Product Description

God s Beauty Parlor opens the Bible to the contested body of critical commentary on sex and sexuality known as queer theory and to masculinity studies. Through a series of dazzling rereadings staged not only in God s beauty parlor, but also in God s boudoir, locker room, and war room, the author pursues the themes of homoeroticism, masculinity, beauty, and violence through such texts as the Song of Songs, the Gospels, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of Revelation. He ponders such matters as the curious place of the Song of Songs in the history of sexuality, or how an apparent paean to male-female love became a pretext for literary cross-dressing for legions of male Jewish and Christian commentators; Jesus face and physique in relation to ideologies of beauty, ranging from the patristic era, when the earthly Jesus was regularly represented as ugly, to the contemporary global culture industry, with its trademark equation of looks with worth; the gendered and sexual substratum of Paul s doctrine of salvation embedded in his most influential epistle not least his gendering of righteousness as masculine and sin as feminine; and the intimate imbrication of masculinity and mass death in Revelation, a book about war making men making war-making men ...some of whom also happen to be gods.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1123627 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
'This is a brilliant piece of work. Moore combines broad and deep knowledge of biblical scholarship with creative, controversial, even fanciful exegesis.Addressing both the homoeroticism and violence of biblical and other Jewish and Christian texts, he takes the material seriously and playfully at the same time, a feat few writers are capable of carrying off. If people pay attention to Moore's interpretations - and they should, biblical scholars as well aslay persons - they should never be able to read these texts with the same benign expressions as before.' Dale B. Martin, Yale University

Synopsis
God s Beauty Parlor opens the Bible to the contested body of critical commentary on sex and sexuality known as queer theory and to masculinity studies. Through a series of dazzling rereadings staged not only in God s beauty parlor, but also in God s boudoir, locker room, and war room, the author pursues the themes of homoeroticism, masculinity, beauty, and violence through such texts as the Song of Songs, the Gospels, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of Revelation.

He ponders such matters as the curious place of the Song of Songs in the history of sexuality, or how an apparent paean to male-female love became a pretext for literary cross-dressing for legions of male Jewish and Christian commentators; Jesus face and physique in relation to ideologies of beauty, ranging from the patristic era, when the earthly Jesus was regularly represented as ugly, to the contemporary global culture industry, with its trademark equation of looks with worth; the gendered and sexual substratum of Paul s doctrine of salvation embedded in his most influential epistle not least his gendering of righteousness as masculine and sin as feminine; and the intimate imbrication of masculinity and mass death in Revelation, a book about war making men making war-making men ...some of whom also happen to be gods.