Battle of the Sexes: Gender and the City in the Song of Songs

Abstract

This article considers the significance of the city in the Song of Songs as a landscape, that is, a cityscape. It explores how contemporary theorizations of the city, especially landscape urbanism, can illuminate patterns of poetic use in the Song. It argues that the Song's use of the motif of the city is highly ambivalent, evoking the twin themes of protection and vulnerability. The Song playfully casts the lovers in a battle of the sexes, in which the young woman is a threatened city, and her lover is the encroaching enemy. Ultimately, the Song imagines the city as a body–-dependent on and susceptible to its surrounding environment, gendered female according to the conventions of the ancient world, and evocative of desire.