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16 Days of Activism – Day 16: Meredith Minister

by Meredith Minister on

Meredith Minister, Assistant Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University, talks to us on the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign about her work on religion and sexual violence. Meredith works closely with fellow academic activists Rhiannon Graybill and Beatrice Lawrence. They have a forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books), which will be profiled on this blog in January.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

I’m Meredith Minister, Assistant Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University. I also teach courses in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Shenandoah.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

I am involved with gender activism in my scholarship, on campus, and in the community.

My recent scholarship has been focused on addressing sexual violence on college campuses by providing a better theoretical framework for prevention and response. This project has been ongoing for several years and has included presentations on trigger warnings and a critique of existing approaches to sexual violence including consent and bystander intervention. I also attended a NEH seminar this summer on diverse philosophical approaches to sexual violence led by Ann Cahill at Elon University. In my forthcoming book, I explore how rape culture is learned through cultural, religious, institutional, and legal processes and argue for deep and ongoing pedagogical interventions that offer possibilities for unlearning rape culture. This book is titled Rape Culture on Campus and is forthcoming from Lexington next year.

Beatrice and Rhiannon have been faithful conversation partners for this work and Rhiannon’s interview describes the ways we’ve collaborated so far and where you can find our work!

On campus, I have worked with students to promote better structures for preventing sexual violence and for responding to specific instances of sexual violence. I have also worked with faculty by developing and offering a workshop on teaching about sexual violence in partnership with our Title IX office here at Shenandoah.

Finally, off campus, I work with the Valley Equality Project, a community organization that serves the Winchester community by working to make our community safer for and more inclusive of LGBTQ+ persons.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

 I think The Shiloh Project is doing really important work and I’ve enjoyed reading about the other scholars featured in this series. Scholarship is so often presented as an isolated endeavor but I think the kinds of academic work we’re doing, including challenging engrained cultural assumptions, really requires collective work and imagination. Not only can we learn from one another, but we also find validation and commiseration when things get messy (as they sometimes do when you come out against sexual violence).

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

 In my forthcoming book, I argue that the classroom can be a space where we can begin to unlearn engrained patterns of rape culture. This unlearning goes beyond simplistic interventions such as consent education and bystander intervention. These interventions depend on an understanding of human beings as autonomous individuals and fail to connect rape culture to other cultural assumptions such as white supremacy and institutions such as the prison industrial complex. Rather than creating responses to sexual violence that perpetuate these individualistic assumptions, I hope to draw on understandings of human beings as fragile and relational in order to rethink existing responses to sexual violence. I do this theoretical work in my scholarship in part because it energizes my resistance to gender-based violence on campus and in the community.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 16: Beatrice Lawrence

by Beatrice Lawrence on

To mark the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Beatrice Lawrence, an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. Beatrice works closely with fellow academic activists Rhiannon Graybill and Meredith Minister on religion and gender-based violence. Look out for their forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books).

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

I’m an assistant professor at Seattle University, where I teach courses on the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, often cross-listed with Women and Gender Studies. I love my job; I think the material at the heart of my career is fascinating and important, and it’s wonderful to see students realize that as well. My research is eclectic, ranging from rabbinics to rape culture. A consistent thread, however, is that of pushing boundaries.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

 I grew up in a staunchly feminist household. My mother was an activist, going on marches and serving as the president of Idaho’s National Organization for Women. (Yes. Idaho.) She would take us with her, she would talk about it with us, and my father was just as engaged. Feminism was and is an integrated and central element of our family dialect, and I’m incredibly grateful: I have always been motivated to see and name gender-based injustice and violence. It is only natural that it would be a part of my work, and the way I parent my daughters.

I’ve always been involved in community and pedagogical work around sexual assault, by creating workshops, engaging in mindful teaching practices, and supporting activist groups. But a few years ago, I was blessed to meet my colleagues and friends, Rhiannon Graybill and Meredith Minister, at a Wabash workshop. We came to realize we shared a concern about sexual assault on college campuses, as well as the conviction that the culture surrounding it needed to be identified and named. Its intersection with our work in Bible and theology fueled our desire to create sophisticated yet accessible means to discuss it. Thus was born our work together, writing and teaching about rape culture.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

 I’m grateful for the chance to connect with the wonderful people at The Shiloh Project to mutually promote each other’s work. We share a commitment to relevant, rigorous scholarship on gender-based inequality and violence, and a desire to have an impact in the academy as well as outside it. We are publishing a volume on rape culture and religious studies (due out late 2018), and look forward to sharing it in this context as well. The feminist ethic of collaboration and care is present in the work of The Shiloh Project: let’s work together, support each other, and make a difference.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

I’m loud, angry, and active—and I plan to continue being thus.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 16: Rhiannon Graybill

by Rhiannon Graybill on

On the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Rhiannon Graybill, an Assistant Professor at Rhodes College, who works closely with fellow academic activists Beatrice Lawrence and Meredith Minister on gender-based violence. Look out for their forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books).

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Rhiannon Graybill and I’m an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. At Rhodes, I am also the director of the interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

I’m involved in gender activism in a number of ways. One of my major goals as director of Gender and Sexuality Studies is promoting scholarly work and campus awareness around gender. At Rhodes, I’ve organized events on feminism and surveillance, sexual violence on campus, and abortion activism, and I’m now working on a trans film festival event. The program also sponsors an undergraduate research symposium and a faculty scholarship group.

I’m also involved in gender activism in my research. My book, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets is about masculinity, but to me this is always a feminist concern. Are We Not Men? uses feminist and queer theory to think about the male bodies of prophets and to understand the ways in which prophecy transforms masculinity and embodiment. My next book is a study of queer feminist readings of biblical women.

I also work specifically on sexual violence, especially in collaboration with Meredith and Beatrice. The three of us met at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, when we were part of Teaching and Learning a Workshop for Pre-Tenure Religion Faculty. We not only got along really well, but we realized we were all deeply concerned about sexual violence on campus, and working to address it in different ways. We started collaborating, beginning with a workshop for our peers at the Wabash Center and coordinating some on-campus activities (I organized a workshop for my colleagues about teaching about rape in the Bible and classical literature). Then we put together a couple of publications, one for Teaching Theology and Religion and one for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. We also organized a panel at the AAR/SBL Annual meeting in 2016. Now we’re co-editing a volume entitled Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives with Lexington Books.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

I’m so excited about The Shiloh Project! These issues are so important, and we need as many people working on them and talking about them as possible. It’s also really exciting to me to be able to be involved in international conversations around these issues, as I’m mostly familiar with the U.S. context. We have some peculiarities to our system, like the way that Title IX (the federal law about equal access in education that’s used to justify a lot of sexual violence policies) works. Thinking globally helps us gain perspective, as well as think about possible alternatives. I’m also really interested in The Shiloh Project’s work on popular culture, as well as spiritualism and transphobia. I can’t wait to see what you all produce!

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

 This is the time to do it! Things have seemed pretty terrible on a gender front in the U.S. lately, but in a funny way I’m heartened by the outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations in the media and politics. I think it’s possible this might lead to some change. At the very least, people in authority are beginning to hear what we’ve been saying for decades – longer than that! I also think popular culture provides an interesting, if complicated, feminist space. I’m going to keep studying and teaching about it; I think teaching students is one great avenue for feminist activism.

Follow the links to read more of Rhiannon’s work on sexual violence:

Sexual Violence in and around the Classroom (a piece the three of us wrote for Teaching Theology and Religion).

 

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16 Days of Activism – Day 15: Jessica Keady

by Jessica Keady on

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I am Dr Jessica M. Keady and I am a Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David (Lampeter). I currently teach and supervise on topics related to the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism to both undergraduate and postgraduate students on a variety of degree programmes. I am also research active, and my main research interests are based on Second Temple Jewish texts and their ancient/social context. I am particularly interested in the portrayal of gender in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the constructions of Jewish purity and impurity laws. My first monograph, Vulnerability and Valour: A Gendered Analysis of Everyday Life in the Dead Sea Scrrolls has recently been published (Library of Second Temple Studies 91, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) used theories from Gender Studies to investigate the purity texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

I take an active interest in the promotion of The Shiloh Project’s significant work on Social Media. I have recently contributed to The Shiloh Project Blog – Rape Culture Discourse and Female Impurity: Genesis 34 as a Case Study and I am following the work that the project is undertaking and thinking of future collaborative plans between Sheffield, Leeds and Lampeter to foster further interdisciplinary dialogue amongst wonderful colleagues and friends.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your research and teaching?

The Shiloh Project is important to my research as it enables me to question and interpret difficult biblical texts in a safe environment. A larger version of the blog post is being published in the forthcoming volume, Rape Culture, Gender Violence and Religion (ed. Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan and Katie Edwards).
As a new lecturer, I am also preparing material for forthcoming modules that I will be teaching next academic year on Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World and I can envisage The Shiloh Project as being an excellent online resource for students to reflect on and use in their wider reading and understanding.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 

The increase in reports of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation, press coverage, and social media campaigns need to be encased in a wider rape culture framework, that primarily considers the survivors’ perspectives, and also monitors the comments and possible backlash that he/she experiences from the general public. The Shiloh Project’s work is, arguably, needed now more than ever to demonstrate the importance of researching the phenomenon of rape culture, throughout history and within contemporary society.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

Now that I have secured my first lectureship, I am keen on fostering future collaborations between the UWTSD and The Shiloh Project, especially in relation to the teaching of sexually violent biblical texts. I am also working with two of the Project Directors, Dr Katie Edwards and Dr Johanna Stiebert (and Dr Meredith Warren), on a future journal article series that is focused on Gender and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 14: Alison Joseph

by Alison Joseph on

For Day 14 of the 16 Days of Activism, we profile Alison Joseph, researcher in the Hebrew Bible.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I am Alison Joseph. I received my PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. I am currently the assistant managing editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. I write about the Hebrew Bible, specifically about the contextual factors that contributed to the ways in which biblical text was written.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

When the blog took off last the summer, I knew I wanted to be involved somehow. I wrote an early post about Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its interpretation of Genesis. Besides the access to a wide audience (more than 3000 views in 48 hours), it was retweeted by author @MargaretAtwood herself. AMAZING!

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

I didn’t set out for activism to be a part of my scholarly life; I actually tried to avoid it. I was trained in a somewhat conventional, historical-critical model, and I intentionally tried to stay away from contemporary meanings of the biblical text because I often found them to be parochial. I spent many years living in the world of the Deuteronomistic History and writing about the composition of the book of Kings. After spending two years teaching courses in Religion and Ethics, I think some of the course prep reading starting sinking in, making me consider the ways in which we regard and teach the biblical text, and in particular the stories about women and those involving sexual assault. The ethical issues I was dealing with in class made it impossible to continue to exclusively read these stories in the context of ancient Israelite society. The biblical narrative, for the most part, is not sufficiently reactive to episodes of sexual violence. It is somewhat commonplace and not a focus of the goals of the text. I found, it’s not enough to say, “That’s the way it was back then!” The Shiloh Project highlights the absence of recognition in the text, taking our preconceived notions and blowing them apart.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 

The Bible is filled with misogyny, sexual exploitation, and violence against women (I’m not saying that’s all there is—there’s a lot of good stuff too). Its prevalence and authoritative role in many religions and Western civilization give credence to these beliefs. The Shiloh Project is trying to defamiliarize these unfortunately commonplace behaviors by highlighting the pervasiveness of prejudices and violence against women in the text that has contributed to normalizing them in our society and throughout history. Recognizing some of the bases for our beliefs, even the subconscious ones, allows us to start moving forward and dismantle those elements of society

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

My research currently is focused on a large project about Dinah in Genesis 34. It is the story of a young woman who is clearly a victim, but the text and most of the history of interpretation are not concerned with what happens to her. I want to explore the ways theories of contemporary rape and purity cultures can help to understand this text. Stay tuned!

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16 Days of Activism – Day 13: Meredith Warren

by Meredith Warren on

For Day 13 of the 16 Days of Activism campaign, we speak to Meredith Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield and Deputy Director of SIIBS.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I’m Dr Meredith Warren and I work on early Christian and Jewish literature and culture. I also lead the research theme on Embodied Religion at SIIBS, which explores the ways that religion is expressed on and through the body, bodily performance, and bodily experience. I’m currently working on a book that uses the sense of taste as a lens to view the transformational aspects of food and eating.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

I’m a member of the Shiloh Project based at the University of Sheffield. I’ve written a blog post on rape and the Book of Revelation, which is a specialism of mine. Katie and I also lead a module in the School of English called Texts of Terror, which is a level 3 class that examines the horrific in the Bible, especially divinely-ordained or divinely-sanctioned violence against women, slaves, and ‘the Other’ broadly defined. I’m particularly committed to not letting the New Testament off the hook for its participation in this trope, since all too often people seem to assume that the New Testament is all about peace and love, ignoring not only the peace and love abundant in the Hebrew Bible but also the very violent aspects of the message of Jesus.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

For me, the Shiloh Project influences how I teach texts with rape or assault. I’m just finishing up a semester teaching Foundations in Literature: Biblical and Classical Sources, in which an ancient text from Homer or from the Bible or from Ovid is paired with a contemporary text that explores similar themes or characters. These sources are full of sexual assault and other types of violence, and I think the Shiloh Project shows students that pointing these examples out and talking about them and challenging how later authors represent them is something we can do as scholars – we don’t have to ignore these uncomfortable and distressing scenes in literature and we don’t have to accept what they imply about gender.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 

Again, being able to bring these discussions out into the open is so important in destroying a culture in which it’s shameful to talk about gendered violence. By writing academic pieces, blog posts, lectures, and leading seminars, we’re demonstrating to our colleagues, our students, and to the public that we can and we need to take a close hard look at the texts and ideas that are taken for granted as foundational to our society. The Bible has been used to justify sexual violence and coercion and we can’t ignore that, even if we are under the (in my opinion mistaken) impression that we live in a post-Christian society.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

I’m particularly interested in challenging scholarly readings of ancient texts as ‘not about rape’ because ‘things were different back then.’ I recently finished a book chapter, for my forthcoming book, on the Persephone myth, in which Hades kidnaps his niece Persephone to rape her. Ovid recounts one version of the myth, and within that there are two accounts of Persephone’s experience, one told by the narrator and one told by Persephone herself. I was shocked when I researched this that some scholars assumed that Persephone’s version, where she explicitly states that she was taken against her will, should be discounted; there was a prevalent assumption in scholarship that Persephone was lying about her experience in order to seem pure. The recognition of how pervasive rape culture is, and how much it has influenced academic readings of ancient texts, has inspired me to go back to Ovid and think through the other divine rapes, which is a project I hope to work on when my current book is finished.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 12: Rosinah Gabaitse

by Rosie Gabaitse on

On Day 12 of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Rosinah Gabaitse, Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Botswana.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My  name is Dr Rosinah Gabaitse and I research and teach on the topic of Biblical Studies at the University of Botswana. I wear many hats: I am an activist, a mother of three sons, an academic and a member of the global community, speaking out and fighting against violence perpetrated on anyone vulnerable, including women and girls. Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow, funded by the Humboldt Foundation, based at the University of Bamberg in Germany.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
We live in a gendered world and human beings are categorised according to their  socially constructed and assigned gender.  Unfortunately, gender is widely used to determine who has power, who is rendered voiceless, who speaks when and how. We cannot escape the many ways that gender has been used by societies to silence, oppress, and deny access to resources. In my own context violence against women perpetrated most often by men is sadly common. Consequently, my involvement in gender dynamics is personal because I am a woman, and therefore socially assigned the female gender, which has left me, like many women in Botswana, disadvantaged in terms of access to resources, sexual harassment, and being undermined in the work place. Because this is unjust, gender activism is part and parcel of who I am as a woman inhabiting patriarchal structures. I am overt about  teaching egalitarian values and I speak out against the inequality between men and women and between heterosexual and homosexual persons. In Botswana, male homosexual activity is classified a crime against nature – and I resist the injustice of this. I teach that God rejoices in equality and respectful, tolerant and peaceful coexistence, hence my involvement with gender activism.

My work intersects with gender activism in many ways. First, as I teach at the university, my standing in front of the students as a female teaching Biblical Studies is in and of itself engaging in some form of gender activism. Theology is primarily the reserve of men in most cultures, Botswana included. So, when I teach already ordained ministers or trainee preachers about the Bible and the life-giving ways of reading it, I am already making a point about gender. Teaching theology  as a woman is transgressing boundaries on its own in a discipline dominated by men, like my own. Further, I am intentional about being a gender activist. I am intentional about speaking out against, for example, the violence of rape and murder poured out against the concubine in Judges 19, or Hosea’s wife Gomer, or the many other stories of violence narrated in the Bible. After engaging these texts of terror (a phrase from Phyllis Trible), I require that  my audiences (be it in the church or classroom) contextualize the biblical texts in terms of the social realities of our own communities where intimate femicide, shaming women in public, and sexualized physical violence are rife and tearing our communities apart. I am intentional about engaging the many hurts and abuses that women endure, just because they are women. I also write about violence against women as I reflect on how we have bestowed males with enormous power often by using a few select biblical texts, sometimes with violent consequences for women.  However, I also know it is true that the same Bible that has been used to legitimate and support violence is life-giving and can also be used to raise up a man who abhors violence against women. Therefore, my work engages the Bible to deconstruct violence and reconstruct the life-giving power of the Gospel.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

The Shiloh Project engages scholars and  communities on the topic of rape culture. Obviously the people who are most vulnerable to rape are women and children, because they have been rendered vulnerable and less empowered by dominant social structures. Resisting this is exactly what I do in my little corner in Botswana and The Shiloh Project gives me a forum and a resource for my activities, now and going forward.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
I am already active in this area and I will continue to be so. Like I mentioned above, my teaching  at the University of Botswana mainstreams topics on violence against women – from what the Bible teaches or does not teach about  gender-based violence, to how the churches are silent about the issue, to how their preaching  contributes to violence against women and how  violent men are constructed through particular and toxic kinds of biblical interpretation.

In 2016, I and another young lady from Botswana, Wendy Maano, intentionally selected  one school and worked together to teach children about violence. We had  a series of conversations with children about non-violent ways of communicating and being, teaching them to stand up against violence against the vulnerable girl child in particular. We also had a series of conversations on violence with parents. As part of my community service and in my capacity as motivational speaker, I engage young people in schools on issues of violence against women,  in order defuse rape culture manifestations early on. The boy child, who may have a propensity towards committing violence later on in life, needs to be taught very early on what violence against women is. I want to share a saying going around in a group I belong to made up of men and women and called ‘Women and Men Against All  Sexual Abuse of Children’, which goes like this: ‘Not all men are actual rapists. Some are rape apologists. Some tell rape jokes. Some are victim blamers. Some are silent.’ The saying captures where very many men are and my work with boys really aims at teaching them the ways of responding to gender-based violence. Of course it is important not to commit acts of gender-based violence but things won’t actually get better until men not only forsake violence but also denounce and resist and challenge other forms of gender-based inequality. This is particularly important within a community like mine where there still isn’t much open talk about the topic of rape and gender-based injustice.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 11: Samantha Joo

by Samantha Joo on

We mark the eleventh day of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence by speaking to gender activist and researcher, Samantha Joo.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

 I had taught Hebrew Bible at a number of academic institutions.  My last appointment was at Seoul Women’s University.  However, during my father’s illness and eventual death, I felt lost and decided to leave academia.  I was tired of living in cities I hated, writing on subject matters that only appealed to a few people, and teaching courses to students most of whom did not care about their education.  All at extremely low pay.  So after some soul-searching, I started my own nonprofit organization, Platform (https://www.platform4women.org), and opened a new business to financially support my work. Now, I write about topics relevant to my community, work with people who I believe will be effective visionary leaders, and live in a city that I choose.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

For some reason, I had always associated activism with protests, marching out in the streets or blockading some politician’s office.  Since I was a more private person, I did not consider myself an activist, and definitely not a gender activist.  But now, I think differently.  I had the makings of an activist in my early career but it did not become manifest until I started teaching at Seoul Women’s University.  It was here that I met some of the brightest, passionate women who had limited themselves by unconsciously accepting traditional societal expectations.  To model my own teachings on gender equality and social justice, I felt I had to “out” myself through activism.  I started Queer Koreans Alliance (QKA) which jumpstarted the first LGBTQ teen safe space, Dding Dong, in Seoul, South Korea.  I felt that I could not ask my students to make a difference without daring to make change myself.

In developing Dding Dong and teaching at SWU, I visualized a center to train emerging women leaders for social justice.  It took a long time to turn the vision into reality, but I well under way to developing a nonprofit organization, Platform.  Platform intends to mentor/train women with a passion and a vision for the marginalized in API communities.  It empowers women to work more effectively for the oppressed in their communities.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

Interestingly, I had written an article on the politics of “comfort women” in Korea.  Johanna Stiebert happened to be one of the reviewers and wanted to include a shorter version of the essay on The Shiloh Project.  Of course, I was honored to share my article on the website but it was more than an opportunity to capture a wider audience.  The Shiloh Project is a mission-driven platform to explore gender-based violence and religion.  It has everything to do with my work and scholarship because rape culture affects all women and men.

But more specifically, I am writing an article on rape and silence in the Bible.  I analyze the story of Tamar and Amnon in which many commentators have written about the terror of Absalom silencing his beloved sister, Tamar.  On the contrary, Tamar is not silenced but actually speaks through her body.  The biblical author alludes to her desolation which is a subtle reference to the silent language of the oppressed.  This language is commonplace in many cultures where women cannot vocalize but embody their stories.

I am able to share such essays on The Shiloh Project to a wider audience.  I personally do not know of any other platform where this is possible.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

Many of the nonprofit organizations in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities have been established to combat gender-based violence, specifically domestic violence.  Platform will not only train women to serve victims of domestic violence but to create a space in which women can discuss and find systemic solutions to end it.  Since Platform is invested in women leaders as well as the marginalized in API communities, we are empowering grassroots movements to “resist” and “fight” oppression.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 10: Hugh Pyper

by Hugh Pyper on

Our interview to mark the Day 10 of the 16 Days of Activism is from Hugh Pyper, Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the University of Sheffield.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

 I am Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Sheffield University, where I have worked for the last 14 years.  My interests are varied but I am always intrigued by how biblical language and ways of thought continue to influence contemporary debates, often without the awareness of those involved.  The way in which children’s encounters with the Bible shape their adult perceptions, again often unconsciously, is a case in point, but the wider cultural legacy of the Bible is all-pervasive.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

Biblical Studies staff at Sheffield have for decades been among the pioneers in researching the impact of these texts on questions of gender and ideology.  Even if I had not had an interest in these matters, I could not have been unaffected by the work of so many brave colleagues over the years at Sheffield and beyond.  My own experience growing up gay in the late 1960s and 70s makes me aware both of what has been achieved in the face of violent pressure to conform to cultural expectations of gender roles and of how much more needs to be done.

The models of masculinity and femininity which are often labelled ‘biblical’ are damaging to women, to men and to those who cannot accept such binary categories for themselves.  The Shiloh Project is a timely enterprise in exposing just how damaging these models can be and, more positively, in exploring the cultural resources within religious traditions that might help us to imagine ourselves and our relationships differently.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

 I have a particular interest in how the structures of patriarchy in the Bible are predicated on the fragility of male identities and the anxiety that underlies masculinity in such a system.  Violence and discrimination are rooted in fear and the Bible gives us much food for thought on how the oppression of women and gender minorities relates to the insecurity of men who feel obliged to embody the impossible demands of acting as a patriarch.

My own recent work has looked at the way in which conventional readings of male figures in the Bible tend to be complicit with the text’s strategies of deflecting attention from the anxiety of masculinity.  Reading with different assumptions about gender roles can both expose and perhaps alleviate the anxious responses that give rise to violent suppression of the threat supposedly posed by femininity and effeminacy.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 

 First, it is important to lay bare how the Bible has been and can be used to endorse the attitudes that lead to a culture of rape.  Secondly, however, alternative readings of the Bible can model potentially more positive understandings of gender and sexuality that can counter and contain such violence.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

I want to continue my project of reading biblical texts about men and their relationships against the grain.  Notoriously, Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice with the claim ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’  Nowadays, that might not be so universally accepted; indeed, Austen was quite clever enough a satirist to know herself that a truth universally acknowledged is not necessarily universally true.  Yet even though many contemporary readers might agree that there may be single men in possession of good fortune whose aspirations are rather different, there is still a heteronormative default position when we read.  ‘Boy meets girl’ continues to be a norm.  Reading about a character, we expect and usually find that the writer introduces various potential partners of the opposite sex and that part at least of the story will revolve around the outcome of those attachments.  We look out for those encounters and expect to be induced to speculate on them.

It is an intriguing experiment, then, to try to read biblical stories homonormatively rather than heteronormatively or, in other words, to look for the possible implications of incidents where ‘boy meets boy’ and ‘girl meets girl’ in the story, although these terms themselves need to be critiqued.  What transpires is that biblical texts are often less anxious about such relationships than later readers have assumed them to be and are thus less staunch allies for contemporary manifestations of patriarchy than those who rely on them would like.  Looking at these relationships can also remind us that men too can be the victims of a culture which relies on violence to police its gendered norms.  Pointing this out may contribute something to challenging the fears that underlie a culture of rape.  Look out for some provocative takes on Joseph and Daniel, among others!

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16 Days of Activism – Day 8: Claire Cunnington

by Claire Cunnington on
To mark Day 8 of the 16 Days of Activism our interview is from Claire Cunnington, PhD student at the University of Sheffield.
Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?
I’m a Wellcome Trust funded PhD student at the University of Sheffield, researching what helps or hinders adults recovering from childhood sexual abuse.
What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?
I’m a member of The Shiloh Project.
How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?
I’m researching the way in which the dominant discourse around rape and abuse affects a victim’s ability to recover. Religion, particularly Christianity in the UK, has influenced this discourse. The Shiloh Project’s discussion of rape culture and the Bible is examining the wider context and my research is, in part, examining the impact.
How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 
By highlighting and questioning the origins of victim-blaming.
What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?
I am currently running a qualitative survey on recovery for adult survivors, which looks at what helps and hinders recovery. The survey can be found here: http://bit.ly/recoveringcsa. This includes a question about religion and spirituality. I aim to produce a paper discussing the influence of religion on recovery for adults who have experienced childhood sexual abuse.
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