Trans Biblical

Trans Biblical provides some of the most exciting new scholarly work in trans biblical interpretation to help us better understand our Bibles, our bodies, and one another in a fraught and fractious world.

Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture offers a collection of wide-ranging essays exploring key issues animating trans biblical interpretation from a variety of angles and emphases. Contributors, who themselves represent a range of gender identities, answer the question "what makes a biblical reading trans, or a trans reading biblical?" in diverse and exciting ways. They also promote new ways of thinking about gender variation in the ancient world while more sensitively and critically addressing ongoing debates about gender and embodiment.

This collection is a helpful entrée into how biblical readers and interpreters can make new, more creative, reflexive, and accountable connections to influential texts and traditions. It represents a historic effort to situate, expand, and elaborate on the current trajectories of trans biblical interpretation. Gender variance is as old as stories about creation, and biblical texts are more variable than we have been trained to see. They disrupt present-day assumptions of a simple and stable gender binary, often deployed against trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. Taking us from Genesis through the Gospels and epistles and into rabbinic and early Christian scriptural engagement, Trans Biblical sharpens our awareness of what is in these texts and builds up our capacities for what can be done with our encounter with biblical texts and traditions. In short, the work of the scholars gathered in this one, convenient collection meets an important, even urgent, need by providing a range of entry points and approaches to biblical texts and traditions in a contextually and theoretically nuanced fashion.

Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Ball State University. They are the author, editor, or coeditor of more than ten books, including Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul's Letters; Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles; and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies. They are also currently serving as chair of the Society of Biblical Literature's first-ever Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship and founding coeditor (with Melissa Wilcox) of the new journal QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion.