Post-race-and-gender Politics Question

(Let's not use f-words today.) Let's ask (instead), How long have the politics of the USA been post-racial and post-gender (and post-Aristotle)?

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
--G. Gordon Liddy
(HT Allison Gaudet Yarrow of The Sisterhood)























--President Richard M. Nixon with his Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
(HT Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine)

Aristotle was one of the earliest to tackle the problem: he saw menstruation as a sign of female inferiority, related to the passive part he felt women played in reproduction.
(--from Janice Delaney's, Mary Jane Lupton's, and Emily Toth's
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation)

But menstruation is not just any cyclical occurrence. It involves the shedding of blood, which is itself a dire event, with or without group synchrony and astral coincidences, and at least intuitively associated with acts of deliberate bloodshed. Aristotle observed in the Historia Animalium that menstrual blood runs "like that of an animal that has just been stabbed" in sacrifice and Hippocratic medical texts used the same analogy.
(--from Barbara Ehrenreich's
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War)

For the Hippocratics the weakness of a woman's body (her porous flesh) caused menstruation; for Aristotle menstruation caused her physical weakness.
(--from Sarah B. Pomeroy's
Women's History and Ancient History)

Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”). The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the f****ist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow f*male activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get f***ed a lot.” This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.
(--from Anne Carson's
Glass, Irony, and God
- the unoffending *s have been added for our comfort.)

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly [as by a syllogism of logic] . . . . [S]ince woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
(--from Anne Carson's
Men in the Off Hours)

New Testament Translation Question

(Let's not use the word "feminist" today.) Let's (instead) focus precisely on the Greek text of the New Testament. Let me make a suggestion that I've made before, and then ask a question. Here's that suggestion:

that Mark is translating Jesus to give a pluralistic hermeneutic when he has him saying and asking:

Καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς, Οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην; Καὶ πῶς πάσας τὰς παραβολὰς γνώσεσθε;

And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?

The entire parable and this whole pericopic episode seem to get at interpretive difficulties and ways of being and repentance and subjectivities against pretended objectivity and the like. Yes, I know I'm exegeting isogetically - but isn't that some the point here in Mark 4? To keep outsiders out and insiders in and to multiply statements and so forth?

So the question:

How differently would you read this story of this parable if it started, really and textually, in Mark 3:31? With Jesus being challenged about his ostensible inattention to his mother and his brothers. Yes, I know the manuscripts and therefore the text critics go bananas here in verse 33. But Mark has Jesus turning the whole question of precise definition back to those challenging him:

Καὶ ἀπεκρίθη αὐτοῖς λέγων [ἀποκριθεὶς αὐτοῖς λέγει], Τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου [ἢ οἱ] [καὶ οἱ] [ἀδελφοί μου] ἀδελφοί [μου].

And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

Then he goes even further, and Mark does as well with his Greek:

34 Καὶ περιβλεψάμενος κύκλῳ τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν [τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν κύκλῳ] καθημένους, λέγει, Ἴδε, ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί μου

Ὃς γὰρ ἂν ποιήσῃ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ἀδελφός μου καὶ ἀδελφή [μου] καὶ μήτηρ ἐστίν.

34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Do you see how bold this interpretation? How additional to the text this marked detail? Is this a set up for the story of a sower sowing? Does gender matter? Embodiment in interpretationS? Wordplay in Texts?

In the words of Jesus: What does the text say? How do you read it?

The Preacher Sunday

When preaching about Joshua and the people of God obeying the Lord by following His clear and precise but not really explained orders to march around the city of Jericho once a day for seven days and to do a certain number of exact things that seventh day, the preacher at my church Sunday also said this:

"Partial obedience is total disobedience."

Not having the Hebrew orders really explained to me very well, I shrugged when remembering to obey totally and impartially:

ואהבת את יהוה אלהיך בכל־לבבך ובכל־נפשך ובכל־מאדך

and

לא־תקם ולא־תטר את־בני עמך ואהבת לרעך כמוך אני יהוה

Fortunately, Matthew's translation of that other Joshua's summation of all this precisely sums it all up in all its parts:

Ἐν ταύταις ταῖς δυσὶν ἐντολαῖς ὅλος ὁ νόμος κρέμαται καὶ οἱ προφῆται

And my own father had gotten me to memorize all that totality this way:

"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Later I heard that, at the very same time in another church, someone had shot George Tiller presumably because he'd been a baby killer like the people of Jericho must have been and the leader of Nazi Germany certainly was. "Hang all" sure had a sad meaning yesterday.