Queering The Ethiopian Eunuch (emerging Scholars)
by Sean D. Burke /
2013 / English / PDF
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Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as
florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted
court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the
Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why
does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs
as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have
received dramatically different answers over the centuries of
Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular
stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well
as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to
resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized
figure at a key place in the narrative—as the gospel has expanded
beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named—in such a
way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense,
Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations
and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new
community.
Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as
florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted
court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the
Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why
does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs
as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have
received dramatically different answers over the centuries of
Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular
stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well
as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to
resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized
figure at a key place in the narrative—as the gospel has expanded
beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named—in such a
way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense,
Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations
and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new
community.