Join us in CHAT for our Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series. This week, Anne Létourneau (Religion) will discuss "Biblical Beauties: Femininity, Sexual Fantasy and Violence in the Hebrew Bible."
"This talk explores the intertwining of violence and gender in the Hebrew Bible from an aesthetic point of view. In the biblical texts, beautiful women are often victims of aggression. This violence takes the form of physical abuse, rape, murder, and other such modes. I argue that feminine beauty has a very specific function in these violent literary plots: this narrative motif eroticizes every scene and holds the beautiful woman responsible for the violence to which she is subjected. This talk will also be an opportunity to demonstrate how beauty and power intersect differently according to gender in the Hebrew Bible. What kind of agency beautiful female characters are granted in these texts?"