Rhiannon Graybill
Biographic Data
| ID | 3803814 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rhiannon Graybill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rhiannon |
| FAMILY NAME | Graybill |
| SIGNATURE | GRAYBILL R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Richmond |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9843-088X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Learning Something
LEE EDELMAN AND THE QUEER STUDY OF RELIGION. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 280. Hardback, $160.00. BAD EDUCATION: WHY QUEER THEORY TEACHES US NOTHING. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $28.95. SEX, OR THE UNBEARABLE. By Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 168. Paperback, $24.95. NO FUTURE: QUEE…
Beauty, Rescue, Disappointment, and the Erotic
Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones is a vital contribution to disability theology, biblical hermeneutics, and more. This response explores Watts Belser’s critiques of beauty and of the desire to “rescue” texts, pairing them with the book’s reflections on disappointment. It also questions the role of love and eros, directing attention to the Song of Songs as a possible resource for the larger project imagined by the book
“They Put Themselves in Danger, Girls Like That”
This article pairs the worst of the biblical marriage metaphor texts, Ezekiel 16, with a feminist film about sexual violence, Promising Young Woman (2020). Strikingly, the God of Ezekiel 16 acts in ways that closely resemble the would-be rapists and “good guys” of Promising Young Woman. Furthermore, the portraits of female revenge in Promising Young Woman and Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) suggest new ways of reading …
Introducing a Hermeneutics of Cispicion
A hermeneutics of cispicion challenges cisnormative presuppositions that shape and, at times, occlude the variations in gender and sex exhibited by key characters in the ancestral narrative of Genesis 12–50. It charts the progression from Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion, through liberation, feminist and queer approaches. Focusing on Deryn Guest's queer and trans hermeneutics, Henderson-Merrygold then offers a new strategy for reading aga…
Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion
"This book takes the ground-breaking work of Lee Edelman in queer theory and for the first time demonstrates its importance and relevance to contemporary theology, Biblical studies, and religious studies. It argues that despite extensive interest in Edelman's work, we have barely begun to understand the significance of Edelman's ideas both in their own right and with respect to the study of religion. Therefore, it offers fresh approaches to Edelm…
Christopher B. Zeichmann, Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum
A Child Is Being Eaten
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts in which mothers eat their children. Deuteronomy 28, Lam 2 and 4, and 2 Kgs 6 all offer variations on the theme of maternal cannibalism. While these passages are often written off as gruesome, exceptional, or motivated by extreme necessity (such as starvation), such approaches miss the literary and ideological significance of maternal cannibalism. This study, in contrast, approaches the biblical accounts t…
The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality
This volume collects the most important and cutting-edge readings related to gender, sex, sexuality and the Bible. Engaging the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and surrounding texts and worlds, Rhiannon Graybill and Lynn Huber have amassed a selection of essays that reflects a wide-range of perspectives and approaches towards gender and sexuality. Presented in three distinct parts, this collection begins with an examination of gender/s in and around…
“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”
In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike—the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood. This volume, the first of its kind, assembles cutting-edge literary and critical readings of Atwood and the Bible. The essays span the breadth of Atwood’s work, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam trilo…
“Even unto this Bitter Loving”
Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the criti…
Day of the Woman
In Judges 4 and 5, Jael viciously murders the Canaanite general Sisera with a tent peg to the head. This article approaches the text through horror, with particular reference to the slasher film and the rape-revenge film. Drawing on Carol Clover’s landmark Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Horror Film, I argue that Jael should be read as a “Final Girl” who triumphs over the villainous Sisera. The article further suggests that because of t…
When Bodies Meet
This paper uses Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspective on the mutually implicated bodies in chapter 36 of the biblical book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 36 narrates the prophet’s dictation of a scroll to his scribe, Baruch; the scroll is subsequently read aloud, destroyed, and recreated. Though the story is filled with prophets, scribes, secretaries, and a furious king, it is fundamentally the story of a scrol…
Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael
Are We Not Men
Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. The book argues that prophecy destabilizes the category of masculinity and alters the ways in which the Hebrew prophets overwhelmingly men experience their bodies. Furthermore the body of the prophet becomes a queer body. The book explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies including …
When Bodies Meet
This paper uses Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspective on the mutually implicated bodies in chapter 36 of the biblical book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 36 narrates the prophet’s dictation of a scroll to his scribe, Baruch; the scroll is subsequently read aloud, destroyed, and recreated. Though the story is filled with prophets, scribes, secretaries, and a furious king, it is fundamentally the story of a scrol…
Are We Not Men
Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. The book argues that prophecy destabilizes the category of masculinity and alters the ways in which the Hebrew prophets overwhelmingly men experience their bodies. Furthermore the body of the prophet becomes a queer body. The book explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies including …
Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael
Day of the Woman
In Judges 4 and 5, Jael viciously murders the Canaanite general Sisera with a tent peg to the head. This article approaches the text through horror, with particular reference to the slasher film and the rape-revenge film. Drawing on Carol Clover’s landmark Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Horror Film, I argue that Jael should be read as a “Final Girl” who triumphs over the villainous Sisera. The article further suggests that because of t…
When Bodies Meet
This paper uses Donna Haraway’s theoretical work on “companion species” to offer a new perspective on the mutually implicated bodies in chapter 36 of the biblical book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 36 narrates the prophet’s dictation of a scroll to his scribe, Baruch; the scroll is subsequently read aloud, destroyed, and recreated. Though the story is filled with prophets, scribes, secretaries, and a furious king, it is fundamentally the story of a scrol…
“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”
In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike—the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood. This volume, the first of its kind, assembles cutting-edge literary and critical readings of Atwood and the Bible. The essays span the breadth of Atwood’s work, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam trilo…
“Even unto this Bitter Loving”
Feminist and queer readings of the Hebrew Bible frequently treat the book of Ruth as a “happy object.” At the same time, contextual readings have suggested that Ruth is a narrative of exploitation, including possible sexual exploitation or trafficking. Building on recent scholarship about queer feelings and affect, this article negotiates a reading that takes seriously both the history of lesbian and queer readings of Ruth and Naomi and the criti…
The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality
This volume collects the most important and cutting-edge readings related to gender, sex, sexuality and the Bible. Engaging the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and surrounding texts and worlds, Rhiannon Graybill and Lynn Huber have amassed a selection of essays that reflects a wide-range of perspectives and approaches towards gender and sexuality. Presented in three distinct parts, this collection begins with an examination of gender/s in and around…
A Child Is Being Eaten
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts in which mothers eat their children. Deuteronomy 28, Lam 2 and 4, and 2 Kgs 6 all offer variations on the theme of maternal cannibalism. While these passages are often written off as gruesome, exceptional, or motivated by extreme necessity (such as starvation), such approaches miss the literary and ideological significance of maternal cannibalism. This study, in contrast, approaches the biblical accounts t…
Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion
"This book takes the ground-breaking work of Lee Edelman in queer theory and for the first time demonstrates its importance and relevance to contemporary theology, Biblical studies, and religious studies. It argues that despite extensive interest in Edelman's work, we have barely begun to understand the significance of Edelman's ideas both in their own right and with respect to the study of religion. Therefore, it offers fresh approaches to Edelm…
Christopher B. Zeichmann, Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum
Beauty, Rescue, Disappointment, and the Erotic
Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones is a vital contribution to disability theology, biblical hermeneutics, and more. This response explores Watts Belser’s critiques of beauty and of the desire to “rescue” texts, pairing them with the book’s reflections on disappointment. It also questions the role of love and eros, directing attention to the Song of Songs as a possible resource for the larger project imagined by the book
“They Put Themselves in Danger, Girls Like That”
This article pairs the worst of the biblical marriage metaphor texts, Ezekiel 16, with a feminist film about sexual violence, Promising Young Woman (2020). Strikingly, the God of Ezekiel 16 acts in ways that closely resemble the would-be rapists and “good guys” of Promising Young Woman. Furthermore, the portraits of female revenge in Promising Young Woman and Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) suggest new ways of reading …
Introducing a Hermeneutics of Cispicion
A hermeneutics of cispicion challenges cisnormative presuppositions that shape and, at times, occlude the variations in gender and sex exhibited by key characters in the ancestral narrative of Genesis 12–50. It charts the progression from Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion, through liberation, feminist and queer approaches. Focusing on Deryn Guest's queer and trans hermeneutics, Henderson-Merrygold then offers a new strategy for reading aga…
Learning Something
LEE EDELMAN AND THE QUEER STUDY OF RELIGION. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 280. Hardback, $160.00. BAD EDUCATION: WHY QUEER THEORY TEACHES US NOTHING. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $28.95. SEX, OR THE UNBEARABLE. By Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 168. Paperback, $24.95. NO FUTURE: QUEE…
Art (8 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Development, Ethics, and Society (5 works) · History (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)