"Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis: Here and There, Now and Then," Biblical Interpretation 28.4 (2020)

Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis: Here and There, Now and Then Peter N. McLellan Department of Academic Affairs, Oxford College of Emory University, Oxford, Georgia, USA peter.n.mclellan@emory.edu Abstract This article seeks to disrupt the deadly deployment of boundaries that mark particular people as normative or queer, socially living or dead. Conversing with the Decapolis of Mark 5:1-20 and Washington D.C.’s prostitution free zones (pfz), the present project deploys a hauntological and critical spatial response, that locates points of contact between transwomen of color in the U.S. capital and the possessed Gerasenes. This article challenges biblical scholars to lean into historiography that sees such stories— from the tombs and from the pfz—as politically active in and of themselves, and with one another. Mark 5:1-20 is imagined here as a place constructed by alliances of queer bodies spatialized into unlivability. Such alliances are resources for thinking beyond the neocapitalist drive to create deadly normativity through insides and outsides, suggesting that biblical texts are always already infused with demands from places where life is suffocated. Keywords Gospel of Mark – Gerasene demoniac – necropolitics – hauntology – queer theory – prostitution free zones © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15685152-2804A003 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 429 Necronationalism, built on necropolitics, focuses on the ways in which the erasure and death of the bad (queer) citizen-worker body carves out the ideological and physical space for the good (queer) citizen-worker body to emerge. —elijah adiv edelman1 And night and day, in the tombs and in the mountains, he was always crying and gashing himself with stones. —mark 5:5 As a biblical scholar, I am concerned with the ways in which our work—in this guild, in churches, in academic institutions, in the public—participates in the reification of the borders between places that bring life for some at the expense of other, queer bodies.2 Similar to neocapitalist gentrification practices’ delineation between a here and a there, a desirable citizen and an undesirable citizen, biblical scholars’ engagement with texts as objects of analysis and interpretation keeps the worlds within them at a safe distance. I suggest that biblical scholars’ distance from their object of study has the same homogenizing effect on their minds as gentrification does on the gentrified. Sarah Schulman writes of gentrification that with physical displacement of diverse groups “there was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.”3 The diversity of needs of people outside privileged communities is elided, in favor of the simplicity of gentrified life. While homogeneity protects neighborhood and disciplinary boundaries, people are marginalized by distance and crushed by necropolitics. This project questions whether those who are erased from the homogeneity of gentrified existence still act upon those who determine the boundaries between privileged life and social death. Although Mark’s Decapolis and contemporary Washington D.C. are separated from one another by linear time and dimensional space, attention to the 1 E. A. Edelman, “‘Walking While Transgender’: Necropolitical Regulations of Trans Feminine Bodies of Colour in the Nation’s Capital,” in J. Haritaworn, A. Kuntsman, and S. Posocco (eds.) Queer Necropolitics (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 174. 2 J. Puar’s notion that competition to accede to whiteness creates the conditions of death is prescient here (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007]). 3 Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2013), p. 14. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 430 McLellan non-normative ghosts dwelling within both places rejects the borders between normative and queer, between present and past, between life and death.4 Mark 5:1-20, narrating an encounter between Jesus and a possessed Gerasene man, serves as one entry point for such a discussion. In this project, I argue that not only is the Decapolis bounded apart from the rest of the narrative world, but every element of this pericope is marked by death: its characters, the historical memory of its setting, and the recollection of conquest. Even Jesus, the liberator, appears to mirror the conquest of Vespasian.5 My other point of entry is the “prostitution free zones” (pfz) of Washington D.C. The U.S. capital’s pfz s and the Gerasene tombs serve similarly normativizing roles: they mark queer bodies as undesirable a priori, simultaneously criminalizing them. In his work with trans* sex workers of color in Washington D.C., Elijah Edelman describes pfz s in the nation’s capital as “spaces of liminality and contested use, nearly always situated along gentrifying borderlands.”6 Wrapped up in urban gentrification, pfz s perform the ideological work shaping trans* lives of color from lives on the margins to lives in contradiction, lives unworthy of life. These spaces participate in discourses of legality, legitimacy, and social death, or, Edelman’s words, The exclusion of ‘undesirables’ from the urban terrain ‘must be seen as part of a broader process by which the law includes, weights and assesses all urban denizens.’ That is, deviant bodies come to serve as necropolitical anchoring points, indexing that which is morally suspect and intrinsically disposable.7 The social pressures forced upon transwomen and people of color are compounded when one avenue for work—sex work—is criminalized. pfz s 4 For more on hauntology as a field of critical inquiry see J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (trans. P. Kamuf; New York and London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2006); A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); W. Brown, Politics out of History [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], p. 156); M. McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); G. M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 5 H. Leander Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), p. 214. I discuss this observation in greater detail below. 6 Edelman, “Walking,” p. 179. As a point of clarification, although he thinks about the effects place has on the bodies of people of color and he uses the term “borderlands,” Edelman does not explicitly engage with the work of G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 7 Ibid., 180; K. Mitchell, “Geographies of Identity: The New Exceptionalism,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 1 (2006), p. 102; K. Beckett and B. Western, “Governing Social Marginality: Welfare, incarceration, and the Transformation of State Policy,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001), p. 44. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 431 necessarily criminalize transwomen, while leaving their customers unaffected.8 Inhabiting the realities of massive unemployment and poverty, transwomen of color become in the pfz the necessary excess of an ascendency to whiteness, the unacceptable queer subject wasted for the recognition of a select few citizens. My challenge for biblical scholars is that they lean into historiography that sees such stories—from the tombs and from the pfz—as politically active in and of themselves, and not politically active only when readers identify characters as contemporaries. The gentrified mind of the biblical scholar separates the pfz from the Decapolis, and separates the academy or church from both: the different, the absurd, the uncanny can never live within the purity of a gentrified neighborhood. Attention to spiritual entities—like ghosts, in general, or the demon “Legion” (v. 9), in particular—forces particular challenges for the neocapitalist order within biblical studies: What would it look like to perform scholarship that engages our temporal-spatial realities in privileged, neocapitalist environs so that those very necropolitical realities can be seen to have an agency that disrupts accelerating gentrification and its deadly logics, even without our help? We could take this further: why should we view characters only as identifiable with material subjects whose contemporary conditions seem similar to the narrative world? Indeed, even though the Gerasenes persist within a place completely infused with death, the very activity of spirits makes plain that existence within death worlds is not devoid of agency or the ability to break into gentrified locales. The alliance that forms outside cognition of biblical interpreters, an alliance that rejects boundaries between contemporary gentrified places and biblical death worlds, populates with difference the homogeneity of neocapitalist neighborhoods, populates them with politics. Even though gentrification subdivides space with wealth—a practice that depends on abstracting a place’s vitality and difference—the presence of social activity guarantees that communities, even death worlds, are full of life.9 In exploration of space’s 8 9 This project does not take up the dynamic between customers and products explicitly. However, it should be noted that gentrifiers are those with the economic means to exploit trans* labor while also benefiting from the trappings of uneven development. As stated above, transwomen are criminalized, not their moneyed customers. Here I am channeling D. Massey’s declaration that “any notion of sociability, in its sparest form simply multiplicity, is to imply a dimension of spatiality” (For Space [London: SAGE, 2007], p. 189). But Massey’s work is one among many. She and other critical geographers have helpfully noted that Newtonian physics constructed the modern concept of space, which acts merely as an empty vessel, waiting for and serving as a stage for the animating action of time, whereas critical geography began to pursue questions of whether space itself Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 432 McLellan vitality within neocapitalism, I turn to haunting as a way to elaborate the spectral activity of queer subjectivities moving in and through normative places. Haunting, Jacques Derrida observes, tracks experiences that depend on interactions seemingly out of time and out of place, that “[invade] everything: the spirit of the ‘sublime’ and the spirit of nostalgia crosses all borders.”10 Taking up the challenge posed by this trans-temporal-spatial concept with terms bearing a veneer of academic credibility like “hauntology” and “spectrality,” haunting accounts for subjectivities, histories, and traumatic memories of violence both enacted and submerged by the dynamics class, colonialism, sexuality, race, and technology.11 Carla Freccero links hauntology to queer theory and politics, reflecting: If this spectral approach to history and historiography is queer, it might also be objected that it counsels a kind of passivity…. In this respect it is also queer, as only a passive politics could be said to be. And yet, the passivity—which is also a form of patience and passion—is not quite the same thing as quietism. Rather, it is a suspension, a waiting, an attending to the world’s arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as guarantee or security for action in the present, but as the very force from the past that moves us, perhaps not into the future, but somewhere else.12 10 11 12 was just as ideological and temporal constructions like history (Space, Place, and Gender [London: Blackwell, 1994], pp. 260–263). For more see, for example, D. Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); R.J.A. Johnston, A Question of Place: Exploring the Practice of Human Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); H. Lefebvre, Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell 1991); R. D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 7; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); C. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Explorations in Anthropology; Oxford: Berg, 1994). Derrida, Specters, 168–169. My claim that haunting is not just temporal but spatial is not Derridean, but a nod to M. del Pilar Blanco and E. Peeren, who recognize that haunting is more than just time-play, but also a necessarily spatial phenomenon: ghosts come from somewhere and it is not enough to simply say they make mischief simply because they arrive from another time (“Introduction,” in M. del Pilar Blanco and E. Peeren (eds.), Popular Ghosts: Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture [New York: Continuum, 2010] p. xvii). Del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” in idem (eds.), The Spectralities Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 2. C. Freccero, “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past,” in G. E. Haggerty and M. McGarry (eds.), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), p. 207; see Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Series Q; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 104. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 433 Drawing especially upon the “passive politics” Freccero suggests are entailed in queer hauntology, I imagine Mark 5:1-20 as a space constructed by alliances of queer bodies spatialized into unlivability. Such an alliance, I argue, is a resource for thinking beyond the neocapitalist drive to create deadly normativity through insides and outsides. My goal is to disrupt this pattern by suggesting that religious texts are always already infused with demands from places where life is suffocated. Such demands, working with an agency unique to the dead refuse and condemn the logics that bound privilege from marginalization, textual worlds from reading worlds, normativity from queerness. Decapolis Death Worlds Edelman calls attention to “the complicit exceptionality of violence and death of trans* feminine bodies of color,” arguing that their production and treatment as exception signals “not only a form of queer necropolitics but also a form of what I term necronationalism that dually relies on hetero- and homonationalistic discourses of viable life.”13 While for gentrified communities, certain performances of gay subjectivity are acceptable, performance of life as a transwoman of color is illegible to the biopolitics of the state. For Edelman, this “necronationalism” defines the sorts of bodies worthy of life to the neocapitalist state. But this process is necessarily spatialized: like a possessed man chained up in the tombs, the violent politics that limit life create borders. Of course, the passage with which I am interested makes death-dealing logics more explicit with its setting among “tombs,” but necropolitics need only define their locations by the persistent, contested effort to eliminate life. Accounting for the fact that contemporary states are dependent upon subjects existing outside the realm of livability, the term necropolitics is wrapped up in the description of “death worlds.”14 Within such spheres, state powers see themselves as legitimate arbiters of maximum destruction against the “savage” frontiers of the colony, thereby creating a space in which existence is possible only in a “state of pain.”15 Featuring a “crying” demoniac (5:5, 7), who gashes himself with stones (v. 5), the Decapolis is surely marked with such torment. 13 14 15 Edelman, “Walking,” 174. A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Libby Meintjes (trans.), Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), pp. 39– 40. The term operates under the assumption that Foucault’s biopolitics are an insufficient tool for understanding the state’s drive for maximum production out of its populations, as biopolitics fail to account for the ways in which postcolonial centers depend on the deaths of those on the margins (ibid., pp. 11–12). Ibid., p. 38. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 434 McLellan The spatial reasoning of Mark’s turn toward Gerasa mirrors the abstracting, racializing, and territorializing of bodies exercised by necropolitics. Colonial mapping of territory has carved up dimensional space, writes Ruth Wilson Gilmore, instituting “death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations with and between the planet’s sovereign political territories.”16 Within the carved up territories, abstraction of their multiplicity and ignorance of lived existence contributes to instrumentalization of bodies for profit.17 In such “death worlds,” the possibility of existence is directly tied to apparently essentialized identities, marking people within them, in Franz Fanon’s words, as “men of evil repute.”18 And indeed, the narrator’s introduction of Gerasa offers little to mark this location other than delimiting it by the identity of the people within: the χώρα “of the Gerasenes” (v. 1b) is delimited by a “boundary” (ὅριον; v. 20). Even the term χώρα, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon argues, is a topographical designation, dealing with the physical features of a landscape.19 Like the “tombs” and “mountains” (v. 5) of the χώρα, the Gerasenes are part of this topography. This country is for and of them. Thus, when Jesus exorcises the demon, he still requires the Gerasene to remain in the region (vv. 18-19). Moreover, the narrator even continues to refer to the demoniac as the “man who had had the legion” (v. 15), pointing to a sense that even Jesus’ healing will not remove social death from this community. Mark’s discursive creation of the Gerasenes through this scene leaves little room for life: it abstracts the people, forces them to live there, and imagines them as haunted in perpetuity. The particular elements of the Decapolis do not match up with contemporary death worlds, but the discursive patterns of abstracting life for the purpose of reinscribing imperial power do. The practices of identifying a bounded place by its people, simultaneously embodying spatial meaning upon those same bodies are identical to Washington D.C.’s pfz s. New residents to this rapidly-gentrifying metropolitan area have declared sex workers, many of whom are transwomen of color, a threat to their communities. In 2006, lobbying of neighborhood associations 16 17 18 19 R. Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002), p. 16. D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and London: University of California Press), pp. 21–40. D. Massey has more explicitly defined this practice in terms of a globalized capitalist division between space and place. Space is the realm of the universal, the investor, of empire, while place is particular and local: “Sense of place…is constructed out of an introverted, inwardlooking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins” (Space, Place, and Gender [London: Blackwell, 2004], p. 152). Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 27; see Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1991), pp. 37–39. Malbon, Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 51, 61–62 Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 435 officially stated as much, calling for intensified police enforcement of already enacted anti-sex work laws within gentrifying communities.20 Enshrined with the force of law—the “Prostitution-related Nuisance Bill” of 2006—these lines drawn around privileged neighborhoods did not immediately expel sex workers from these places, but first communicated the rights and privileges of normative subjectivities and the legal illegitimacy of others. Ostensibly created in “areas where the health or safety of residents is endangered by prostitution or prostitution-related offenses,”21 pfz s, in the words of Lisa Sanchez, draw “a boundary between the life spaces [of] privileged, propertied residents and the visibly sexual/sexualized body of the prostitute.”22 Though slightly different than the bounded place for the Gerasenes—the place for the prostitute becomes anywhere-but-here—pfz s openly declare the boundaries within which non-normatively-sexualized bodies can belong and do so through the force of law. Both the work of delimiting Gerasa and creating pfz s depends on the abstraction of non-normative bodies as undesirable through manipulation of place. The first comprehensive study of the impact of Washington D.C.’s 2006 law on the city’s sex workers found that, after its institution, transwomen of color were overwhelmingly harassed; the act “simply legitimized long standing police activities such…arresting all transgender women in certain areas on suspicion of their engagement in prostitution.”23 While sex workers walked in these gentrified neighborhoods, the transwomen were disproportionately targeted. Trans* bodies of color served as a synecdoche for a larger population, abstracted as “nuisances” and prevented participation in vibrant neighborhood life. The Gerasenes, too, seem restricted to an imagined status as possessed, represented by a repeatedly-shackled, crazed man (v. 5). According to Warren Carter, the narrative deployment of bodies declared as ethnic beings was a common antique rhetorical tactic for depicting an “entire society.”24 20 21 22 23 24 M. Arrington et al., “Move Along: Policing Sex Work in Washington D.C.,” Alliance for a Safe & Diverse D.C. (2008), pp. 16–17. Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, “MPDC Begins Enforcement of New ‘Prostitution Free Zone’ Law,” August 31, 2006. L. Sanchez, “Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices: Neighborhood Associations, Community Policing, and the Expulsion of the Sexual Outlaw,” in D.T. Goldberg, M. Musheno, and L.C. Bower (eds.), Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 125. “Move Along,” p. 10. Carter argues that the Legion represents the possessed character of all occupied peoples (“Cross-Gendered Romans and Mark’s Jesus: Legion Enters the Pigs (5:1-20),” JBL 133, no. 1 (2014) pp. 144–145). His primary interlocutor here is M. Gleason, whose studies of GrecoRoman rhetoric point to the notion that “images of the body” work as a “synecdoche for Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 436 McLellan Carter is certainly more interested in the characterization of Romans as a demonic force in Mark’s narrative, but if this “legion” inhabits a Gerasene man, these people are as metonymic as the demonic colonizers.25 Though their methods differ—the force of law in D.C. and the power of narrative in the Decapolis—material bodies—those of transwomen of color and Gerasenes— are abstracted into places and marked for death. Indeed, both places are discursively established as violent, regulating places. The opening of the passage signals the necropolitical: “And as he left the boat, immediately, from the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit met him” (5:2). More explicitly than the social death within pfz s, “the tombs” work with urgency to frame this narrative setting with necrotic energy. This characterization of Gerasa aligns well with Achille Mbembe’s notion that colonial powers necessarily practice “seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations.”26 Indeed, he will continue, these regions are divided violently by conquerors so as to construct lands of origin for “[people] of ill repute.”27 Here, too, the “savage” frontier is imagined by the Markan narrator to be out of control and wild, even demonic. The man approaching Jesus from the tombs had been chained there and broken free; he howled, “day and night,” so wild that he gashed himself with stones and “no one was able to bind him, not even with a chain” (5:3-5). At this point, the striking image of a Gerasene man, roaming the tombs and the mountains of the whole region, and screaming from his possession serves to transform the entire region into a lawless space.28 While the particulars of Gerasene peoplehood are negotiated here, the negotiations 25 26 27 28 an entire society” (“Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus,” in S. Goldhill [ed.], Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], p. 52). Leander, Discourses of Empire, pp. 216–219. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 25. Ibid., p. 27. This phenomenon is not lost on E. Stewart who also notes that the wild and death-dealing behavior of the Gerasenes functions to characterize them as a wild and “uncivilized” people (Gathered around Jesus: An Alternative Spatial Practice in the Gospel of Mark [Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009], p. 182). Carter notes that the wildness of this space, typified by the emasculated demoniac, allows Jesus to look the part of the most powerful being in the arena: “In these terms, the man as metaphor for society subdued and dominated by militarily based Roman dominance communicates in vv. 2-5 the experience of that power in terms of death (among the tombs), social alienation, overwhelming power, lack of control, self-destruction, demonic control, and antithesis to God’s empire/rule manifested by the manly man Jesus (1:15)” (“CrossGendered,” p. 145). Indeed, to be fair, Carter’s argument has more to do with a Jesus versus the empire conflict at work. My argument, therefore, extends his claim to mark the whole of the territory in which this conflict is meted out. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 437 are carried out on the terms set by imperial power—through law enforcement, through territory, through war. The narrator presents us with a people who are open to conquest, a conquest that is justified, on account of their lack of self-control, their inability to protect their borders from the assault of outside entities. Engaging a more vibrant spatial imagination of the second gospel’s encounter between Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac demonstrates the way a narrative’s locatedness functions as an ideological formation.29 Narrative spaces are more than just plot devices, but come preloaded for the author, reader, and audiences with meaning from cultural memories, histories, stories, and values. In other words, space is manifest ideologically, through mapping, narrative, and in its material forms; space is conceptual. Space is also a lived reality, insofar as the subjects who interact with a given space are marked by it and mark it; they can accede to its ideological demands, refuse them, or simply live otherwise. Applying such a hermeneutic to Mark’s Gospel yields fruitful results.30 The Markan narrator constructs an ideological space for the Gerasenes to reside: the tombs, a necropolis, a space marked by death, which marks them for death. That is, with the demoniac serving as a metonym for the Gerasenes as a whole, their existence as a people, becomes one that needs to be chained up, to be policed (v. 4). And, as the pfz s of this nation’s capital persistently demonstrate, declarations of trans* undesirability make their marks on the material places they claim to represent. Writes Edelman of the lives of trans* sex workers of color following the pfz laws: their “strolls”—the usual locations for work—have shifted from relative safety or predictability to “laden with a particular kind of danger,” facing the sex worker with “the possibility of incarceration were she to engage with her community in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”31 Sex workers’ experiences of pfz s illumine space’s operation, in general, and the work of Mark’s Gerasa, in particular, by constituting it through individual and communal experiences, by stories and memories, by the ways its borders are policed. A focus on queer bodies, often deemed dangerous to the point of criminalization, begs questions of space beyond its narrative function and toward its lived constitution and ideological activity on subjects.32 While both 29 30 31 32 See Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, pp. 260–263; Lefebvre, Production. For a first-of-its-kind reading of the Second Gospel with a critical-space hermeneutic, see E. Stewart’s Gathered around Jesus, a more complex look at space in Mark than Malbon’s work (cf. Narrative Space). Edelman, “Walking while Transgender,” 182. Mark’s spatiality has not escaped interrogation, though generally under the rubric of linear time and dimensional space. E.S. Malbon deploys Levi-Strauss’ analytic for mythic Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 438 McLellan imperial and neocapitalist powers have deployed homogenous territory as a tool for gain, at the expense of multiplicitous life within those regions, hauntings offer a means of imagining these places as constituted by relationship, agency, and social activity of non-normative bodies. As Doreen Massey argues, spaces in any capacity—neighborhoods, territories, homes, offices—are “the [products] of interrelations,” and as such “[do] not exist prior to identities/ entities and their relations.”33 As such, space is “the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity,” not a container, but known by the presence and possibility of others.34 This understanding folds neatly into a haunted reading of Mark 5:1-20, as the question of the unseen other burns more prominently. The homogenizing logic of gentrification, which demands like belongs with like, would say the trans* sex worker in Washington D.C.’s pfz s is present in Gerasa, because the two types of people look alike. But though the rhetorical and legal logics of both these places profess a desire for homogeneity, the admitted presence of spectral figures—the queer specters of demons and trans* sex workers of color—draws a vast world of multiplicity into these places. What, then, this passage offers us, is an example not of bounded space—bounded not by time, borders, narrative setting, or literary medium—but of space as a phenomenon always already intimately related to time, relationality, and process. Thus, questions of contamination or threat from queer subjectivities is not solved by space, but is, in fact, heightened. 33 34 texts to argue that Mark provides a system of spaces like a “symphony” in order to create a coherent, meaningful whole (Narrative Space, pp. 6–10). Expanding this narrative-critical analysis to a more social-historical reading of Markan Space, Eric Stewart applies Lefebvre’s theory of social space to “challenge the social relationships inherent in spatial practices and representations of space” (Stewart, Gathered, p. 222). With respect to the pericope in question, Stewart takes into account the narrative setting’s marginalized relationship to the imperial center of the Roman empire, arguing that “disorder” is the result of imperial domination manifested on its fringes (Ibid., p. 23). These interpreters foreground their understanding of space as both meaningful and productive in spatial practice and place less emphasis on geographical, dimensional precision. Massey, For Space, pp. 9, 10. Massey provides a definition of space that I gloss here, arguing that it is known (1) by “interrelations,” (2) by the “possibility of the existence of multiplicity,” and (3) through its constant reconstruction through sociality. Massey’s threepart proposition on space recalls H. Lefebvre’s “spatial triad,” which defines three spatial operations: “spatial practice,” “representations of space,” and “spatial representations” (Lefebvre, Production, pp. 26, 33). Here, in the words of A. Merrifield, a distinction can be drawn between “conceptualized space” (representations of space) and “lived space” (spatial representations) (“Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space,” in M. Crang and N. Thrift (eds.), Thinking Space [New York and London: Routledge, 2000], pp. 174–175). Massey, For Space, p. 9. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 439 While both the pfz and the Markan Decapolis are bound and flatten out the people within them, lived bodies queer the apparent stability of these delineations out-of-time and from elsewhere. That is, borders hardly contain the experience of and knowledge formed by life, even if those experiences and knowledges are formed in constant avoidance of death. Far from being prefigured as normative, particular places are constituted by the instability of everyday life.35 With audiences reading from locales participating in the same ideologies that seek to banish sex workers to the pfz, such spatiality begs the question: what trajectories are established in the Decapolis and how do they get there? Policing Dead Space Geography can just as well be identified by the subjects forced to reside within: queered and queering, criminalized and criminalizing space. Indeed, a necropolitical reading of this passage shows the Gerasenes to be a discrete, identifiable people. We have already seen that this place—constructed as a bordered (ὅριον) χώρα “of the Gerasenes”—is politically-bounded and recognizable within the Markan imaginary, but we can also interrogate the reinforcement of those borders. In the present example, we might note that Mark presents the residents of the Decapolis as eager to regulate the demoniac in ways that reinforce their collective identity in a constructive way; we might even say that they police his behavior for their own performative ends. I argue that Mark rhetorically creates a queer group performing an ideal act of policing the very death world from which they come. In death worlds, policing and identity formation come hand-in-hand. The narrator’s desire, however, is complicated if we maintain that the characterization of the demoniac serves to construct an image of the Gerasenes as a whole. If this is the case, this passage coopts the agency of the people of the region for the purpose of policing the very border separating them from the realm of the living. They are obliged to regulate their very death: the Gerasenes become inseparable from the tombs, materialized as denizens, as criminals, as police, as failed. 35 S.D. Moore, K.L. Brintnall, and J.A. Marchal narrate four turns in queer theory away from a laser-like focus on sex and gender, one of which, the “antinormative turn,” is marked by resistance to the exclusionary values of regimes of the normal (“Introduction. Queer Disorientations: Four Turns and a Twist,” in Moore, Brintnall, and Marchal (eds.), Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, and Theologies [New York: Fordham University Press, 2018], pp. 3–8). Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 440 McLellan When it comes to materializing the Gerasenes, in the past or present, spatiality and characterization may be the only tool at interpreters’ disposal to even begin some sort of reconstruction. Treatment of the “Gerasenes” as a marker of a “people” has a convoluted past in twentieth- and twenty-first-century biblical scholarship. Most readers prefer the term Γερασηνῶν, traditionally associating the demoniac with the ancient city of Gerasa, contemporary Jerash.36 Still other possibilities have made mischief in alternate Greek manuscripts, including Γαδαρηνῶν (Gadarenes, of Gadara)37 and Γεργεσηνῶν (Gergesenes, of Gergesa).38 While “Gerasenes” seems the most likely choice, it becomes so only as lectio difficilior, given that both Gadara and Gergesa were located on the Sea of Galilee, while Gerasa was located roughly thirty miles inland from the sea.39 Thus, even if a more precise case could be made for either of the other two locales, the lack of precision in the Markan narrative leaves readers with little choice, but to characterize the subjects encountered here by trajectories like the tombs, demonic possession, and the social death of their contexts. If we are to proceed under the notion that Mark is deploying the death-dealing language of conquering powers, it behooves us to consider who the conquerors are in this passage and how they operate vis-à-vis the, literally, demonized Gerasenes. When Jesus confronts the demoniac and asks for the spirit’s name, the spirit famously answers, “Legion, for we are many” (5:9b). Given this uniquely Roman moniker, scholars have long noted this passage’s not-so-veiled critique of Roman military occupation of the region in the first-century ce.40 36 37 38 39 40 Γερασηνῶν is attested by ‫ *א‬B D 2427vid latt sa. This option is popular, because unlike Gerasa, Gadara was an actual city on the coast of the Sea of Galilee. Support for this moniker can be found in A C. The Nestle-Aland prefers Matthew’s use of the term “Gadarenes” in 8:28, perhaps already pointing to a trajectory of scribal skepticism over Mark’s shaky geography. However, Luke seems to favor “Gerasenes” (Luke 8:26). This reading is attested to in ‫א‬2 L Δ. For Origen’s account, see his Commentary in John 6.24. For discussion of this conversation, see especially T Baarda, “Gadarenes, Gerasenes, Gergesenes and the ‘Diatessaron’ Traditions,” in E. E. Ellis and M. Wilcox (eds.), Neotestamentica et Semitica: Studies in Honor of Matthew Black (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969), pp. 181–197; J. McRay, “Gerasenes,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 2 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 991–992; B. Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2nd edn, 1994), pp. 18–19; J. T. Fitzgerald, “Gadara: Philodemus’ Native City,” in Fitzgerald, D. Obbink, and G. S. Holland (eds.), Philodemus and the New Testament World (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 343–397; Collins, Mark, pp. 263–264, especially note b. Collins, Mark, p. 263. This claim has been made numerous times over the past half-century. Some of the more prominent postcolonial and empire-critical readings to follow this notion include P. W. Hollenbach, “Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities: A Socio-Historical Study,” JAAR Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 441 But in his postcolonial analysis of the Second Gospel, Leander notes that the Markan Jesus’ performance mimics that of the emperor Vespasian as described in first-century Roman texts. Both are presented as victorious military leaders in Gerasa (5:9; Josephus, Jewish War 4.488), both heal the sick in similar ways,41 and they each appear to fulfill Jewish messianic expectations (8:29; J.W. 6.312-313). Rhetorically, Jesus functions as a general as powerful and successful a military leader as the Emperor himself; practically, however, we need to also interrogate the way in which Mark not only sets up Jesus as conqueror but also the Gerasenes as conquerable. Indeed, rather than appearing as a party worthy of justice—maybe one of Jesus’ numerous healings (1:40-45; 2:1-12; 3:1-6; 5:2143; 6:53-56; 7:24-37; 8:22-26; 9:14-29; 10:46-52)42—the Gerasenes appear worthy only of a perpetual tragic existence. Perhaps more insidiously, following the carnage of the Jewish War, Mark re-presents this suffering, extending its memory in perpetuity through his Christological manifesto.43 Legion may represent conquering Romans, but Jesus mimics the conquerors themselves: again, it appears, in a death world, normative discourses leave little room for resistance. The anti-colonial impulse of this passage may initially resonate with readers concerned with liberation hermeneutics, but Jesus’ travels to a distant land betrays an investment in the establishment of a hegemonic order. Jesus’ voyage far away, “to the other side” of the sea, in order to tame the local residents rings of colonial hegemony to Laura Donaldson: “The biblical demand that the Gerasene become ‘fit for society’ bears a close resemblance to the colonialist demand that indigenous peoples become civilized.”44 Moreover, Donaldson 41 42 43 44 49 (1981), pp. 567–88, W. Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), pp. 43–48; C. Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), pp. 190–94; J. D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco and New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 91; R.A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 140–48; S.D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), pp. 24–44; J. Garroway, “The Invasion of a Mustard Seed: A Reading of Mark 5:1-20,” JSNT 32, no. 1 (2009), pp. 57–75, Leander, Discourses, pp. 201–19. For a salient critique of the more tendentious of the above accounts, see L.E. Donaldson, “Gospel Hauntings: The Postcolonial Demons of New Testament Criticism,” in S.D. Moore and F. F. Segovia (eds.), Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005), pp. 102–106. Both Jesus and Vespasian cure men with withered hands (3:1-5; Dio Cassius 65.8.1) and, with more exotic specificity, blind men with spittle (8:22-26; Suetonius, Vespasian 7). No doubt, the Gerasene is himself cured of an “unclean spirit,” but the Decapolis remains a tomb, thus maintaining the space’s and people’s necrotic identifier. Consider, for example, Leander’s assertion that the audience would have remembered Vespasian’s bloody foray into Gerasa (Leander, Discourses, p. 214). Donaldson, “Gospel Hauntings,” p. 104. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 442 McLellan notes, in citation of Frank Kermode, that this “uncivilized” native is presented as a gendered deviant, “displaying ‘a [demonic] excess of male strength,” who is healed of “‘an excess of maleness.’”45 This Gerasene man is therefore encountered in a location physically removed from the living, and chained there on account of his gendered inability to participate in the civilization. The arrival of a heroic masculine figure from afar, Tat-siong Benny Liew argues, does not rectify the problematic dynamics of Roman imperialism, but rather demands that the demoniac conform to hegemonic norms.46 In pursuit of a solution to this gendered affront to Markan normativity, an expulsion of otherness occurs within a location far from any civilized populace. The material effect of narratives of this kind are the creation of places, like the pfz, as spaces of “exceptionality,” where real estate moguls and the state collude to create a space where “erasure and death” of queer bodies becomes acceptable, even preferable.47 Fixing the Gerasenes with an apparently stable—if necrotic—and recognizable identity, I argue, is accomplished in large part through a negotiation of conceptual and lived spaces, beginning with a twofold rhetorical move on the part of the author to engage tombs as a concept and as a materially-recognizable space. In the first place, we see Mark’s effort to construct the demoniac’s non-living status; tombs are a place where the dead are supposed to reside. The lengths to which the Gerasenes went to force the man to the necropolis are telling, as they repeatedly try to bind him (5:3-4). In other words, the narrator has created a situation in which a people, already associated with death, willingly maintain that identity marker. Their apparent desire to keep the demoniac chained among the tombs is highlighted by their horror upon discovering his stable condition (v. 15). Thus, this is both a location where certain behaviors are unacceptable to the point of social death and where all normative residents are enlisted in policing its boundaries. Second, an examination of Greco-Roman tombs, broadly, further illuminates the ideological work done by the Markan journey to the Decapolis.48 To 45 46 47 48 Ibid., p. 103; cf. F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 135. T.B. Liew notes the way that Jesus attempts to redefine and thus performs an agonistic Roman masculine script in which his gender identity is defined over against other failed subjects (“Re-Mark-able Masculinities: Jesus, The Son of Man, and the (Sad) Sum of Manhood?” in S.D. Moore and J.C. Anderson [eds.], New Testament Masculinities [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003], pp. 114–115, 134–135). No doubt, we can count an out-ofcontrol demoniac among that number. Edelman, “Walking,” p. 177; Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 23–24. As my examples below demonstrate, this project is less interested in the particularities of individual necropoleis, but concerned more so with common regulatory traits shared across regions of the Empire between the first-century bce and the second century ce. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 443 say that marking the Gerasenes with a space of the dead puts them to death is not enough. If space is socially productive, it behooves interpreters to consider precisely what sort of work cemeteries do to the subjects forced within them, particularly their unwelcome guests. Tombs across the Roman world were hardly static machinations of stone, but rather places through which subjectivities were constantly negotiated. Examining Jewish tombs in northern necropolis at Hierapolis, Philip Harland has noted the ways in which “graves of those who had passed on can also further our understanding of cultural interactions among the living.”49 Harland’s main object of interest is the tomb of Publius Aelius Glykon Zeuxianos Aelianus, the tomb of a Jewish family, who left behind funds for the associations of the purple-dyers to celebrate the festival of Unleavened bread, and the carpet-weavers to celebrate the festivals of Pentecost and Kalends.50 The participation in both Jewish and non-Jewish celebrations, argues Harland, posits a question of whether the Glykon family, who clearly identified as Jewish,51 were “(born) Jews or whether they were gentiles who adopted important Jewish practices (judaizers) and then arranged that other (guilds) also engaged in these practices after their deaths.”52 More important to Harland than this family’s racial-ethnic identity is the notion that their tomb becomes part of the acculturation process of a relatively recent Jewish community in Hierapolis.53 No doubt, this particular tomb serves as one example among many possible other tombs, but the point stands: the necropolis was also a space by which the dead might continue performing their identity, even after life. Certainly, individual and group identity-formation through epitaphs operates as an explicit means by which the dead might be shown to belong to—or set themselves apart from—a given society. But such places also trade in an alternative, more implicit discourse of identity-formation: legality. In a western necropoleis, burial plots would be marked by legally-binding “boundary stones,” writes Virginia Campbell, marking the spaces in which a body might be interred.54 Of course, the delineation of boundaries is, from the outset, an 49 50 51 52 53 54 P. Harland, “Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora: A Jewish Family and ‘Pagan’ Guilds at Hierapolis,” Journal of Jewish Studies 57, no. 2 (2006), p. 222. W. Ameling (ed.), Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Band II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), p. 196; cf. Harland, “Acculturation,” p. 228. Harland will note elsewhere in this piece that the northern necropolis, which houses a majority of Hierapolis’ Jewish tombs, is marked with a large number of menorahs (Harland, “Acculturation,” p. 227). The Glykon tomb, however, does not feature the symbol and is found in the southeast necropolis, apart from most of the Jewish tombs. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., pp. 239–242. V. Campbell, The Tombs of Pompeii: Organization, Space, and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 99–100. See also, J. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 444 McLellan attempt to construct a binary between inside and out. Thus, if a legitimate party resides within the boundaries, the threat of an outside intruding ever lurks. Greco-Roman tombs were frequently inscribed with the names of the buried and buried-to-be, prescriptions for memorial of the deceased party, and penalty for violation of the space (e.g. anyone who might otherwise be buried in said tomb).55 Legal language, including prescriptions for behavior vis-à-vis burial spaces and punishment for violation,56 created criminal bodies. To put it another way, reading tombs as “representations of space,” in which both proper use and violation are presented transparently, comes preloaded with the notion that a violator of the space is a haunting threat. In conversation with Georges Bataille, Mbembe notes that sovereignty is the ability violate all of the restrictions placed on them, who lives “as if death were not,” who is more afraid of the limits of identity and the limits of life and death.57 The criminal, thus becomes a threat because of their ability to act as a citizen, as one who respects the law over death. Without the privilege of an epigraphical naming on an antique, Greco-Roman mausoleum, the would-be criminal is marked by death in the tombs, not because they have been laid to rest, but because their sovereignty as a living subject is always already subject to rightlessness. We could say that the restrictions of law on bodies—whether in the U.S. capital, Hierapolis’ necropoleis, or Mark’s Decapolis—necessarily imagine material bodies who should not be awarded sovereignty, bodies their society sees as a threat to their identity. I argue that whether the Gerasenes intend to criminalize the demoniac or that his imprisonment in the tombs reforms him hardly matters: the Markan gospel has zoned this χώρα for the criminalization of Gerasene bodies. Familiar to the gentrifying practices of Washington D.C.’s neighborhood associations and real estate 55 56 57 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 73–100; M. Carroll, Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 99. The plot might even be dedicated by a particular entity. In Pompeii, for example, Virginia Campbell has noted that numerous tombs include a decretum decurionum, given by the municipality for use of public land (Campbell, Tombs, pp. 84–98). Harland makes a similar case in the east, but focusing rather in particular associations as the maintaining bodies of certain tombs (Harland, “Acculturation,” pp. 232–235). For more on tombs in the Roman world, particularly as regulated space, see Campbell (Tombs, pp. 84–109). See also J.H.M. Strubbe, “‘Cursed Be He That Moves My Bones,’” in C.A. Faraone and D. Obbink (eds.), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 33–59. Campbell notes that in and around Pompeii the town council readily granted the use of public land for burial, but also argues that once a body was buried in a tomb, legal recourse was made not to municipal law, but divine law (Tombs, pp. 10–11, 90–93). Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds.), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 318– 319; Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 16. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 445 developers, our interrogation of the Decapolis need not only remain a narrative or archaeological analysis, but can fully witness the burgeoning alliances formed at the intersection of deadly spatial practices and the afterlives they create. The Markan narrator presents a familiar necropolitical practice, policing normativity, as a vehicle for competing for privilege. Within the Decapolis, the Gerasenes are conjured as a people unable to bind their demons and offers policing as a material solution. The narrator’s method should not be unfamiliar to those attuned to contemporary global sexual politics. Jasbir Puar has noted the ways in which western white queer groups are complicit in the spreading of racist ideology, which figures non-white and non-western queer subjects as victimized by particularly hateful and backward rhetoric. Such homonationalism, as Puar terms it, incites now-normative gay subjects to join in the liberal discourse of, say, “civil rights.” But liberal, gentrified values are unable to comprehend the non-white, non-western queer subject, who exists in religiously-, ethnically-, and mortally-other spaces.58 This discourse, constantly reproducing itself, creates a tension between global queer subjects: some are adopted as acceptable bodies by the postcolonial center, while other non-white queer bodies are rejected as the terroristic other, worthy of death.59 Similarly, the Gerasenes appear to have a similar value system to Jesus, insofar as they disapprove of the demoniac’s condition, as something to be either fixed or removed. Queer subjects become detritus of a competition to life.60 Mark effectively sets up Gerasa as a region beset by the tension colonial discourse injects into provinces. His Jesus has aspirations, imperial aspirations, and he performs his script well. But if the copycat maneuver enacted by this Son of God is just that, mimicry, then it should also be noted that the act looks to move him out of a similarly non-Roman subject position. That is, this Galilean peasant ironically targets the people of another Roman frontier territory for re-conquest. The recognizably normative Jesus moves to exorcise the demons of the Gerasenes, embodied within a man possessed by demons 58 59 60 The liberal gay subject has come to maintain an ideology of “queer secularity,” which “is also underpinned by a powerful conviction that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist… By implication, a critique of homophobia within one’s home community is deemed more pressing and should take precedence over a critique of racism within mainstream queer communities” (Puar, Terrorist, pp. 15–16). Puar argues, then, that biopolitical discourses depend upon a “tension” among global queer subjects, in which some are acceptably white and others are aligned with the terroristic other, thinkable only as citizens of the dead (ibid., p. 35). The result, in Puar’s words, is a productive tension between “bio and necro” in global sexual politics (ibid., pp. 35–36). Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 446 McLellan who has now offended too many Greco-Roman sensibilities—allowing himself to be penetrated, unable to control his behavior, chained and shackled, and engaging in self-harm (5:2-5).61 Yet, the Gerasenes are themselves implicated in their own failure to regulate and police him. Jesus’ ascendancy to cosmological prominence alongside the Roman emperor passes directly through a region housing people unable to regulate their home. Mark’s protagonist proves his ability to control the supernatural by exorcising the demons the Gerasenes could not, a move justifying their identification with the tombs. Vespasian and Jesus can police the Gerasenes and are awarded with sovereignty; the Gerasenes cannot police themselves and are chained among the dead. Regions beset by necropolitics, observes Puar, are frequently subjected to vilification by the western white lgbt community for failing to treat their own non-normative sexualities in the liberal mode.62 This inability to control the conditions of their own country, is a problem to be solved by the Markan necropolitics through a colonial correction. As Mbembe writes of the uncontrollable frontiers, justice can be “suspended” in the “service of ‘civilization.’”63 The outlaws outside the boundaries of civilization are the excess of the sovereign ascendancy to imperial power: the Gerasenes are victims of just such an effort. Still, the question of power’s operation in the realm of the dead presents itself: are the threatening dead as such because their lives are inherently unlivable, or has the construction of the space as productive of criminality created the need for policing? Indeed, the Gerasenes exist in a necropolitical police state, in which they have been drafted to regulate their own state of death, an endeavor they have a priori failed. But then another question presents itself: is this police state so much different than the very divisions of space that separate reader from text, privileged bodies from marginalized ones? In short, where are we, as interpreters implicated in the territorialized death of any victim of necropolitics and what are the demands of the dead? 61 62 63 Carter helpfully notes, “This is a scathing indictment of Roman power, but we must not miss its important gendered texture. Integral to the characterization of the man in these terms in vv. 2–5 is the lack of self-control. A lack of self-control ‘calls into question one’s masculinity’ and creates a process of ‘sliding down the scale from man to unman.’ Lack of self-control was womanish. The presentation of this unruly unman in vv. 2–5 constructs Roman power as effeminately out-of-control” (“Cross-Gendered,” p. 145). See also C. Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 21–25. For more on Greco-Roman masculinity and self-control, see C. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2010), pp. 151–156. Puar, Terrorist, pp.14–15. Mbembe, “Necorpolitics,” p. 24. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 447 When the (Un)Dead Haunt For marginalized bodies within death worlds, death is immanent,64 but the spatial logics that inform gentrification and pfz s—that “those people” be “erased” from sight and history65—by definition prevent privileged subjects from any sense of vulnerability or responsibility. Meanwhile, within necropolitical zones of exclusion, the threat of death is as real as the event itself, insofar as its future coming is both unpredictable and assured: the death world is a space of collapsing time.66 When time and space collapse into a place, particularly one that is meant to be absent of the death found in the Decapolis, it is revealed to be what it really is: a “sphere of possibility,” to quote Massey, the “possibility of the existence of multiplicity,” where any number of surprising, throwntogether presences are made manifest;67 in short, the Other is always already present within time-spaces. The present argument concerns itself particularly with hauntologies as vehicles for considering the agency of the unseen other and calling into question the subjectivity of the interpreter.68 Indeed, the creation of a death-dealing space like the 64 65 66 67 68 Contrary to Foucault’s concept of “biopower,” which, Puar writes, exists to “stave off death” (ibid., p. 32). This aside is inspired by Schulman’s notion that gentrification erases “urbanity” with “suburban values” (Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind, p. 27). Mbembe argues that the suicide bomber operates with the “logic of martyrdom,” contrasted with the “logic of the survivor.” The survivor, he writes, is one who struggles against his or her enemies, only to come out alive on the other end. The martyr, though, accomplishes “homicide and suicide…in the same act.” Indeed, this means that they suicide bomber lives under a rubric which understands the logic of the survivor to be antithetical to his or her own worldview (and vice-versa). In this way, the bomber overcomes: “The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation” (“Necropolitics,” pp. 36–37). Bringing Mbembe’s notion of the suicide bomber into conversation with that of G. Spivak, Puar again enters the necropolitical conversation, but this time working with the notion of the “female suicide bomber,” who “[disrupts] the prosaic proposition that terrorism is bred directly of patriarchy and that women are intrinsically peace-manifesting.” Indeed, for Puar, and by extension Spivak, the female suicide bomber, in her final death, exceeds the gendered binary and resistance/complicity binary. Or, in Spivak’s words, “[There] is no recoding of the gendered struggle” (Puar, Terrorist, p. 220; G. C. Spivak, “Terror: A Speech after 9–11,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 [2004], pp. 96–97). This temporal and gendered notion is drawn further by Mbembe into the realm of spatiality, as he describes the suicide attack as a movement of modern warfare from killingat-a-distance to “body on body” combat (Mbembe, “Necropolitcs,” p. 37). Massey, For Space, p. 9. For similar, new materialist engagement with critical space theories, see N. Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). The ethical pay-off for haunting, argues D.K. Buell, arrives from the agency of ghosts and the responsibility of the living: “…[Even] if ghosts/specters have a kind of being and Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 448 McLellan pfz depends upon both an official abstract understanding of space—which can be chopped up, subdivided, zoned, and infused with illegality—and the passivity of the queer subjects fused to it. But if particular places, even the most necrotic, are not constituted only by boundaries but by manifold haunting agencies, then the pfz and the Decapolis are bound by a similar trajectory: marginalized, spectral subjectivities that wrest control of meaning and boundaries away from readers and practitioners. These agencies come from elsewhere, always already queering one’s spatial-temporal relationship to the text. Here, of course, the effort is undertaken by Legion, revealing the alliances formed in, with, and through this pericope against the criminalizing practices of neocapitalist police states.69 Queer temporalities offer resources for thinking of gathering alliances of the dead, socially or otherwise, across time. Shifting away from explicit use of sex to critique the normal toward temporality—among other tactics70—has led to a focus on, in Carolyn Dinshaw’s words, “affective contact between people now and then.”71 Jumping off from Dinshaw’s affective interest, Carla Freccero has helpfully issued a call to spectral historiography on the level of the historian’s subjectivity: “It proposes an ethics…that might, through remaining open to 69 70 71 agency (whether one acknowledges them), the responsibility for responding to haunting rests with the living, thus preserving ethical accountability within denying the agency of the nonliving”(“Hauntology Meets Posthumanism: Some Payoffs for Biblical Studies,” in J. L. Koosed [ed.], The Bible and Posthumanism [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014], p. 38). See also her “God’s Own People: Specters of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Christian Studies” in L. Nasrallah and E.S. Fiorenza (eds.). Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), pp. 159–190. For more hauntological efforts in biblical studies, see S.D. Moore, Gospel Jesuses and other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism post-Poststructuralism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2017), especially pp. 85–106; P.N. McLellan, “Specters of Mark: The Second Gospel’s Ending and Derrida’s Messianicity,” Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016) pp. 357–381; M.J. Ketchum, “Specters of Jesus: Ghosts, Gospels, and Resurrection in Early Christianity” (PhD diss., Drew University, 2015); pp. 357–381; C. Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles”: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); B. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); T.K. Beal, “Specters of Moses: Overtures to Biblical Theology,” in eds. David M. Gunn and Paula M. McNutt (eds.), “Imagining” Biblical Worlds: Studies in Spatial, Social, and Historical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flannigan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 171–188. I recognize that any historian would be hard-pressed to claim Rome was “neocapitalist” in any way. However, this essay, that homes in on non-linear and relational philosophy of history sees the alliance between people marginalized by necropolitics as a force that cuts across time-spaces. Under this rubric, Rome is as neocapitalist as the contemporary, postcolonial powers, because they police the boundaries of normativity and privilege. Moore, Brintnall, and Marchal, “Queer Disorientations,” pp. 5–25. C. Dinshaw, et. al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ 13, no. 3 (2007), p. 178. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 Queer Necropolitics in the Decapolis 449 being haunted, do justice in responding to how we find ourselves impelled by demands that confound the temporalities we call past, present, and future.”72 That is, non-linear and relational historiography is more than just a touching across time73 but a loss of agency by the historian in the face of the demands of the other. When Legion is exorcised from the man and “enters into” a herd of pigs, only to charge over a cliff to their death, a message is communicated far beyond the pages of the Second Gospel, and beyond the Decapolis. Spirits, in their invisibility and their unbelievability, communicate. Derrida helps us think with ghosts outside of gentrified space, zoned for profit, into a metaphysical reality comprised of ethical demands. If, as I have argued, Mark’s imagined Gerasene community is portrayed as always already dead, a threat to social order, and failed regulators of that threat, then the spirit, Legion (v. 9), enacts a slippery and transcendent resistance. In fact, Derrida says as much of the “specter”: that it “haunts all places at the same time…. The spectral rumor now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the ‘sublime’ and the spirit of nostalgia crosses all borders.”74 For our purposes, the border crossing arrives temporal-spatially—between first-century Palestine and twenty-first-century United States—but also collectively—the specter bursts through the boundaries erected between marginalized groups. To think about the issue with the specters of the Second Gospel and beyond, and in a Derridean vein, all discrete, material spaces are always already making demands upon their citizens—and denizens. But not only do subjects also create their spatial realities through practice, those practices can occur—spectrally so—across times and spaces. Time-spaces are created by the demands of manifold Others, destabilized by sociality, and infused with ethical demands. Legion and the ghosts of trans* sex workers make common cause against necropolitical police states, because their spectral presence across boundaries always already refuses the logics of empire. Legion leaves the narrative space determined by imperial conquest and instead chooses to transgress the borders of possibility: the borders of bodies—from human to pigs—and of life and 72 73 74 C. Freccero, “Queer Times,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007), pp. 489–490. Derrida and Gordon serve as interlocutors and forebears for Freccero here. A. Gordon writes, “Any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past, or control barely visible structuring forces of everyday life…[are] bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts and [are] bound to call for an ‘official inquiry’ into them” (Ghostly, p. 151; see also Buell, “Hauntology,” pp. 37–38). Derrida generally avoids an explicit claim of agency for the ghost, but he accedes to intersubjectivity between the subject and the other: “The pledge is given here and now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional” (see Derrida, Specters, p. 37). Though, I by no means endeavor to claim Dinshaw’s position to be this simplistic. Derrida, Specters, pp. 168–169. Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450 450 McLellan death—choosing the sea (5:10-13). Its refusal to maintain such boundaries condemns Mark’s partition of Roman occupied communities against one another, a separation that figures one as pseudo-imperial and the other as dead. Attention to haunted spatiality recognizes that the temporal-spatial divisions between colonized bodies and queer bodies, between past spaces and present spaces, between sacred texts and lived realities, obscure rationality that would open room for alliance. This alliance, therefore, calls attention to the biblical interpreter’s act of understanding the Decapolis as “over there” and “back then” as the same violence that would push the transwoman of color out of their own neighborhoods. Legion persistently disrupts the spatial boundaries that divorce any gentrified reader from vulnerability and responsibility to the bodies pfz s relegate to invisibility. Contrary to dimensional understanding of Gerasene space, in which the Gerasenes merely fill a void, Legion makes clear the relationality of territorialized places by haunting beyond borders.75 All space is haunted by relations beyond the visible, beyond the past, and beyond the present. The spectral presences of social death defy the logics of divisions that would subdivide and mark spaces like the pfz and the Decapolis; they defy the logics that would prevent those spaces from aligning against the powers that would keep them apart. In other words, Legion bursts through the established dividing lines of demographics, of space, and of time, uniting the cries of all necrotically-bound peoples. When western ngo s cry foul at two-thirds world treatment of lgbtq bodies while constructing marginalizing critiques of Islamic subjects, Legion continues their cry.76 And what might Legion cry when urban American policing policies are presented as non-racist because African-American cops also walk the beat? We set them up for failure, with no tools, sending them to the realm of “broken windows” as violent regulators, and Legion cries. Legion cries foul at the notion that those who subsist in such death worlds are a threat that must choose between self-policing or occupation by a foreigner. Legion rejects policing strategies that pit the lower-middle class against the poor, and knows that tension must be held between #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName; and even then, Legion says the name of those trans* subjects rendered criminal-before-crime because their queer bodies are inconceivable outside a “prostitution free zone.” In all this, Legion lives into the threat, knowing only that unity in discontent, a unity which celebrates the Other’s unique subjectivity, can respond effectively to the lies of neocapitalist space, neocapitalist time, and neocapitalist identities. 75 76 Massey, For Space, pp. 9–12, 189. The Greek term deployed for the speaking voice of the demoniac is κράζω (5:5, 7). Biblical Interpretation 28 (2020) 428-450