The Bible is like a body. It is a whole composed of many parts, in the pages of which
we find other bodies, identities which even now haunt the Western imagination. But
the chief focus of this essay is the biblical body of God and its sex. It is often
asserted that God has no sex, and that concern with God’s gender is beside
the point. God’s sex is merely metaphorical. But if so, it is far from
being a dead metaphor. God’s sex still orders human lives. But it does so
from behind a veil; from behind the homophobia and misogyny of Western culture and
religion. And when we draw aside the veil we find something queerer yet: the myth of
a self-fecunding man without an omphalos.
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