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date: 10 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

What is the place of the New Testament and early Christianity in the history of gender and sexuality? This essay explores this question in conversation with feminist and queer theory. It considers the terminology of sex, gender, sexual difference, sex acts, and sexuality both as theoretical concepts and in relation to New Testament and Early Christian Studies. It then surveys the question of ancient androcentrism and the methodological problem posed by the so-called linguistic turn, arguing that the ongoing study of gender and sexuality in the New Testament and early Christianity will, of necessity, continue to be a prismatic, if contested, exercise in writing “the history of the present.”

Keywords: New Testament, early Christianity, sex, gender, sexuality, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, feminist biblical scholarship, androcentrism

Benjamin H. Dunning

Benjamin H. Dunning is Professor of Theology, Comparative Literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, New York, NY, and Bronx, NY.

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