Her-esy
Presentations and Publications
'Falling for the Devil: Telling Tales of Two Subversive Sisters – Eve and the Witch'
Ehrhardt Seminar, University of Manchester - 6 May 2021
This paper represents research inspired first, by the contemporary political landscape, and in particular feminist protest culture, and second, the habit Western culture has had for telling tales about two transgressive female figures, Eve, and the Witch. More specifically, this paper is about two female figures, created by male authors, each of whom, according to popular retellings of their stories in Western patriarchal culture, ends up falling for the devil…. And two female figure who have also been appropriated and allied in powerful and creative ways by feminist activists and agents throughout the history of the Women’s Movement, from the nineteenth century onwards.
'Serpentine Saviours and Woke Women: When the Satanic Witch Met Eve in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina'
Cultural Bibles in Popular Visual Entertainment (Scriptural Traces; London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming)
Genesis 1-3 is one of the most popular stories of all time. It is both the biblical story about God’s creation of gender and sexuality, but also one of our cultural texts that has been used to create ideals about femininity and masculinity through the ages. Adam, Eve, and the snake – who in Christian culture came to be interchangeable with Satan from around the second century CE onwards – have been used to think with about women and men, sex, and sin, for centuries. Very frequently, the texts have been used to support damaging theological, political, and cultural ideals, and have been appropriated by writers and artists to support patriarchal notions concerning proper, ‘natural’ gender roles. In this chapter I want to focus on the ways in which contemporary popular visual culture has begun to challenge this legacy, by reflecting on the ways in which the figures of Eve and Lilith appear in the 2018 Netflix television show, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and by doing so reflect also on how these new characterisations of biblical women might be used to think with about notions of femininity and freedom today.
(Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
Encountering Eve's Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4 aims to destabilize the persistently pessimistic framing of Eve as a highly negative symbol of femininity within Western culture by engaging with marginal, and even heretical, interpretations that focus on more positive aspects of her character. In doing so, this book questions the myth that orthodox, popular readings represent the 'true' meaning of the first woman's story, and explores the possibility that previously ignored or muted rewritings of Eve are in fact equally 'valid' interpretations of the biblical text.
By staging encounters between the biblical Eve and re-writings of her story, particularly those that help to challenge the interpretative status quo, this book re-frames the first woman using three key themes from her story: sin, knowledge, and life. Thus, it considers how and why the image of Eve as a dangerous temptress has gained considerably more cultural currency than the equally viable pictures of her as a subversive wise woman or as a mourning mother.
The book offers a re-evaluation of the meanings and the myths of Eve, deconstructing the dominance of her cultural incarnation as a predominantly flawed female, and reconstructing a more nuanced presentation of the first woman's role in the Bible and beyond.
‘Judgement was executed upon her, and she became a byword among women’ (Ezek. 23.10): Divine Revenge Porn, Slut-shaming, Ethnicity and Exile in Ezekiel 16 and 23'
Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Katherine Southwood and Martien Halvorson-Taylor (LHBOTS; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2017)
Ezekiel 16 and 23, two “marriage metaphor” texts, have frequently drawn critical attention from feminist biblical scholars due to their inclusion of shocking, retributive violence against the personified Samaria and Jerusalem, the “wives” of Yahweh. This chapter aims to develop an ethnicity-focused feminist approach to reading Ezekiel’s deployment of sexualized imagery of the two female cities, whose “whoring” with foreign men and subsequent divinely decreed punishment by mutilation and public stripping serves as a figurative explanation of the conquest and ultimately the exile of Israel and Judah. Additionally, it will also argue that the description of God’s punishment of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16, and Samaria and Jerusalem in Ezekiel 23, functions as a form of divine “revenge porn” and “slut-shaming” that points toward the “reality” of life during the exilic period.
'The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement'
The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field. Edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Anna Fisk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
In this chapter I examine the ways in which female writers and protesters have appropriated the Bible’s first woman in their challenges to female subordination in patriarchal culture, and in their own articulation of what it is to be ‘Woman’. In particular I focus on the significance of the figure of Eve in thehistory of feminism to demonstrate the importance of women’svoices in the Bible’s reception, as well as to explore the impactGenesis 2–3 has had on the women’s movement. Thus I reflecton the symbiotic relationship between women’s writing andwomen’s material culture and the biblical text, consideringsome of the interpretative strategies used within them todemonstrate that not only have women’s readings frequentlyworked to reject negative, derogatory images of the woman inGenesis 2–3 but that they have also actively appropriated andrewritten Eve as their champion rather than their curse.
'What’s in a Name? Analysing the Appellation “Reception History” in Biblical Studies'
Biblical Reception 3 (2015)
This paper offers an analytical reflection on the reception theory/biblical studies relationship. In particular, it focuses on the issues surrounding the popular use of ‘reception history’ as an umbrella term for studies on the reception, interpretation, influence, and impact of the Bible carried out within the field of biblical studies. Exploring the roots of reception theory in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Robert Jauss, and Wolfgang Iser, I argue that their hermeneutical insights offer a rich resource for biblical studies. In view of the broad spectrum of literary and historically focused modes of approaching the reception and influence of texts offered by these three theorists, I suggest that ‘reception history’—a term predominantly associated with Jaussian methodology—does not satisfactorily describe the diversity of reception studies that have been conducted within biblical studies in the last twenty years. Instead, I advocate ‘reception criticism’ as a preferable term for describing the application of reception theory by biblical scholars, and explore the different modes of studying biblical reception that this might potentially encompass. The paper concludes by locating ‘reception criticism’ within the wider field of biblical studies, especially in relation to its compatibility with historical criticism.