Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Paul, Gender, and Empire in Philippians

Here is a blurb from my upcoming review:
Joseph Marchal, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ball State University, agues in The Politics of Heaven: Women, Gender, and Empire in the Study of Paul that a combined approach of both feminist and postcolonial scholarship that focuses on ‘gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and empire’ provides a more useful overall interpretive framework, referred to as ‘multi-axial’ (3). Furthermore, Marchal hopes to show how ‘Paul’s letters and Pauline scholarship are the results of imperially gendered activities’. Thus, the focus of his work is ‘the interconnections of sexism and imperialism’ (4). Moreover, Marchal argues that current postcolonial biblical scholarship has not given due attention to feminist concerns, whilst Paul’s letters have been under-researched by postcolonial scholars (10). His work then seeks to examine both the rhetorics of Paul’s letter to the Philippians as well as Pauline malestream scholarship in order to determine how both are implicated in the continuation of rhetorics of inequality, injustice, and the dominating use of power.

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