Pericopes in the Present: Gender,Water,and Flows of Blood in and Beyond Mark 5

Abstract

This essay considers polyvalent meanings of fresh water and the gendered dynamics of menstrual blood and porous, gendered bodies in the history of interpretation of Mark 5:24–35. Drawing upon a hydrosocial, anti-colonial, intersectional feminist hermeneutic, this essay articulates intersections among the uneven contemporary menstrual burdens associated with insufficient fresh water supply, indicates how gendered and racialized medicine and public health figure into these dynamics, and offers a robust alternative to the dominant history of biblical interpretation usually applied to the Mark 5 pericope of the hemorrhaging woman.

Charting Water(s)

As Mircea Eliade observed nearly seventy years ago, waters figure prominently throughout human religious societies as metaphor, symbol, and ritual substance. ¹ Religions find a place for water both ritually and conceptually, from the centrality of sacred rivers and the Kumbh Mela in Hinduism; to numerous koans in Zen Buddhism and imagery in the Tao Te Ching; to miqvā’ôt (and other purification rituals) and Amos’ texts of justice in Judaism; to the polysemic imagery and status of the Jordan River in Judaism and Christianity over millennia; to baptism and the notion of “living water” in Christianity; to wudu in Islam, and distinctly Islamic water-attuned architecture in the Middle East. ² The list could go on. Waters elude exhaustive definition and are the supple stuff of life, legend, belief, and religious practices.

In scientific notation, water—dihydrogen oxide—is a bent molecule, comprised of two atoms of hydrogen jostling with one atom of oxygen, with polar tetrahedral bonds that enable it to exist in three different states: liquid, solid (ice), and water vapor. Physiologically, water is essential for human survival; common wisdom holds that most humans can survive for nearly a month without food but only for a week or less in the absence of water. In biophysical iterations, global waters are dynamic entities, fluctuating in ocean currents and atmospheric rivers, precipitation cycles, groundwaters, and surface waters. While seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water, only approximately one percent—the world’s freshwater—is amenable and available for human consumption. And fresh waters are highly susceptible to environmental degradation and human landscape modifications. Effluents from industrial waste easily mingle with river water and alter its potability. Sulfurous emissions from factories in one part of the world create acid rain in a neighboring region. Logging and land development, damming and irrigation increase the silting of rivers, mineralize arable land, and drain rivers. Absence of sanitation infrastructure leads to pollution of freshwater sources and renders them dangerous for human use, even for the most basic aspects of survival such as bathing or drinking. So, too, can economically incentivized water management decisions lead to decaying pipes and—as in the case of Flint, Michigan, and many other communities since—issue forth in massive, racialized public health effects from lead contamination. ³

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, some fresh water sources are viewed as desirably pristine and are “protected” from general use by wilderness, ecotourism, or corporate privatization economic initiatives—often with the effect of isolating local communities from these water sources and features. This is evident in the case of bottled water, where FIJI water’s advertising has boasted that its propriety aquifers are “untouched by man,” for example; and it is also evident in the formation of some U.S. national parks or monuments, where Native American tribes have been removed from their traditional lands and waters in the interests of nationalized park ideologies. ⁴ Thus, while fresh waters are a universally essential component of life for and beyond human flourishing, it is also the case that people’s experiences of fresh waters are mediated by institutional factors (governance and infrastructure) as well as cultural significations. None of these factors are self-evident, uniform, or neutral; and, unfortunately, there are often disproportionate racialized and gendered burdens that result from constellations of social norms, public policy, and hydraulic infrastructure pertaining to fresh water distribution.

Recognizing the multiple complexities of fresh waters’ flows beyond the strictly physical hydrological cycle, geographers, political ecologists, and ecological theorists now refer to hydrosocial cycles and territorialities, in which human institutions (such as government and economic policy) and social norms (such as religious values and cultural practices) are interwoven with physical waterscapes. ⁵ Because of the multiple contextualities and polyvalences of fresh waters, in my scholarship I have moved from referring to fresh water as a singular noun (“global fresh water crisis”) to invoking and specifying fresh waters, and associated “crises,” as plural (“global fresh waters” and “global water crises”). These small linguistic acts remind me (and readers) that the relationship between humans and water is manifold, polysemic, and brimming with what feminist cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has called “epistemic murk.” ⁶ The multiple epistemologies and interpretive frameworks for fresh waters admit of a range of paradigms, influences and ethical dimensions. Taking these considerations into account, in this essay I proceed with an approach that can be described as a hydrosocial, anti-colonial, intersectional feminist hermeneutic. This complexity is necessary because dominant interpretive strategies for the materialities of waters and bodies have played out in modernity in ways that have privileged racialized, gendered, but purportedly universal euroamerican masculinist perspectives and values.

Hydrosocial, Anti-Colonial, Intersectional Feminist Epistemology: A Note on Method

For several decades, feminist, Black feminist, womanist, mujerista, and Asian feminist scholarship, as well as postcolonial and other social theories, have challenged the notion—in biblical studies, theology, and elsewhere—that there exists one neutral, ahistorical and therefore authoritative way of perceiving, describing, and analyzing features of the world. ⁷ This includes the world of a sacred text, religious tradition, or ritual practice. Prominent among many sources, Sylvia Wynter’s postcolonial analyses have for decades pointed out how the false neutralities of euroamerican characterizations—in theology, philosophy, and then the biological sciences—are manifestations of deeply biased, racialized colonial Christianized intellectual configurations and social-economic processes. ⁸ Epistemologies (and the moral judgments as well as constructive ethical accounts that follow from them) that challenge and correct this presumption of uniformity employ different methods of analysis, and so it is important to remember that there is no uniform “feminism,” and that it is important to stipulate one’s methodology.

In my hydrosocial, anti-colonial, intersectional feminist methodology, then, first and foremost is a concern for the experience and well-being of persons of marginalized genders, often with special attention to women/girls as they are rendered vulnerable by both direct and systemic water-mediated disenfranchisements. I also give special attention to historical consciousness and ongoing colonialities, especially to the lessons from past or current water-mediated exploitations and injustices, as a remedy for the ahistorical aspirations of dominant paradigms. This approach also tends to engage responsibly-derived social and scientific data, where available, in the service of structural critiques of power relations, including gendered and racialized dynamics of hydrosocial realities. Finally, attention is also given to the aporias or margins of normative discourse, by inquiring about what sorts of questions not being asked in dominant discourses about water, ecology, religions, or human experiences; and then by foregrounding or amplifying those perspectives in ethical reframing. ⁹

The analysis in this essay is also indebted to three specific types of sources and methods, and specific interlocutors. The first is an engagement with data on water, sanitation, hygiene, and gendered experience, especially regarding menstruating women, as reported in recent social scientific and international humanitarian literatures. While there are problems with uncritical use of social scientific research in contemporary biblical interpretation or theological ethics, it is nonetheless the case that demographic data engaged responsibly can help to contextualize and illuminate gendered realities and burdens in a way that can refract into theological reflection and biblical analysis. ¹⁰

Next, I move the frame to focus on the pericope of the hemorrhaging woman in Mark 5. Drawing on translations of the text as well as subsequent euroamerican biblical scholarship on that story, I foreground and engage the work of Candida R. Moss on porosity, femininity, and disability, in conversation with classicists’ understandings of Greco-Roman medical and philosophical anthropology. Into these discourses I interpolate feminist materialisms and phenomenologies of water, articulated by hydrofeminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis, as well as a return to the topic of contemporary reproductive and gendered social realities. The intertwining of these series of insights leads to theo-ethical reinterpretation of the Mark 5 pericope.

Such an approach may feel unruly to those who may be laser-focused on historical-critical methodologies or linguistic textual analysis, and it is certainly ambitious for one essay. But as readers of this journal well know, there are many ways to analyze responsibly the content and meaning of a text. In all of my work, I am committed to rigorous interdisciplinarity that inhabits the strengths and observes the limits of particular methods and sources and can perhaps be described by what Jeffrey Stout calls “moral bricolage.” ¹¹ Precision is warranted, but so too is humility and creativity when it comes to textual interpretation in a world of buzzing multiplicities and cultural-historical variabilities and deeply-ingrained colonial, racialized, gendered bias. It is wise not to assume that one approach or interpretive lens is exhaustively accurate or methodologically exclusive; yet some approaches are better than others, and much depends on the frame. ¹²

Framing Water or Data as Pericope

A pericope is a selection or extract of a text, especially from the Bible, that has a type of coherence and meaning even if removed from its original context. In the next section, we will encounter the pericope of the woman with a flow of blood (or hemorrhage) in Mark 5. But first, let us consider a pericope of a different sort: recent data on access to water, sanitation, and hygiene through the lens of gender and menstrual health.

It has been clear for decades that lack of consistent access to clean water and sanitation continue to be major causes of disease, death and suffering worldwide. Water-borne diseases from unclean water sources and lack of sanitation facilities affect millions of people per year, cause nearly a million deaths per year, and are a leading cause of death in children under five years of age. ¹³ Public health researchers have long noted that, despite the fact that water is vital for the basic activities of human life (and many more besides), “perhaps more than any other element, it is also the source of death and disease . . . Extreme shortage and surfeit of water—drought and inundation—dramatically affect people’s health and well-being by changing the local ecology, disrupting disease-control measures, and creating new pathogenic environments.” ¹⁴ Climate change amplifies dynamics of water scarcity or deluge, which in turn renders even more vulnerable the people who are living in situations of social, ecological, or economic precarity. Gender is a major factor in terms of which bodies bear the greatest burdens; women and girls are disproportionately responsible for water procurement when a centralized domestic source is not available, thus impacting their health, education, and economic attainment status, as well as physical safety. ¹⁵ Because fresh water is a vector for climate change impacts, research on climate change and health continues to demonstrate that women suffer first and most in the absence of clean, fresh water sources. According to WaterAid’s recent comment on this topic, “women typically need to use more water than men, for caregiving and during menstruation, pregnancy and breastfeeding. This means that when water is scarce due to higher temperatures or droughts, women may not be able to meet their basic needs for water and personal hygiene.” Similarly, “women and girls may have to travel further to find somewhere to manage their periods or relieve themselves, which increases their risk of experiencing violence and harassment.” ¹⁶

Viewed anthropologically and sociologically, gender is a significant determinant of one’s experience of water. As early as 2006, the corporate-leaning World Water Forum noted that, “throughout the developing world, in urban as well as rural areas, the gender division of labor typically assigns to women a series of roles and responsibilities that, for the most part, men do not share. They include securing water for household needs like drinking and washing; cooking and ensuring overall household security; and caring for children, the elderly, and the ill.” ¹⁷ The data available on access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) confirm that hydrosocial realities of water procurement tend to burden women disproportionately. In parts of the world where water is scarce or contaminated, the journey to obtain water generally falls to women; depending on their proximity to a fresh water source, they may spend multiple hours per day gathering sufficient water for their families’ use. Once the water has been obtained, they must carry it home, which over time can lead to musculoskeletal problems. And in some cases, “the need to travel farther from home to secure water can expose women and girls to sexual harassment and rape—this can also happen when women who lack safe, nearby sanitation facilities move about at night in search of privacy.” ¹⁸ Life and educational possibilities are circumscribed by the limiting factor of fresh waters in multiple ways: the physical and temporal burden of water-gathering for domestic purposes; the risk of physical, sexual assault when gathering water or when seeking privacy for menstrual realities; the educational impact of girls and young women staying home from school to gather water or because of insufficient or unsafe facilities for menstrual relief or other forms of sanitary hygiene.

While gaps in data remain, the 2023 joint UNICEF-WHO report assessing the years 2000—2022 indicates that among households that share sanitation (i.e., do not have personal-family toilets), “women are more likely than men to feel unsafe walking alone after dark”; that “lack of handwashing facilitates disproportionately impacts adolescent girls and women who are primarily responsible for child care and domestic chores in many countries around the world”; and that “inadequate WASH services limit the ability of adolescent girls and women, and other persons who menstruate, to safely and privately manage their periods.” ¹⁹ This report notably includes, for the first time, a chapter on menstrual health and water. In doing so, it draws on guidelines from the Global Menstrual Collective that takes a definition of “menstrual health” to include “various factors that influence the experience of those who menstruate,” including measures of pain and social stigmatization, which allows a greater impact on the experience of menstruating people than on other factors (such as how governments may or may not underwrite menstruation support such as medical services or supplies ²⁰ ). These metrics include access to supportive, trustworthy, and affordable care; sufficient facilities to change their menstrual materials; and social-educational-economic “menstrual health impacts,” namely, whether menstruating people were impacted in their school participation, paid work, or social activities due to their menstrual period(s). ²¹

The 2023 report, and especially the first-of-its-kind chapter on menstrual health, also demonstrates how “wider gender norms, taboos and stigma . . . surround menstruation in many parts of the world.” ²² The hydrosocial realities suggest clear connections to relations of stigma, sexism and sexual vulnerability, and patterns of androcentric privilege (since boys and men, by and large, do not face these obstacles). This serves as a reminder that hydrosocial, embodied experiences such as menstruation, or other female reproductive-adjacent realities are often stigmatized and/or linked to women being disenfranchised from public health care. For such embodied realities, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “etiologies do not readily materialize under the microscope,” and social analysis is an indispensable tool. ²³

Biblical Interpretation and Hydrosociality

Let us pause the social analysis for a moment. What does any of this have to do with biblical interpretation? What can a scientifically engaged ethicist productively or accurately say about theology or the Bible, anyway?

In prior publications, I developed an interpretation of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 that explored how a return to then-common knowledge about water in the ancient world, along with a feminist methodology, prompts a re-evaluation of the historically dominant, euroamerican consensus meaning of the story. ²⁴ Specifically, I demonstrated how interpreters who insist on viewing “the woman at the well as benighted or unreasonably confused . . . are missing profound differences in the meaning of water’s sources” that would have been common, practical knowledge in the ancient Mediterranean region. ²⁵ That Jesus’s interlocutor in John 4 was a woman seemingly made it easier for centuries of biblical interpreters to dismiss or ridicule her statements; that these interpreters had no experience of fresh waters in the ancient world led them to ignore her practical wisdom from years of the gendered labor of gathering water.

Given the productivity of that historiographical reevaluation, I now engage a similar strategy, this time with regard to the Gospel of Mark in conversation with the social scientific data cited above, as well as contemporary biblical scholarship and hydrofeminist philosophy. Here, just as with the woman at the well, we find a woman who is viewed by histories of mainstream biblical interpretation to be somehow flagrant in her embodied reality, as well as errant in her understanding of Jesus. Yet where the woman at the well in John 4 is understood to be scorned and socially shunned for being an adultress (a seductress, a woman with multiple husbands, someone on the margins of society for sexual reasons), the woman in Mark 5 is not isolated from society; indeed, as Amy-Jill Levine points out, she is quite explicitly immersed in a crowd, although she has experienced a twelve-year flow of blood or hemorrhage that linguistically and interpretively seems specific to menstruation or peri-menstrual realities of the sort that often besiege people with uteruses. Rare it is for women’s uterine blood to be so public, both in the ancient world and in ours, since menses are messy and highly gendered in the androcentric history of New Testament interpretation and in cultural commentary generally. ²⁶ And so the question of gender once more comes to the interpretive fore, not only through waters but through menstrual blood, liquidity, porosity, and flows of power in the Gospel of Mark.

Constitutive Porosity and Women’s Blood, from Mark 5:24-35 to the Present Day

Nestled like a fibroid in the Gospel of Mark is a story of a woman who bleeds. Variants of this account appear in three of the synoptic Gospels, and each describes with modest variance an encounter between a woman who, in search of healing, reaches out from a crowd to touch Jesus’s cloak (Matt 9:20–22; Mark 5:24-35; Luke 8:43–47). ²⁷ New Testament scholars will recognize interpretive strains that have garnered much attention through the centuries: among the most prominent are the question of the particular nature of this woman’s ailment, the features of women’s (gynecological) blood, and the woman’s upstart-improper “taking” of Jesus’s healing. Candida R. Moss summarizes that, “in the history of scholarship, this pericope has attracted the attention particularly of scholars interested in the woman’s gynecological ailment and its relationship to purity,” adding that “these interpretations have centered on the woman’s femininity, anonymity, and ritual impurity to fascinating effect”—specifically, in ways that have emphasized “femininity to the neglect of her disability.” ²⁸

Another angle of mainstream biblical interpretation asks whether there were menstrual purity taboos that would have informed how listeners in the ancient Mediterranean absorbed the message; male euroamerican interpreters have been particularly keen on this one. Then there is the question of whether the woman is acting improperly by reaching out to touch Jesus’s cloak (generally answered in the affirmative by centuries of male interpreters). Commentators have, by and large, been extremely keen to retain Jesus’s power in the face of an irrepressible, grasping, and bleeding woman; and feminist commentators seem to suggest that this may be in part because, in the Mark pericope, Jesus plays only a supporting role in the healing narrative. In all three synoptic accounts, the woman seems to believe that if she touches the hem of Jesus’s garment, she will be made well; but it is only in Mark that Jesus perceives “in himself that the power had gone forth from him” (5:30), and in both Mark and Luke the woman’s affliction is healed before Jesus recognizes her. In these two accounts, therefore, Jesus merely recognizes and affirms the exchange of power that has already transpired—though also in all three accounts, Jesus identifies the woman’s faith as the primary healing agent. ²⁹

Moss’s analysis and interpretation differ refreshingly from the male-embodied lexicon by pointing to similarities between Jesus and the hemorrhaging woman. ³⁰ She keenly develops how the dynamics of the flow of power are summoned by the woman, and inadvertently emitted by Jesus—and that, in addition to this dynamic, it is precisely the story’s inversion of the Greco-Roman aversion to porosity that constitutes its signification in that ancient society. Moss notes specifically that the “uncontrolled emissions” of power going out of Jesus at the touch of a woman’s hand to his cloak “has not sat well with many readers of Mark,” and that the Gospel of Matthew redacts that touchy detail, granting healing power to Jesus’s words alone without the prod of cloak-grasping. Pointing out how power flows to and from “porous bodies” in the context of Greco-Roman physiology, Moss indicates that “what is unusual” about the pericope of the hemorrhaging woman, “is the mechanics of her healing and what these mechanics can tell us about the porosity of Jesus’s body.” ³¹ Moss further argues that “[w]hen viewed in the context of Greco-Roman models of the body, both the woman and Jesus appear weak, sickly, feminine, and porous. . . . It reverses the traditional association of porosity and weakness, both because Jesus lacks a positive, healing power and because this leakage of power points toward his concealed identity.” ³² This interpretation centralizes the idea of dynamic, porous, and differently abled bodies, and it allows for a reading of Jesus himself as porous and powerful in ways that parallel femaleness and purported weakness.

Writing of gendered bodily porosity and disability in a philosophical register, Astrida Neimanis elaborates how gendered porosity “[i]nterrupt[s] a comfortable human sense of a bodily self, while also amplifying our very human vulnerabilities.” My turn to Neimanis’ philosophy is not because she herself has engaged this pericope, but rather because such an anthropology of porosity resonates with the interpretation that Moss begins to proffer from Mark 5, and indeed opens it further. Philosophically, attunement to the wateriness of bodies, Neimanis suggests, makes room for the non-normative—including “those of us for whom our subjectivity has always been subjected to a chronic illness that means one’s visceral body is perpetually unruly.” ³³ This surely sounds like a description of the hemorrhaging woman, with her “perpetually unruly” “visceral body,” a body that informs her subjectivity, her needs, her sense of self, her actions. Then, in the very next clause, Neimanis goes on to offer another salient context: She explicitly links embodied porosity and hydro-dependence to hydrosocial, public health realities, such as those noted in the prior section of this essay (“Framing Water, or Data as Pericope”). Specifically, she argues the following:

. . . or one may be dependent on a water source too distant, too polluted, or too costly to respond to one’s bodily needs. In these instances, one’s assemblage of watery bodiedness can spill beyond the discrete comfort of the human, and in doing so reemphasize the flimsy membrane that just barely holds this conceit together, but which is patrolled all the more for it. ³⁴

The constitutive porosity of all human bodies, the need for water, the hydrosocial differences in the availability and burden of fresh water procurement and access—these too are all factors that should bear on considerations of an anthropology of porosity in the present day. In these ways, an anthropology of porosity reveals myopias embedded in a modernist conceit of isolated, indvidualist agency that does not recognize hydrodependence, hydrosociality, interdependence, and interconnection.

Finally, Neimanis’s description of “the flimsy membrane that just barely holds this conceit together” suggests that bodies (in their permeability) and flimsy social assertions of an isolated, individualist, modernist-proper self are “patrolled all the more” precisely when porosities, dependencies, and other ways of being human are revealed not just as aberrations, but as constitutive to the conditions of being embodied. As we consider the intimacy of wateriness, porosity, and blood in relation to women’s bodies and reproductive capacities, it is worth asking whether these are categories that, when affixed to gender, remain undervalued or ignored in contemporary euroamerican thought. The exclusion of menstrual hygiene and health from decades of humanitarian reporting would suggest as much. And, in the context of Mark 5, one could say that the history of interpretation of this pericope speaks to how the hemorrhaging woman’s body, motives, and action have been undermined yet patrolled for centuries. This raises the question: Why? What is so powerful, so potent, that it must be patrolled? Does some of the power of the woman’s grasp for healing derive from the nature of her affliction? In multiple directions, I suggest, the power exchange between the woman and Jesus is more complex, and speaks to contemporary realities in far more direct ways, than the history of interpretation has standardly allowed.

Pericopes in the Present

On social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok, and in the pages of media publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, claims resonant with Sylvia Wynter’s diagnosis seem to surface: that the long euroamerican universalizing of the White male body’s physiology and pathology is simply intellectually insufficient and lazy; that it cannot be presumed to include all human bodies; and that its unconscious adoption results in the suffering, disablement, and death of those who by dint of genetics, gender, and circumstance do not conform to the presumed-neutral racialized, masculine norm. ³⁵ Simultaneously, there is sustained awareness—the result of #MeToo and much more—that there continues to be no dearth of theological and cultural justifications for women’s suffering, including psycho-pseudo-medical justification for withholding treatment from suffering women, especially women of color. What has long been pointed out by feminist scholars and activists has effloresced anew in English-language cultural commentary: in addition to overt medical sexism and racism, there is a galling dearth of research priorities and treatment for a host of women’s bodily conditions, whether acute or chronic. To take but one easy example, hormonal birth control has been prioritized for women and rendered on women’s bodies with substantial side effects in many cases—but simultaneously deemed too risky for men, despite many of the same side effects occurring across trial groups. (Women can bear the headaches and the nausea and the hair loss but men, it seems, should not.)

Among numerous other examples, consider the recently redressed public spectacle of J. Marion Sims (1813–1883), a physician and former president of the American Medical Association as well as founder of a New York women’s hospital. Sims’s research protocols involved repeated surgeries (including hysterectomies and attempted innovations to repair fistulas) on non-consenting and non-sedated enslaved women, sometimes in front of an audience. ³⁶ This work earned him the honorific moniker “father of gynecological medicine” in the nineteenth century, and starting in 1894 a statue of Sims stood in Bryant Park, then in Central Park, across from the National Academy of Medicine in New York City. It was not until 2018 that Sims’ legacy was publicly reconsidered and the statue was removed from its pedestal and relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. ³⁷

Or consider that, also in the year 2018, twenty-three-time Grand Slam tennis champion Serena Williams gave birth to her first daughter and, post-parturition, was told by a nurse that she was acting “crazy” when she insisted—based on prior diagnosis and hospitalization resulting from blood clots in her lungs—that something was amiss. Indeed, Williams was correct, and the nurse was not. It was Williams’s persistence, self-knowledge, and prominence that ensured her subsequent access to sufficient care (though not without complications and obstructionism). Since becoming vocal about the experience, Williams’s story has become a flashpoint for discussions about the pervasiveness of medical racism and especially about Black women’s reproductive undertreatment and vulnerability. If a world-renowned sports figure who is recognizable by only her first name can be called “crazy” for detecting the precursors to an embolism, this surely bodes poorly for the many women of color who lack Serena’s professional status, economic power, access to medical care, and cultural clout. ³⁸

In addition to the short accounts of Sims and Serena, recall that despite twenty-three years of focused data-gathering and purported concern about water and health, 2023 was the first year that a chapter on menstrual health was included as a central piece of global public health reflection by transnational humanitarian agencies. And this is, of course, despite the ubiquity of women’s bodies, menstruation, and water concerns across all of human time. While I am cautious about universal claims, I suspect that in every society throughout human history, the reproductive distinctiveness of women’s bodies has been interwoven with the fundamental bodily necessity of water. Even despite vast differences between ancient sacred texts and contemporary global demographics, the woman with the hemorrhage in Mark 5 can be viewed as representing legions of women throughout history with porous bodies who have bled and suffered, visibly or invisibly, and who have had to clamor for the right to medical attention or healing, usually with minimal to no support—despite the simple fact that, as Karen Tang aphorizes, “women’s sexual health is public health.” Instead, as we now know, with particular demonstrability across euroamerican colonial history, bodies that carry bloody, uterine, menstrual constitutive porosity have often been medically ignored, minimized, psychologized, or patrolled. ³⁹ What is rare and noteworthy about the Mark 5 passage is that when the hemorrhaging woman demands treatment—healing—she takes it upon herself to make this demand; and then the “flow of power” moves from Jesus to her. From this angle of interpretation, it is notable that, perhaps against the norms of the current society, she demanded healing—and received it. She demanded healing, and received it, perhaps even against the will of the so-called healer.

Consider, then, that perhaps the woman with the flow of blood actually understands the severity of her bodily condition and its social contexts quite well—having lived in her body for many years and presumably having consulted available experts of the time. Given this, what if the hemorrhaging woman is not just a dismissably gendered social bother, or a figure to be instrumentalized in pursuit of christocentric affirmation; but rather, what if she is the hero of the story—precisely for demanding that the purported healer give her what she needs, on her own terms? In that frame, we could emphasize how the reader’s attention is drawn to the woman’s own insistence upon her bodily value and normativity. We could view her as the prophetic figure of the pericope, she whose porosities reveal the obvious failures of society’s incomplete, sexist notions of bodily integrity and their linkages to institutional patterns. We would view her as the one who, with her porous embodied agency, goes on to change the narrative. For at the end of the story, the woman in this Mark 5 pericope has demanded—and received—from the most powerful healer precisely what society has not (yet) made possible for her, and that which even the healer does not voluntarily give: the right to flourish on her own bodily terms. What if that were, in fact, the theological lesson?