Gender and Apocalyptic Ethics
From Desert Saints to Drag Scenes
by CAPAS-Fellow Kate Cooper
Every May, a grass-roots network of researchers in hundreds of cities across five continents holds the ‘Pint of Science’—a global science festival in which big ideas get talked about in an informal setting over pints of beer (or other nice things to drink). This year, CAPAS contributed with a session called ‘From Desert Saints to Drag Scenes’.
The idea behind this session was apocalyptic ethics: how the idea of the apocalypse can disrupt this-worldly habits and commitments and allow people to move into a liminal space where the sense of self is challenged and expanded. In both the ancient and modern worlds, our ‘gender habits’ are some of the ones that are hardest to disrupt.
The first half of the event, Pelagia, Queen of the Desert, was focused on my research on early Christian saints who disrupted ancient ideas of gender. In an earlier book, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women, I explored the early Christian idea that a deeper connection to the power of God can lead to questioning or challenging earthly gender roles, and the fascination of early Christian writers with women who challenged social norms. My project for CAPAS builds on this work to ask how apocalyptic thought gives energy to these early Christian ideas about gender disruption.
We explored the lives of two of the most provocative of the early gender-disrupting saints, Pelagia of Antioch (4th century) and Mary of Egypt (7th century). Early Christian writers were fascinated by women who dressed as men, or who ‘became’ men—whether transformed physically in a dream as in the case of Perpetua of Carthage (d. 203 C.E.), or who were ‘made into men’ spiritually, such as Mary Madgalene as she is depicted in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (2nd century). And an important theme in the lives of the early female saints, from the second-century Acts of Thecla well into the medieval and Byzantine period, was this: when women first heard the early Christian message that the world would soon end, some of the most saintly among them chose to disguise themselves as men in order to be able to leave their families and follow the rootless life of a wandering preacher. The idea shared by these early Christian texts is that while gender roles in our daily lives may have their own value, they can distract us from what is really important.
Things took a marvelous turn during the second half of the evening, when three scientists who are also members of the Heidelberg Drag Family—Caroline Bertemes, Rodrigo Gama, and Valentina Salazar – joined me for a round-table discussion, Saints and Sequins, in which we explored the similarities between the experiences modern drag performers and the early Christian saints of the desert. Caroline, Rodrigo, and Valentina each explained the exploration that has gone into the persona each has developed in their work as drag performers, and how their experience of radical gender disruption in this work has changed their perception of—and in some cases their choices in—the on-going gender performance of their daily lives. The evening concluded with a fascinating open discussion of how members of the audience perceived—nd were inspired by—the possibilities for ‘getting apocalyptic’ about gender in their own lives, made possible by our exploration of saints and sequins.
