Customer Reviews

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

According to John Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the Christian tradition was not anti-gay until the late middle ages. Professor Brooten's book makes us revisit that argument and rethink the hegemony of Boswell's thesis in gay circles. Her critique of Boswell's reading of Romans 1 is telling and accurate.

Brooten's book is a very tight and carefully argued presentation of Christian tradition as anti-gay and (especially) anti-lesbian from the outset. The wider context of this argument is fascinating. It includes translations of spells and other original material never seen before. No one interested in gay or lesbian history can neglect this study!

This book, as one can tell from the title, explores "early Christian responses to" what Brooten calls "female homoeroticism." By "female homoeroticism" Brooten means women who were somehow sexually involved with other women, either in longer-term relationships, or simply in a sexual way independent of any long-term relationship. One of the most important things to say about this book is that it examines texts and brings together a large amount of research and analysis that has never been brought together before and, in that sense, it is ground breaking. Her work on Romans 1:26 is, I believe, some of the best out there. It is an important book for those interested in how female/female sexual interaction might have been understood in the time of early Christianity. This is not a book that most "everyday" readers might want to read from cover-to-cover. It is an academic book, and should be of interested to scholars of early Christianity/biblical scholars and those interested the history of sexuality. That said, "everyday" folks who might be interested in this could read parts of the book and find it very interesting and enlightening, while skipping over the translations of obscure documents or inscriptions and such. Although another reviewer noted that this shows that Christianity has been "anti-gay" from the beginning, I'm afraid that is not really what this book does. An important part of this book argues that what we today understand as "gay" or "lesbian" does not closely resemble what females being sexually involved with other females or males being sexually involved with other males looked like thousands of years ago. Brooten does show, however, that females being sexually involved with other females in antiquity was often looked down upon, although the reasons for that are different than the reasons lesbians are often discriminated against today. I would like to have seen Brooten differentiate between "love" between women and "sexual relationships" between women -- she seems to operate under the assumption that these automatically or almost always come together. I also would have preferred that she change the wording in her closing which suggests that "the idea of homosexuality" existed in antiquity. While she makes good arguments that particular sexual preferences and inclinations toward certain kinds of people existed in antiquity, to say that "homosexuality" or "the idea of homosexuality" existed in antiquity is to be too casual with the use of the 19th/20th/21st century construct of homosexuality. As for the review that gave this book only one star -- this book was reviewed in, at the least, a somewhat positive light in nearly all the academic journals which reviewed it. While there are, as with almost all books, some weaknesses, to give it just one star is to absurd. At the least, this book does some exciting and never-before-done work which is always valuable, even if it isn't perfect.

Brooten is my favourite lesbian scholar, she is very honest, which I respect, unlike other other pro-gay scholars. 1996 Academic treatment. Brooten gives a very useful annotated bibliography on Rom 1:26ff and NT and homosexuality generally. Also she has a detailed commentary on Rom 1:18-32 (p 215-302). She does rely too much on the misogyny argument, but that is not what Paul is talking about, even if that is what the Hellenistic society believed. If one looks at 1 Cor 7:3-4, Paul is not misogynistic; he is quite egalitarian for a man and a woman within the marriage bed. Even Paul allows sexual freedom for a man and a woman within the marriage bed.

This book aptly demonstrates why biblical scholars are generally not yet ready to address the topic of ancient sexuality: They are clueless. I aim most of my invective against part one of Brooten's study: the ancient Greek and Roman background of female-female erotics. Brooten's main problem is that she does not understand (1) the nature of her primary texts or (2) the social construction of sexuality. The medical and astrological texts she attempts to analyze explain EVERYTHING via medicine and the stars; therefore, it is pointless to try and deduce very much about social constructionism from them. John Winkler makes this point well in _The Constraints of Desire_. Her essentializing conclusions are therefore invalid. The best book on female-female sex and erotics in Antiquity when I originally wrote this review was Juan Francisco Martos Montiel's _Desde Lesbos con amor_, a very strangely ignored study. I suppose Anglo and Germanic scholars consider Spanish beneath them. Now, the best book would have to be _Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World_, a collection of essays edited by Nancy Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger that actually does acknowledge Martos Montiel's book as one of the major previous studies in the field. [UPDATE: The best book by far would now be Sandra Boehringer's _L'Homosexualité féminine dans l'Antiquité grecque et romaine_ (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007).] The tirade of part two of Brooten's book does nothing but rehash the traditional view. She therefore repeats the error of anachronistically reading very late notions of "nature" and "natural law" into early Christian texts by confusing a mishmash of disparate texts and theories from several different cultures, subcultures, and historical periods into one miraculously unified and coherent "natural law." I tell you, she makes even the best magician look like an amateur. What she fails to do, however, is convince.Why are biblical scholars so bad at this type of research? I have observed that, even when they are familiar with a fair portion of the secondary literature, biblical scholars just don't understand the arguments. Why is that, then? It seems biblical scholars are still caught up in a long-outdated mode of scholarship, one ill-equipped to handle later forms of social and cultural history, especially when involving a good dose of theory, as LGBT historical studies inevitably do.

By the way, regarding the book's critical reception, David Halperin has had some very interesting things to say in his book, _How to Do the History of Homosexuality_. The controversy and shady dealings surrounding Brooten, as well as another scholar by the name of Amy Richlin, are also addressed in Halperin's _Saint Foucault_. I highly recommend a careful read of both texts. Brooten is hardly as "original" as she and her friends think that she is, nor is she above rhetorical name-calling to distract from the weakness of her arguments. Interestingly, although the authors of the essays in Rabinowitz and Auanger's book positively mention Brooten's book at every turn, they tend not to adopt its main conclusions--VERY interesting, if you ask me.

In short, there are far more weaknesses to Brooten's book and thinking than strengths--assuming there are any strengths worth noting, at all. I have severe doubts on that last point.