Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts (Emerging Scholars)

Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile a slave or a free man? Why does Luke call him a man while contemporaries referred to eunuchs as unmanned beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have received dramatically different answers over the centuries of Christian interpretation he shows that eunuchs bore particular stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well as of race ethnicity and class. Not only has Luke failed to resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized figure at a key place in the narrativeas the gospel has expanded beyond Judea but before Gentiles are explicitly namedin such a way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense Burke argues Luke intended to queer his readers expectations and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new community.