Browsing by Subject "virginity"
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Item Open Access Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity(2017) Lillis, Julia Linnea KeltoThis dissertation examines ancient conceptualizations of female virginity. Giving particular attention to early Christian sources, I challenge the common assumption that virginity was a uniform concept in antiquity. In contrast to scholars’ tendency to treat virginity as a familiar and static concept in early Christian texts, I show that different writers construe it in different ways, often without including notions that modern readers have treated as universal—such as the idea that virginal women have intact hymens or the idea that virginity can be verified by medical inspection.
The early chapters of this dissertation emphasize the diversity of conceptualizations that can be found among ancient groups and thinkers. Surveying a wide range of pre- and non-Christian sources from various ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions, I show that these societies distinguished between female “virgins” and “women” but did so in a number of different ways, using “virginity” as a category for age, marital status, and more. Christians thus could work with a variety of ideas and assumptions when they wrote at length on virginity. An examination of second- and third-century writings about Jesus’ mother Mary reveals that the Christian authors of these texts held divergent opinions about what virginity is; they not only give different verdicts about whether Mary could be considered a virgin after giving birth, but employ different definitions of virginity in their answers to this question. A long central chapter identifies commonalities and significant differences between four fourth-century authors who wrote in Greek, Syriac, or Latin (Basil of Ancrya, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, and Ambrose of Milan). This comparison demonstrates that writers who utilized similar terminology and themes could construct surprisingly different configurations of the concept of virginity, especially the idea of “bodily” virginity.
The later chapters of this dissertation focus on developments in virginity discourse at the turn from the fourth to the fifth century C.E. and afterward. Unlike earlier sources, texts of this time indicate a widespread belief that virginity can be perceived in anatomical features of the female body. I draw on Christian, Jewish, medical, and encyclopedic sources to chart the shift, and I consider the relationship between belief in anatomical virginity and the social institutions of marriage, the sex trade, the slave trade, and Christian consecrated virginity. Turning to a Christian author who became especially influential in later periods (Augustine of Hippo), I provide a new reading of his discussions of virginity and chastity in the work City of God, exploring the tensions that the notion of anatomical virginity produces within his thinking. My analysis underscores the difficulties that emerged in Christian thought on virginity when writers both viewed virginity as an anatomical state and sought to promote it as a moral and spiritual state. I conclude that early Christians and their neighbors in the Mediterranean world held a variety of views on what female virginity is, and that the ideas of hymenal intactness and gynecological virginity testing did not become common until very late antiquity. In my concluding chapter, I offer brief observations about the connections between ancient conceptualizations of virginity and virginity’s meanings and value in present-day societies.
Item Open Access Virgin Territory: Theology, Purity, and the Rise of the Global Sex Trade(2016) Adkins, Amey VictoriaSex sells. A lot. But who exactly is on the market?
What kinds of bodies are calibrated for traffic and consumption, and how exactly do they get there? When it comes to “sex” trafficking—which comprises a minority percentage of human trafficking, yet dominates the moral imagination as an “especially heinous” crime—the rise in predominantly white, evangelical Christian American interest in the trafficked subject galvanizes an ethical outrage that rarely observes critiques of race, ethnicity, sexuality or class as conditions of possibility. Though a nuanced mandate to fight trafficking is all but cemented in the contemporary American political and moral conscience, Virgin Territory accounts for the ways Christian ideas of purity annex both gender and sexuality inside the legacies of racialized colonial encounter, and foreground the market expansion of the global sex trade as it exists today.
In Part I, I argue that the narratives of virginity tied to Mary’s body simultaneously foregrounded the gendered, sexed Other as sparked disdain for the religious Other, for the Jewish body and for Mary’s Jewish identity. Through this analysis I explore the connections of racial identity to the Christian theological elision of Jewish election. I demonstrate how the questions of sexual ethics materialized at the site of the Virgin Mary, and align the moral attachments of sex and purity in the production of whiteness. These machinations, tied to the emerging European identity of empire, irrupt horrifically into the narrative ontology of dark flesh in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
In Part II, I highlight the function of these narratives inside of the moments of colonial encounter, demonstrating how the logics of purity and virginity were directly applied to manage dark female flesh. I map the visual iconography of the Black Madonna first through a Dutch painting entitled The Rape of the Negress. I read this image through the social theological imagination instantiating the idea of the reprobate body and white imperial gaze. This analysis foregrounds a theological reading of Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” as the center of a complex sex trafficking investigation, outlining the genealogy of race, as well as the ideologies of the racial, ethnic and national Other, as mitigating factors in the conditions of possibility of a global sex trade. By restoring these narratives and their theological undertones, I reiterate the ways Christian thought is imbricated in the global sex trade, and propose theological strategies for rethinking humanitarian responses to sex trafficking.