Spirits of Queer Kinship: The “Law of Kinship” and Queer Liberalism in Romans 8

Sunday, November 24, 2019, 1:00 PM

“Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible” Open Session 

Romans 8, especially verses 15-17, contains many spirits. Since he claims and makes use of adoption and inheritance, these spirits allow Paul to craft communal ideas about kinship that, via the formation and spread of Christianity, inform modern societal notions and norms of kinship. This paper shows how, as an affective text, the spirit of Romans 8 hovers around and haunts queer theory’s analysis of hetero- and homonormative kinships. Unchallenged, its spirit can linger into queerer forms of kinship.

Drawing from scholarship on Paul, kinship, and adoption (e.g., Hodge 2007; Lewis 2016), the paper develops a queer critique of Paul’s use of adoption in Romans 8. Drawing from David Eng’s critique of queer liberalism’s turn to normative familial models, I argue that an ancient queer liberalism undergirds Paul’s letter. The politics and ideology of Roman adoption is thoroughly embedded in the gendered and sexualized constructions of—and lived experiences within—Roman domus, familia, and patria potestas. Adoption in first-century Rome ensured the inheritance of male authority from a father to a son, biological or otherwise; it was politically motivated, ensuring the stable, dynastic succession for Rome’s emperor and ruling elite. Such a description effaces the racialized and status-based nature of Roman adoption: elite Romans adopted men who were already elite, freeborn Romans into their lineage in order to affirm and maintain the Romanness of the elite. The household, like the empire, is not just patriarchal but kyriarchal—ruled by elite male lords who placed into submission an assemblage of women, foreigners, slaves, and others. Paul’s adoption metaphor does not work against these assumptions. By promising an inheritance via such adoption, Paul inspires and perpetuates a hope for inclusion within Roman imperialism for his audience of marginalized Christ-followers. In so doing, this adoption under God-the-imperial-father offers hope that they will experience the rise in status (what Berlant calls “the good life”) that accompanies Roman inclusion.

But this is not the only story or spirit around Romans 8. Although a critique of Paul’s queer liberalism is necessary to expose how it still affects contemporary neo- and queer liberalisms, villianizing Paul is no better than idealizing him. When focusing solely on Paul’s spirits, we miss the other spirits around him, namely the folks who participated in these Christ-assemblies. Paul’s ideas about kinship in Romans 8 are just that: ideas that entered into a conversation in Rome. Therefore, I place Paul’s singular ideas into an assemblage that plausibly included many we might call “queer”: those from communities of rebels and bandits, slaves who created their own sexual and familial structures, subcultures of cinaedi and tribades who embraced sexual relations that defied sexual norms. Through this placement, I imagine speculative plausbilities for the ways in which some ancient bodies might have inhabited queerer forms of kinship. In so doing, I argue that it is possible to resurrect, alongside Paul’s queer liberal spirit of adoption, some spirits of ancient queerness that can produce different affects around contemporary kinships and queernesses.