Queer Futures Among Ezekiel’s Dry Bones: Is the Grave a Rectum?

• In Event: Queering the Futures of the Past: Reading Ancient Jewish Eschatology and Apocalypticism with Queer Theory

Abstract

In Ezekiel 37, the text presents the famous imagery of Israel as dry bones returned to life. In particular, God "opens Israel's graves" (v.12–13) and "puts God's breath/spirit into them" (vv.6,9,10,14). I interrogate this extended eschatological metaphor through the lens of two prominent queer theorists: Leo Bersani (“Is the Rectum a Grave?”) and José Esteban Muñoz (CRUISING UTOPIA).

My investigation begins by spotlighting the queer aspects of Ezekiel's imagery, which portrays the masculine God as one who opens grave-orifices and penetrates Israel with his powerful breath. (For readers of Ezekiel's other gendered metaphors, such as Stuart Macwilliam, this image of God as a male who violates his partner will be familiar.) Bersani celebrates the rectum as "the grave in which the masculine ideal ... of proud subjectivity is buried," a site where abjection can unravel homonormativity. By conversely reading Israel's grave as a rectum, where Israel achieves resurrection through being penetrated, the queer interpreter can point toward an eschatologically queer masculinity. Perhaps Ezekiel offers hope here, not just for the future of Israel, but for a sexual landscape that escapes the bifurcation between masculinity-as-strength and femininity-as-weakness.

Yet at the same time, the metaphor troubles this utopian vision. Muñoz's optimism and Bersani's anti-sociality are united in resisting homonormative approaches that seek to domesticate queerness into heterosexual norms. Fully queering this biblical metaphor must involve more than positioning Israel as God's male (yet penetrated and submissive) lover, and it must engage with the implications of an eschatological vision grounded in diasporic longing for the soil of Israel.

Muñoz describes how queer utopias are concrete, collective, and based in "educated hope." It may be that the way to queer this metaphor is to imagine ourselves in all three categories: the dry, penetrable bones in search of hope; the penetrating wind that offers life and breath; and the prophetic voice that speaks into being an erotic and fecund future. All three of these entities (some grammatically masculine, some grammatically feminine) play a critical role in Ezekiel's queer vision of new life: not through heterosexual reproduction, but through collective revival.

Author

• Esther Brownsmith, University of Dayton