume that Judas' kiss is purely platonic? If it was Mary Magdalene kissing Jesus, there'd be a lot more nudging and winking (and the Dan Brownians would be wolf whistling their hearts out). Not only that, but who's the naked boy? The fact that his nudity's mentioned suggests to Myles that he might be a male prostitute (why would Jesus only hang out with female prostitutes?).

Conclusion
If we think there aren't any sexual undertones in the Bible, maybe it's because we're not looking hard enough. Maybe reading the Bible with dirtier minds would open up whole new levels of meaning, and whole new challenges to our ideas about sexuality, gender, and masculinity. This is especially important with Mark's gospel, which is often used to get ideas about what it means to follow Jesus. Why should Mark Driscoll get to decide what biblical manhood is like? If Myles is right, we need a whole new generation of biblical students with an eye for innuendo. Anyone feel called?

If you like this, Robert J. Myles' blog is here, and the full article is here. For the dirtiest mind in biblical studies, you could check out Roland Boer's blog, which covers biblical erotica, bestiality, and his campaign to get rude articles into respectable academic journals.
Photo credit: Travis S.

From Wimps to Wild Men

From Wimps to Wild Men: Bipolar Masculinity and the Paradoxical Performances of Tom Cruise is by Donna Peberdy. She's interested in the stories we tell about the way masculinity changes over time: some people say 'Once men were real men, but now that are soft and wimpy.' Other people say that masculinity swings like a pendulum from toughness to wimpiness and back again. In the early 90s there was a big move to recover 'lost' masculinity, epitomised by the poet Robert Bly, who wrote a book called Iron John: A Book About Men and organised men-only weekends where blokes got together and did manly things like ritual dances with masks (hm). Bly thought that men had been 'feminised' and it was time to take back the manliness. Peberdy thinks that this fear of losing masculinity has been around in American culture ever since the frontier disappeared: men are often thought to stand for culture over and against 'feminine' nature, and if there's no wild nature to conquer, how can men be men?

Peberdy thinks that the basic opposition is between 'hard' and 'soft' masculinity, and she argues that it's not that we've lost one and replaced it with another, or that when we have too much of one we reach for the other. Masculinity, she argues, is fundamentally bipolar: it is both hard and soft, and hard and soft models of masculinity need each other. We talk as though masculine 'wildness' is inherent, natural, and only bad, feminised culture takes men's manliness away from them, but actually the 'wild man' is always a performance: that's why Bly's men wore masks to dance around the campfire.

Peberdy also thinks that we see this bipolarity of masculinity epitomised quite nicely by Tom Cruise, especially in the film Magnolia where he almost parodies his earlier roles: he plays a self-help author of a book called Seduce and Destroy, and when we first see him he is shouting, butch, and hyper-masculine. Over the course of the film, this persona falls apart, as we find out that his character had to nurse his sick mother when his father left her, and eventually he breaks down and sobs by his father's deathbed. This complexity is mirrored by Cruise's real life: he started out playing classically masculine roles, but there were rumours about his sexuality, increasingly viewed as unstable due to his Scientology, and eventually became a figure of fun when he jumped on Oprah's sofa to declare his love for Katie Holmes. Like his Magnolia character, his hyperactive public performances called into question his masculinity. The lines between performance and reality, masculinity and femininity are begin to look blurrier than we'd like to think. Wild men are wimps and vice versa; like the protagonist of Fight Club, all masculinity is bipolar.

It's interesting how these sorts of narratives get translated into Christian culture: Wild at Heart is the obvious example, but Mark Driscoll's definitely in on it (in a much worse way), and I'm sure there are more examples. What would it look like if we let men be a bit more complicated than the Wild Man/Wimp dichotomy suggests? What's going on when we blame the 'feminisation' of culture for the decline of 'real men'? Answers on a postcard.

Richard Rohr: How to be a man

Richard Rohr is a Catholic priest who writes books which are somewhere between theology and pop psychology. In Adam's Return, he writes about masculinity. He argues that most cultures have initiation rites that they make their boys go through before they can be men - you know, guy stuff like killing wolves, getting tattoos, having your teeth knocked out. He thinks that men are finding life hard these days, and that it's partly because we don't initiate them properly into manhood any more. According to Rohr, there are five lessons that male initiation teaches:

1) Life is hard
2) You are not important.
3) Your life is not about you.
4) You are not in control.
5) You are going to die.

Rohr's idea is that men need initiation and women don't because women's bodies do the initiating for them: menstruation and childbirth teach women the things that men learn from initiation rites. Interesting, this mirrors what the anthropologist Margaret Mead says in her book Male and Female which studies models of gender in different South Sea island tribes and compares them to 1950s America. She argues that girls just become women naturally: it's something that happens to them naturally, and isn't something they have to earn any more than they have to earn their wombs, whereas boys need to earn their masculinity, and men need to have a special thing that only men can have in order to be able to feel manly.

I'm kind of skeptical about the one-genderedness of Rohr's ideas, not least because motherhood is hardly a universal experience for adolescent women, and I for one don't fancy waiting till I pop a sprog to qualify as an adult female. In a society which doesn't mark or even really want to talk about menstruation, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that it marks the transition to womanhood in any significant way. But I really like his five lessons of initiation, and I like the idea that theology has space for those hard truths as well as the fluffy ones. Jesus might be your boyfriend, but maybe he's also going to make you go out and kill a wolf.

Photo credit: David and Emma on Flickr

Camp Chronicles

Roland Boer is an Australian theologian who writes what I guess is a mixture of biblical criticism and critical theory (surprisingly hard to summarise what that is: suffice it to say that it's not a way of thinking usually applied to biblical studies. If you really want to know, Google it. We are in the 21st century, after all, and I won't do all your work for you). He is fun. He also has a new article in the Journal of Men and Masculinities, called 'Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles.' Don't freak out too much about the long words. We'll go slow.

Basically, Boer's idea is this: our ideas of what it means to be male and female aren't eternally fixed. They're constantly changing, and so if you want (as he thinks the writers of Chronicles did) to maintain a particular idea of masculinity which makes men more important than women, you have to keep propping that idea up. There's no single definition of what it means to be 'masculine' or 'feminine', so in every society we have a whole set of tools for defining those terms: actions we do, the words we use, particular ways of talking about the world and about people. But because you have to keep doing or saying all of the things that establish our idea of masculinity, there's always the risk that you might start to subvert it: you might start acting so hyper-masculine that you end up actually being camp. Boer's basic argument is that the books of Chronicles are all about propping up a particular idea of masculinity, and a particular vision of a society where men rule, ok; and his argument is that the whole thing goes so over the top that it starts to fall apart. It's less Chuck Norris or Bruce Willis and more Conan the Barbarian or Flash Gordon.

One of the key elements to Boer's argument is the centrality of the description of the Temple to the books of Chronicles. According to the dimensions given in Chronicles, the temple vestibule would have been twice as high as the whole temple was long. This seems a bit silly, and various commentators have suggested that maybe something's wrong with the text, but Boer thinks that the ridiculous dimensions are exactly the point: they make the temple a big ol' phallus, ‘like some angular cock raised to the heavens with its balls on the ground.’

He also talks about the begats (you see! you shouldn't have skipped them: there's important stuff in there). The Hebrew idiom goes 'Abraham begat Isaac etc.', but the way the verb's used means that it could actually be translated 'Abraham caused to bear Isaac', and because there's no mention of the women it sounds like the men give birth to other men. By excluding the women, the text inadvertently ends up in the same dubiously masculine territory as Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior (That one where Arnie gets pregnant).

Boer also points out that there's an awful lot of information in Chronicles about the duties of the priests, which seem to involve a lot of cooking, cleaning and singing; and an incredible amount of detailed concern with interior design. Just as for us, Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen has somehow failed to achieve the status of 'heterosexual icon', Boer suggests that there's something a bit girly about all of this.

Overall, Boer argues that the books of Chronicles are desperately trying to paint a picture of a deeply masculine world that probably never existed, but that their writers desperately wanted to believe in. But they try so hard that, in the end, their butch male world tips over into something decidedly queerer.