One simple remedy is simply to use it as a starting point, and ignore the details of gender, as I have done myself in the past – but this is not entirely satisfactory.
“I am black and beautiful,
O daughters of Jerusalem” (1:5)
The Shulamite recognizes that because of her relationship to the Beloved, she has become the subject of a discourse that intensifies her experience of marginality. Having become merely an outsider, she has become a taboo person.
“Making their rounds in the city,
the sentinels found me;
they beat me, they wounded me,
they took away my mantle
those sentinels of the walls” (5:7)
The very men who ought to protect the Shulamite have savagely attacked her. Not only have they thrashed , bruised and perhaps raped her, they have also stolen her outer garment, exposing her body to the physical elements, and more seriously, unveiling her shame to the elemental forces of public scorn.
It really doesn’t take a great deal of imagination here to make the obvious parallel with the violence and persecution that sexual outsiders have suffered, just like the Shulamite foreigner, and often similarly at the hands of those who should be protecting the weak – the church and the police.
But – she’s a survivor, and love conquers.
A further important point, worth carefully stressing, is not just the joy of their love, but also it’s absolute equality and reciprocity.
My beloved is mine and I am his
he pastures his flock among he lilies (2:16)I am my beloved’s and he is mine
he pastures his flock among he lilies. (6.3)
This mutuality and equality within a relationship is commonplace in queer relationships, but less so (probably rare, to this degree), in conventional marriage.
And so, although the relationship that is celebrated in the Song of Songs is not a same-sex one, it is indeed a queer one. The biological sexes are different, but at this level of equality, gender and gender roles fade into insignificance. “Queer” is more than a descriptor of same-sex attraction, but also includes all manner of sexual outsiders. An outsider the Shulamite most certainly is, and like us, has suffered for it.
But still, she can celebrate her love for her beloved, as he celebrates his for her. Most important of all for me, is that this has been quite literally celebrated in the most public way possible – written down in a book of Scripture, read by those who followed over the following thousands of years.
Source:
King, Christopher: “A Love as Fierce as Death”, in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, edited Robert Goss.
2 thoughts on “Queering the Song of Songs”