By Harold Veeser
Following Clifford Geertz and different cultural anthropologists, the hot Historicist critics have advanced a mode for describing tradition in motion. Their "thick descriptions" grab upon an occasion or anecdote--colonist John Rolfe's dialog with Pocohontas's father, a observe discovered between Nietzsche's papers to the impression that "I have misplaced my umbrella"--and re-read it to bare in the course of the research of tiny details the cause forces controlling a complete society. participants: Stephen J. Greenblatt, Louis A. Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gerald Graff, Jean Franco, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frank Lentricchia, Vincent Pecora, Jane Marcus, Jon Klancher, Jonathan Arac, Hayden White, Stanley Fish, Judith Newton, Joel Fineman, John Schaffer, Richard Terdiman, Donald Pease, Brooks Thomas.
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Sample text
While I agree that Perpetua undergoes an oneiric transformation that allows her to fight as a gladiator in the arena, in my view, she does not become male. Rather, she transcends the binary gender categories that dictate that women cannot be gladiators by redefining the categories themselves: as a woman, she becomes male, inhabiting both genders at once. This reading is further supported by the sentence’s diction: “masculus” is translated by Heffernan (and most other English translators of the Passio) as a substantive, an adjective which grammatically functions as a noun within the sentence.
Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 511: “Translated for a specific analysis of gender, I am suggesting that an apophatic sensibility shows us that we must always be recreating what we mean by gender, always 42 M. COTTER-LYNCH 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. theoretically and practically working to undo the genders we perform, never accepting any form of bodily signification as either accurate or complete. 512–513. Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no.
COTTER-LYNCH martyrs such as herself simultaneously inhabit both genders, perhaps even eradicating the relevance of gender as a category in the face of Christian eschatology. In Perpetua’s fourth vision, she is escorted from prison by the deacon Pomponius, who leads her to the amphitheater where she knows she is to be martyred. Once there, Pomponius reassures her and departs, leaving her in the middle of the arena, watched by the crowd. Then, she tells us (with Heffernan’s translation, emphasis mine): Et expoliata sum, et facta sum masculus, et coeperunt me favisores mei oleo defricare, quomodo solent in agone; et illum contra Egyptium video in afa colunantem.