| |
| author |
Elizabeth Siegelman
| | title |
Whose Gotta Have It? Race, Gender, and Violence in the Song of Songs
| | abstract |
The biblical Song of Songs presents an erotic world punctuated by interludes of violence.
What role does this violence play in constructing the narrative world of the Song of
Songs? What group(s) benefit from the violence? Is the violence reflective of the post-
exilic community's psychosocial anxieties? In what ways do race, gender, and spatial
location affect how certain bodies are perceived and treated within this narrative world?
And, how and why do similar acts of violence appear in modern American culture?
Several analogues exist between the world of the Song and America's sexual and racial
landscape, in that that both worlds are composed of the intersecting social structures of
ethnocentrism/racism, sexism, and patriarchy. In order to illustrate these cultural and
structural similarities this project engages a bi-directional approach, using the unnamed
woman as a lens through which to read the violence perpetrated against modern black
women, and vice-versa. In order to do this, this project begins with a primer on the
Song's genre, cultural provenance, and history of interpretation. Acknowledging but
moving away from traditional allegorical interpretations, this study engages the Song's
overt sexual language and the social issues of gender, race/class, and space that its scenes
of violence imply. Next, this project considers the poem's application of specific verbiage
and character conventions in its portrayal of the unnamed woman as a transgressive
"other." Building upon her figuration as "other," the penultimate chapter compares the
violence inflicted upon the unnamed woman in the domestic (1:6) and public spheres
(5:7) to the similar instances of violence perpetrated against Spike Lee's character, Nola
Darling in the 1986 and 2017 films She's Gotta Have It. Ultimately this project shows the
resonances between the Song's violent inscription of a gendered social dynamic
reflective of post-exilic Israel's vassal submission and modern instances of race-and
gender-based violence in America that reflect a culture rooted in racism and sexism.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
Ph.D. (2020)
|
| advisor |
Danna Nolan Fewell
|
| committee |
Danna Nolan Fewell
Traci West
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre
|
| full text | ESiegelman.pdf |
| |
