The Hybrid Song between Religious Communities and ‘Secular’ States
The Song of Songs is a performance of unstable metamorphoses and transubstantiations. It performs a synaesthetic break-down of the senses, dissolving the human body into the animal, fluid/liquid, and worlds that are natural and man-made. The history of interpretation has established excruciatingly anxious hyphens of connection (and transformation) between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane and the human and the divine. Taking my cue from the hybridity of The Song and the tortured history of its interpretation, I look at how this very strange representative of ‘the Bible’ (and all that is assumed to lie under the heading of ‘the Bible’, including, above all, ‘family values’), maps onto the rapidly transforming relations between what we call ‘religion’ and what we call ‘sexuality’. I look at how The Song (that private space, that is nevertheless haunted by the watchmen and spectres of the law) can speak to the volatile and accelerated changes in legitimate/lawful sexual identities and practices. Focusing on the (pardon the term) hysteria over birth control in the modern period, I argue that, contra histories of a specifically ‘Christian’ or ‘religious’ repression of the body, above all the female body, this demonization of religion masks the obsession with the policing of female sexual desire that has been so integral to the modern ‘secular’ state.
Yvonne Sherwood has degrees in English Literature, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies (Hebrew Bible, PhD, 1995). Having taught for over twenty years at the University of Sheffield, King’s College London, Roehampton University, and the University of Glasgow, she moved to establish a new PhD programme in Biblical Studies at the University of Kent in January 2013. She was appointed as the Speakers Lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2015 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oslo in 2017. In 2018 she was visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the ZfL in Berlin. Publications include Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the American Academy Awards for Excellence Book Prize; The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (with Stephen D. Moore; Fortress, 2011); and The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her current research projects are on the politics of migration and the figure of the ‘resident alien’ (a project that sets out from the figure of Hagar) and the politics of blasphemy.