Reading Sodom through Sexual Violence Against Women

Abstract

This article considers how modern attitudes toward sexual violence against women influence the popular reception of Genesis 19. First, rape myths equate rape with sexual desire, supporting the assumption that Sodom is a story about gay sexual attraction and queer identity. Second, rape discourses minimize the threat of violence against Lot’s daughters, ignoring how they may be crucial to the attribution of gay desire in this text. Finally, the normalization of rape influences the traction that this story receives in the Christian imagination in contrast to other stories about the rape of women, like Judges 19–20, which are quickly excused or marginalized. Genesis 19 becomes an authoritative text because it is about what men do with men, while the presence of raped women in other stories has curiously little authority in Christian life. I conclude by imagining how we might read Lot’s daughters back into the text, reconstituting a Christian imagination that combats the normalization of rape.