Sexism, Misogyny, and the Usefulness of Terms: Reading The Song of Songs After #MeToo
Feminist scholarship of The Song of Songs has long seen the poem as a celebration of femininity, a kind of subversive enclave from the pervasive androcentrism of the biblical texts. And yet, as J. Cheryl Exum and others have rightly pointed out, the text is not immune from the dynamics and discourse of patriarchy. This paper will consider what kind of terms are useful for addressing the forms of domination that remain stubbornly evident in The Song. I will engage the work of contemporary feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who argues that the distinction between “sexism” and “misogyny” sheds analytical insight on the pervasive experiences of women and women-identified persons in patriarchal contexts. The Song meets her criteria of “misogyny” insofar as it offers evidence of a regulatory or “punishing” dimension of feminine experience. The contemporary context of #MeToo serves as a powerful—and disturbing—reminder of the ways in which women’s experiences are shaped by vulnerability to sexual (and sexualized) gendered aggression. Manne’s work offers terminological clarity that helps to explain the conundrum of how a text so celebratory of female eroticism also witnesses to and encodes gendered forms of domination.
Elaine T. James is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the author of Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Biblical Poetry and the Art of Close Reading (Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as the author of articles on poetry, gender, and land. She is currently working on a handbook of biblical poetry. She holds the MDiv and the PhD in Old Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary. As of July 1, she will be Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.