Right now I am drowning in psychoanalytic and gender theory reading for my Henry James class. I feel God is somehow pointing out the fact that this is one of those things I would have never had to encounter if I had chosen to pursue theology in graduate school: the boring novel. Henry James, to make points in his boring novels, is infatuated with italics. Really, quite the shock when you read it for the first time (sorry, I could not locate the sarcastic emoticon). The only thing that makes me laugh when I read James is when he writes what the deuce, and then my reading mind switches from my voice to the voice of Stewie Griffin. So this has been my trade off, the boring novel for Literature, whereas I dare say that the analogous item in the theological realm is the dreaded systematic theology. Even though Henry James is a boring writer, he is a culturally and philosophically provocative writer that touches on class, gender, and sexuality in a fictive way. As I have plunged into the literary theory of sexuality in Freud, Lacan, Butler, Sedgwick, Mulvey, and other theorists, what has struck me about the peculiarities of their views, as well as their criticisms of the present age's repression of sexuality, is the fact that there are no major Christians working in gender and sexuality as seminal work---there are many Christians working in family studies, sociology, counseling, psychology, psychiatry, etc., but when sex is discussed it is always in the context of the family---which I think is appropriate to the majority of discussions concerning sexuality and gender issues/roles (a post for another time). However, what I find to be despairing is that there is really no internal work on sexuality as it functions as a literary device within the Scriptures---what does sexuality mean for the narrative, for hermeneutics, for our view of God (who is not signified masculine, only represented through a masculine signifier, just to clarify). Sex is everywhere in the Bible and accomplishes, literarily, much in the movement of plot and metaphorical discovery within the text and intertextually.

I by no means feel the need, right now, to begin mapping out what a study of the literary nature of sexuality in the Bible would bring about that is a study within the narrative itself and not of the prescriptive nature of hermeneutics or doctrine: sexual customs, mores, and morals of the Christian as derived from Scripture. We have enough people talking about those types of things---but what about the sexuality, the gender of characters, and the (sexual) desire of characters in the biblical stories as a part of the literary criticism of the Scriptures?

***Postscript***
[10:40pm 6/20] I am indeed woefully stuck in the evangelical side of things, which will be discussed in an upcoming post I have been thinking through on why on earth am I an evangelical when I don't run in their circles. So, anyone who would like to point me in the right direction, as Solideogratia has, would be given many thanks!