Queer Recognition: Locating Tamar’s Queerness in Gen

Introduction

Is Tamar of Genesis 38 queer? Such a question invites another: what do we mean by queer? The narrative of Tamar and Judah within the broader Israelite origin story context describes Tamar’s efforts to survive through trickery, deception, taboo sex, and the humiliation of a patriarch. What is queer about that? The trickery? The sex? Her bringing a patriarch to his knees?

            Queer approaches to biblical literature are almost always referrent to sex. This is because the queer who steps toward the Bible, picks it up, opens it, and reads it is identified as a queer because the way their sex, gender, and (sexual) desire are configured[i] are not coherent under cisheteronormativity. A queer reader, committed to reading the Bible queerly, is one who intends “to complicate, to disrupt, to disturb all kinds of orthodoxies”, including the orthodoxy of cisheteronormativity and the orthodoxy of the Bible as a one dimensional, unmediated text.[ii] The figure of Tamar is important to the queer because of her use of sex toward ends that befuddle the patriarchal regime of the day.

Approaching Tamar

            But is Tamar queer? I argue that she is not queer in the representational sense, because the way many understand queerness today does not map on to the reality imaginged in Genesis. Locating queerness in Tamar’s body or identity would be a case of corrective projectionism[iii], a queer theology term which describes the practice of projecting utopic, queer ideals onto God (or, in this case, biblical figures) with the hope that this will address our ongoing suffering under cisheteronormativity. When it comes to the narrative of Tamar and Judah, corrective projectionism is unproductive because it denies the strange, unfamiliar qualities of their story and of Genesis as a whole. This “alien”[iv] text is not our tool. Instead, as Michael Carden aruges, Genesis is a “trickster”, escaping our efforts to capture or concretize it into our own purportedly unchanging moral and theological narratives.[v]

Thus, our queer approach to Tamar is not queer representation, but queer recognition.“Queer recognition” recalls Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s essay, “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters”[vi]. Christian LGBTQ people are in “occupied territory”, Mollenkott claims, and this necessitates a different approach to ethics that values subversion and survival. This kind of ethic moves beyond the social and political circumstances of  LGBTQ people and into solidarity with people of other marginalized experiences. Our theological/biblical rationale for this ethic is rooted in recognizing the tricksters of the biblical narratives, whose presence teaches us that God is something of a Trickster as well.[vii] My own “queer recognition” approach moves a step further and acknowledges an alliance between Mollenkott’s reconition of the tricksters within the biblical text, and Carden’s acknowledgement of Genesis itself as a trickster. Queer recognition as a queer hermeneutical approach acknowledges the self and certain biblical figures as people who resist God or others for the sake of survival. Further, it acknowledges the Bible itself as a text which slips out of our grasp just before we can objectify it, maddeningly confounding our efforts to utilize it.

Queer Recognitions: Waiting and Fucking

            There is a diversity in what the trans and/or queer reader, depending on their social and temporal location, may recognize in Tamar and her narrative. As a white, trans, bisexual male, I offer two queer reconitions: Tamar’s waiting and her fucking.

Waiting

            Queer temporality, or queer experiences of time and chronology, is a significant portion of the queer theory corpus. Queer temporalities are those that work outside of heterosexual chronologies, which constitute the straight norms governing family, economics, and reproduction.[viii] The queer has a unique, even problematized relationship with both the past and the future[ix], such that the present becomes an important locus for queer meaning making and politcal action.

            Waiting, however, might be understood as a trans-specific queer temporality. In the American and UK healthcare systems, trans people who transition with the help of medical intervention wait: for the approval of doctors and psychiatrists, for insurance coverage, for enough money in their savings accounts, for the effects of hormones to become apparent, through surgery recovery. We also wait for identity documents, for others to become habituated to our new names, pronouns, and gender expressions. We wait, in the conflict between knowing the fullness of ourselves in the present moment and the desire of institutions and individuals to defer that fullness into the future. To survive this futurity, some of us take matters into our own hands, using fake IDs or circumventing doctors to obtain hormones.[x]

            Tamar also waits. Her fullness as a woman, obtained through marriage and giving birth to a male heir[xi], is deferred by three figures: God, Onan, and Judah.

            Tamar is a woman of unknown ethnicity who Judah takes as a wife for his firstborn son, Er. Er was “wicked” (v. 7); God “put him to death” (v. 7). Next, Judah calls upon Onan to have sex with Tamar so that she might bear a male heir in Er’s name. Onan has sex with Tamar, but pulls out before cumming (v. 9). He extends Tamar’s waiting, perhaps for his own pleasure, or to avoid economic loss, or both. God sees this as justification to extend Tamar’s deferral, putting Onan to death also because Onan displeased God (v. 10). This is the last mention of God in the narrative. Following Onan’s death, Judah sends Tamar to “remain a widow” (v. 11) in her father’s house, until Judah’s youngest son, Shelah, comes of age. The narrative clues us in to Judah’s ultimate plan: “for [Judah] feared that [Shelah] too would die, like his brothers” (v. 11). Tamar waits.

            As she waits, she watches, and eventually she catches on to Judah’s empty promise (v. 14). Here her waiting shifts— we recognize it not as the helpless waiting we suffer through in a cis-normative world, but as a productive waiting which signals an impending reversal of fortunes. Tamar puts on a veil, and waits for Judah in a village on the way to his sheep shearers in Timnah. After he sees her, solicits her, provides the collateral of his signet, cord, and staff, and cums inside her, she gets up and goes away (vv. 15-19). She replaces her veil with the “garments of her widowhood” (v. 19), to wait for a missed period and for her public vindication (vv. 24-27).

Fucking

The obvious reversal of fortunes in the story of Tamar and Judah is Tamar’s public shaming of Judah, when he is forced to admit that “she is more in the right” (v. 26) than he. Yet a more subtle reversal is how Tamar inverts patriarchal, sexual power and fucks Judah.

            Genesis understands sexuality not in terms of sexual orientation but as a hierarchy organized around penetration.[xii] Those we would describe as cisgender men were on top, and their sexual activy was unproblematic so long as they did not penetrate another man’s wife or allow themselves to be penetrated. Women, eunuchs, and children were subordinate in this hierarchy because they could not penetrate and/or were to be penetrated.[xiii] Under this sexual paradigm, to fuck is to penetrate, and to penetrate is to be powerful.

            Tamar is certainly fucked, most notably by Onan. Though the power disparity between Onan and Tamar is enormous regardless of whether Onan pulls out, his pulling out is a total disregard of the legitimate claim Tamar has under levirate law.[xiv] His exercise of penetrative power is so total that it may be considered rape.[xv]

            Tamar’s sex with Judah, however, is different. Tamar disrupts penetration and renders it into a tool that would have been difficult to imagine in her context. She is penetrated, but has worked the penetrative norms against themselves to concentrate some power for herself. The sex itself, and the resultant conception (v. 18), accomplishes this somewhat. Yet if Tamar is to become pregnant, she needs to protect herself against charges of “whoredom” (v. 24); that is, she needs to legitimate her sexual agency against Judah’s property claim over her body.[xvi] Further, she needs to protect herself against any trickery Judah may be planning. Judah offers a kid from his flock as payment for sex, and she demands a pledge, specificially his “signet and [his] cord, and the staff that is in [his] hand” (vv. 17-18). Judah agrees, and Tamar takes them. In doing so, Tamar takes hold of items that signify Judah’s patriarchal power: his means, his authority, and his virility.[xvii] Later, when Judah sends his friend Hirah and the promised kid to complete their transaction, Hirah is told that no prostitute had been at Enaim (v. 21). Judah instructs Hirah to let the “prostitute” keep the items for herself, to avoid the shame over losing these important signifiers of his manhood. Judah has been emasculated, because Tamar possesses his manhood. In the act of stealing Judah’s signet, cord, and staff, Tamar controls “what should only be controlled by a few privileged men”.[xviii] Through trickery, Tamar used Judah’s penetration of her as a means to seize his phallic authority and obtain what was owed to her.

            The fullness of Judah’s emasculation is delayed until Tamar’s pregnancy becomes visible. When Tamar begins to show, she is accused of “playing the whore” and Judah orders that she be burned (v. 24). Now Tamar can bring her full plan to fruition. As the threat of her execution looms, she sends word to Judah: “‘It was the owner of these who made me pregnant.’ And she said, ‘Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.’” Judah’s phallus is laid bare, and he is forced to admit that he was tricked, that his withholding of Shelah from Tamar was immoral, and that Tamar was in the right (v. 26). This humiliating moment is the last Tamar sees of Judah’s phallus (v. 26). Tamar’s vindication climaxes months later: “when the time of her delivery came, there were twins in her womb” (v. 27).

            It may be problematic to acknowledge Tamar’s disruption of Judah’s penetration as queer. Mollenkott’s subversive ethics have their limits, especially for those who would want to render queer penetration as something which is constructively good. However, a queer may notice how Tamar’s radical disruption of penetration as a patriarchal tool hopes for its demise. In this we recognize our own queer hopes as we live under cisheteronormativity.

Conclusion

            The queer recognitions of Tamar’s acts of waiting and fucking orient us to her narrative in a unique way. As queer readers who resist and struggle with God and others for our survival, we find ourselves in a triad between the tricksters of Genesis and the trickery of Genesis itself. For all of Tamar’s waiting and fucking, we cannot produce an unproblematic queer figure to correctively project onto scripture. Tamar remains a complicated figure who, paradoxically, sought her liberation through continued connections with men. The justice she rendered for herself is radical in a pinpoint sense, at the moment of intercourse between her and Judah when we ask who is truly getting fucked. At best, Tamar’s “justice” is ambiguous and contingent upon individuals who will perpetuate the circumstances which required her desperate action. Genesis is similarly ambiguous, appearing not to take sides in this morally complex narrative (Tamar is not simply “right”, only more right than Judah).

            A queer recognition approach to this narrative is unbothered by this ambiguity. The work of this triad between queer reader, Genesis trickers, and trickster Genesis is to bring us into deeper reflection upon our alliances, resistances, and strategies for survival. What we recognize in Genesis, and the rest of scripture, will illuminate as much about ourselves and our current queer struggle as it does the text at hand.

Bibliography

 Armour, Ellen. “Queer Bibles, Queer Scriptures?” in Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Scholarship. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pages 1-9.

 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 2006.

 Carden, Michael. “Genesis/Bereshit” in The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest, Robert Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache. London: SCM Press, 2006.

 Foley,  Connor. “Tamar's Transgressive Resistance: Gender Non-Conformity in Genesis 38 and the Women's Protection Unit in the Rojava Conflict”. Presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting Denver, 2018.

Jaffe, Sara.  “Queer Time: The Alternative to Adulting”, in JSTOR Daily, January 10, 2018. Accessed 12/16/19. https://daily.jstor.org/queer-time-the-alternative-to-adulting/

Mee, Emily and Charlie Bell. “Why are Transgender People Self-Medicating?” in Sky News. November 2019. https://news.sky.com/story/x-11861353 Accessed 12/16/19.

Mollenkott, Virginia. “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters”, in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000.

Niditch,  Susan. “Genesis” in  Women’s Bible Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press: 2012.

Tonstad, Linn. God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude. New York: Routledge, 2018. 

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[i] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 10

[ii] Ellen Armour, “Queer Bibles, Queer Scriptures?” in Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Scholarship (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011) p. 2.

[iii] Linn Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 17.

[iv] Michael Carden, “Genesis/Bereshit” in The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest, Robert Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache, (London: SCM Press, 2006), p. 25

[v] Ibid., 25-26. 

[vi] Virginia Mollenkott, “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters”, in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000) , p. 15

[vii] Ibid., 18

[viii] Sara Jaffe, “Queer Time: The Alternative to Adulting”, in JSTOR Daily, January 10, 2018, accessed 12/16/19. https://daily.jstor.org/queer-time-the-alternative-to-adulting/

[ix]Ibid.

[x] Emily Mee and Charlie Bell, “Why are Transgender People Self-Medicating?” in Sky News, November 2019. https://news.sky.com/story/x-11861353 Accessed 12/16/19.

[xi] Susan Niditch, “Genesis” in  Women’s Bible Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press: 2012) p. 42.

[xii] Carden, 23.

[xiii] Ibid., 24-25.

[xiv] Ibid., 54.

[xv] Ibid., 55.

[xvi] Connor Foley, “Tamar's Transgressive Resistance: Gender Non-Conformity in Genesis 38 and the Women's Protection Unit in the Rojava Conflict”, presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting (Denver, 2018). P. 2.

[xvii] Ibid., p. 2.

[xviii] Ibid., p. 3.