- the expriment a bout public homework doing on facebook was most likely a failure, will retreat to the blog
- paul comparing his negative physigonomy to the the wounds on christs body, both perhaps honourable war wounds, as an ironic reversal.
- Quintilian, following Cicero, referred to the orator's sermo corporis, his
body language. Erik Gunderson writes that Quintilian's ideal oratorical body
was "made for reading" (108) which ties into the discussions below about Augustine and Crhyoms use of verbal discourses to suggest public metaphors. - Nonetheless, Luke's recurring emphasis on explicitly Roman ele-
ments of the scene focuses the reader's attention on the meaning of flogging
and flogged bodies in a mien wherein signal aspects of Roman "political
mythology" are embodied. (102) - In his influential study of peristaseis catalogues in the Corinthian corre-
spondence, John T. Fitzgerald argues that, in Greco-Roman literature, "[t]he
scars that the good man sometimes bears on his body are visible tokens of his
virtue, 'so that not by hearsay but by evidence of their own eyes men can judge
what manner of man he is' [Xenophon Ages. 6.2]. The endurance of hardship is
thus the proof of virtue, the seal of integrity." This suggests a kind of understanding of the obsession with visceria, the digging out of guts, perhaps--that the inner virture is written on exterior bodies,m and to make inner bodies visible is to show that virture? - last one for the day Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23-25)
Author(s): Jennifer A. Glancy
Source: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 123, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 99-135 - in fact i wonder if a feminist homosociality might be the way to read these martyrologies,
- the problem w/ sedgwick, is that her brilliance and her interests, were enough to prevent a discourse of female homosociality until very recently (that and homophobia/misogyny, the invisibility of female friendships), i wonder if f and p might be a good place to begin with that?
- but you know, the early feamle martyrs, because of the violence imposed on them, had a masculinity, that when Christainity became codified was thought to be incredibly threatening--and so Augstine, et al, had to perform a regulating surgery on the text.
- Augustine was a bit of an asshole in how he tries to re-femminize perptua.
- Cobb argues that when the father refuses t o give the child back to perptua, he becomes the mother, and she becomes the father, a shift made explcit by the closing up of perptua's breasts, a making contient of bodies.
- im interested in this idea, of perptua and her child, being asked to give up the child, giving up the child, having the child returned to her, the conversation between the father and perptua about childhood, and this idea that to martyr is to give up ones child, it becomes a kind of dual martyrdom (or really triple) but then are we imparting victorian ideas of sentimentality to roman ideas of child raising.
- "hair...is a signal of masculinity at work...The demasculnizaiton of Perpurtua's father, reflected in his emotionalism, his abandonment of parental authority, his use of deceptive persuasion and his old age." (102)
- one of the things that i think may be under spoken of in the works of F and P, is the idea that it provides a rupture in the family structure--the father is not obeyed, and the child is left. the quesiton of what happens to the child, or even the idea that the child is not as vital as the eventual martyrdom, suggests a kind of butch s/Stocism that provides an exception to Roman practive, maybe sort of kind of?
- Nicole Laroux: "Everything stats by being spoken, by being heard, by being imagined" (97)
- Greek Drama, seeing in one's minds eye, and the working through of the implications of that--comparing Chrystom's using of harlot imagery, as a way that thinking can bring into being, as a way of making concrete abstract dangers, and Augustine's sermons which suggest moral contience vs oral speech acts.
- the ambiguous, or liquid gender of F and P as a text "cannot be dismissed by assigning them as different authors" (95)
- the idea of authorship keeps popping up, the assumption these texts were written by men, about women, or that the autobiography must translate thru male lenses.
- onto Cobb, Stephanie. “Putting Women in Their Place: Masculinizing and Feminizing the Female Martyr,” in Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), 92-123.
- "and as one ventures into these inverse imaginative worlds sanctioned as punitive spectacle, savage custom, and heretic rite, eroticism becomes combined with cruelty--with unleashed aggression--so that a whole range of erotic and aggressive impulses become confused in a single narrative tableau.--a perverse oscillation between horror and lust, spectacle and censure, voyeurism and lament. (243)
- the last pages of this essay, which intwine roman depicitons of torture, and the material culture of martyology, as a kind of repression and expulsion, evades a psychoanalytic bent, but suggests that emphasis on disembodiment can allow for a spectacled eroticism, and takes Tertullian to task just for that.
- "tie him with his arms behind him and rack him upwards till the joints of his bones in every limb are rent asunder with a crack. Then with the cleaving strokes lay bare the ribs of their covering so the organs shall be exposed as they throb in the recesses of the wound" ( 229). Don't tell me that throbbing recesses aren't Wittig via Sade.
- but then we spend four pages talking about chariot races, and the point may be that romans just really liked death, lots and lots of death.
- (see the discussion of Charicles, that Frankfurter qoutes: "Achille Tarius beautiful Charicles is torn to bits beyond a crazed stallion, 'gashed with as many incisions as there were points on broken wood" (228). Broke wood, incisions, gashes, beautiful flesh--this could be used to describe the transgendering of christ's crucified flesh.
- (i keep thinking, you know young men are supposed to look at young men as examples, and young women are supposed to look at young women, and young women are examples of the moral prurience of the romans, etc...but is the ideal martyrological victim a woman, and so do examples of masculine stipping, of side wounds, of humilaiton, become a way of castrating masculine bodies--i mean at this time castrating was a way of castrating masculine bodies, but was there other ways to femminise--see Bynum and the side wound of christ/christ's vulva discussion)
- "the nude female, source of excitement, must be framed, clearly as monstrous, or as suffering from the monsters claws, in order to sanction the erotic gaze and even allow masochistic identification with her suffering" (226). This is not the case with the male body, is it, i mean Christ, John the Baptist, Sebastian, Christopher--is this because we cannot imagine the male body as an erotic object--but that is not the case at all, as we can see from Bernard of Caliveuax's reading of male flesh. Women, it's just the ladies that we have problems with.
- or the ironic idea that women who were the personificaiton of lust, had bodies who were "dissipated"--the tension b/w a corporal embodiment as an excess of flesh, and a corporal disembodiment, in order to more conveniently corrupt, this liquifcaiton of lust. (like sublimation in the gas state)
- i do like the mention he makes of the young boy in the story of agnes, who is killed because he looked at a stripped and humilated anges "lewdly", thats some serious vengeful god shit
- see, Frankfurter then goes the opposite end, when he begins talking about Perpetua and Felicity, saying that the milk leaking breasts, the seeking a pin to control her hair, and the tearing of clothing, as examples of this ironic "strip tease" that suggests an eroticizing--but thru-out the P/F text, P/F is attempting to mantain her body, against the terrifying unruliness. Pinning her hair, so that she will not be seen as a martyr with hair askew, pulling her tunic down, and even the breasts as mothers breast--these are not sexual symbols are they?
- ...Such objectification may well involve such narrative contexts such as violence, exoticism and perversion, especially when sexuality itself is culturally signified in violent terms or cannot be legitimately except as perversion or as demonic or as the perpetaiton of the Other. (217) willing to buy this, if we accept Christ as the ultimate other. But, the violence and the sado-masochism of Chri...See More
- "However, the erotic engagement involved in these fundamentally voyeuristic experiences is always repudiated in the culture of martyrology, and that repudiated excitement I will argue, inevitably translates into a rage against the source of the arousal: the martyr" (Frankfurter, . “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009): 215-145). 218. How does this work, with something like Sebastian, where instead of rage, the body of the martyr is writ on with other kinds of desire. The idea of Sebastian as erotic object, the devotion of Sebastian as erotic object, supplanting the idea of Sebastian as pious object--instead of the three levels of translated self fashioning (eros to private piety, priviate peity to public act), something much baser. Thinking that he qoutes Clement of Alexandria, on the idea of shrines to Aphrodite as one whose followers "adorn their chambers", where they "regard(...) licentiousness as piety" is there a place where xian negation and xian prurience function as a simpler one-one transaiton. (and not Jerome's weird, repressed, totes hot work on SoS)
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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