Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts (Early Christianity and Its Literature)

An intersectional study of New Testament and noncanonical literature

Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.

Features:

• Case studies that reveal a variety of understandings, attitudes, medical frameworks, and taxonomies for how disabled bodies were interpreted
• A methodology that uses disability as an analytical tool that contributes insights about cultural categories, ideas of otherness, and social groups access to or lack of power
• An intersectional perspective drawing on feminist, gender, queer, race, class, and postcolonial studies

Anna Rebecca Solevåg is Professor of New Testament Studies at VID Specialized University, Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse (2013).