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Early Christianity and Its Literature #23
Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts
An intersectional study of New Testament and noncanonical literature
Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.
Case studies that reveal a variety of understandings, attitudes, medical frameworks, and taxonomies for how disabled bodies were interpreted
A methodology that uses disability as an analytical tool that contributes insights about cultural categories, ideas of otherness, and social groups’ access to or lack of power
An intersectional perspective drawing on feminist, gender, queer, race, class, and postcolonial studies
Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.
Features:
Case studies that reveal a variety of understandings, attitudes, medical frameworks, and taxonomies for how disabled bodies were interpreted
A methodology that uses disability as an analytical tool that contributes insights about cultural categories, ideas of otherness, and social groups’ access to or lack of power
An intersectional perspective drawing on feminist, gender, queer, race, class, and postcolonial studies
Anna Rebecca Solevåg Professor of New Testament Studies at VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse (2013).
Kindle Edition
Published October 29, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2025
Really great intersectional approach to disability in the NT. Theory heavy but not inaccessible, and covers a broad range of literature and disabilities with a theory/method at the heart of each chapter. Scholars can glean much from just one chapter or reading the whole work.
May 23, 2020
I fascinating look at early Christian texts and how they understood disabilities. The author uses some fresh interpretive lens that helps us to see texts in new ways.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews