“But where is the tweaking, thwacking, thumping, sliming, and rubbing you might have expected–or dreaded–in a paper on sex?”: Sex in Public in The Song of Songs
The Song of Songs contains a great deal of (heterosexual) sex. But there are moments when text’s hegemonic heterosexuality and focus on the male-female couple is interrupted, as when the Shulamite speaks to her female companions. What do these moments signify? One way to read them is as a mode of “sex in public” — that is, sex as mediated by publics, as elaborated in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s classic essay “Sex in Public.” Centering sex in public The Song illustrates how the text challenges the limits of identity and intelligibility and offers a possibility for queer counterpublics. Sex and sexual intimacy are performed for and in front of others, both in the world of the text (the watchman scenes, the daughters of Jerusalem) and in our relations to it. Figurations of the grotesque in The Song offer another configuration of sex in public (erotic vomiting is, after all, one of the marquis examples in Berlant and Warner’s essay), as does the refusal of reproduction or even normative heterokinship structures. In the second half of the paper, I will explore some of the risks that attend sex in public, both as a reading practice in the context of The Song of Songs and as a political and ethical practice more broadly.
Rhiannon Graybill is W.J. Millard Professor of Religion and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and is currently writing a queer feminist study of biblical women, entitled Texts after Terror. She is also co-authoring a commentary on The Book of Jonah and co-editing several volumes, including Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We ever Got our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood.