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God's Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible
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.
God's Beauty Parlor is an exhilarating attempt to bring some of the most significant currents in contemporary gender studies to bear on a text that, even in the post-Christian West, remains the ultimate cultural icon, cipher, and shibboleth.
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.
God's Beauty Parlor is an exhilarating attempt to bring some of the most significant currents in contemporary gender studies to bear on a text that, even in the post-Christian West, remains the ultimate cultural icon, cipher, and shibboleth.
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2002
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About the author
Stephen D. Moore
37 books7 followersProfessor of New Testament at the Theological School, Drew University. His many books include Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (Yale University Press), God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (Routledge), and Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield Phoenix).
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October 27, 2025
More so than a lot of theological books I've read recently, this one really made me think. I appreciated the integration of queer studies and masculinity studies to offer a fresh perspective on so many different parts of the Bible--showing both liberatory readings of passages that I wouldn't have thought of and ways the cultures of the biblical authors formed the way they thought and wrote about gender and sexuality. Moore's writing does such a good job balancing dense academic analysis with moments of humor and personality--I actually found myself laughing out loud at a few points of the book, which I have to say doesn't happen that often during my research process.
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