BookTALK: Guest Speaker Series

Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University. They are the author, editor, or coeditor of 12 books. Solo-authored works include Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (2020) and edited projects include Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture (2025), After the Corinthian Women Prophets: Reimagining Rhetoric and Power (2021), and Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles (2019). Dr. Marchal also serves as a founding co-editor with Melissa W. Wilcox of the completely fee-free and open-access journal, QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, and just completed their term as the founding chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship. Dr. Marchal’s current research projects circle around how “bad feelings” might get us a different sense of the people in the first century communities that sparked, received, recirculated, and repurposed the letters we now call “Paul’s” (how disgust, trauma, and loss/mourning might just be better cues into practices of solidarity in ancient assemblies, and maybe also now).

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. This book reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters: androgynous females, castrated males, enslaved people, and barbaric foreigners. Each of these ancient figures deployed in these letters is situated within a specifically Roman imperial setting, an ambiance that cast them as complicated, debased, and dangerous. While the letters repeat and reinscribe the prevailing perspectives on this constellation of embodied figures, this project repositions them by implementing key insights from queer studies. In juxtaposing them against more recent figures of gender and sexual variation, also subject to vilification and marginalization, this project provides a series of alternative angles on these figures and the assemblies who spark and receive these letters, then or now.

In staging a series of “touches across time,” Appalling Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2020) defamiliarizes and reorients what can be known about both the historical figures active in these ancient communities and those rhetorical figures that continue to be activated in contemporary settings. The aim is not to claim, anachronistically, that these figures are somehow identical to each other; rather, it is through anachronistic juxtaposition that the book highlights contingent connections—partial, particular, but shared practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that depart from prevailing perspectives and demonstrate a range of unexpected impacts for the interpretation of politically and religiously loaded literature.

Purchase a copy of Appalling Bodies at Bookshop.org or Amazon.com