![]() And I'm not claiming that this is the only way to hear this Gospel. ![]() Now I understand that not everyone experiences this passage that way. Mounce's dictionary makes the point that a kunarion is a worthless specimen of a dog, reminding me of the way some folk who love big dogs think about little yapping dogs - that they're not even worthy of the title "dog."Īnd that's how I feel about this text, that the difference between comparing the woman and her daughter to dogs in an analogy and calling her and her daughter the b-word is a distinction without a difference. "Dog" was also the code word for a man who sold sex to other men, voluntarily surrendering his proper place in the gender hierarchy. Dogs were filthy animals to the Israelites, something like a cross between a hyena and a rat, often paired with pigs in the literature of the wider Ancient Near East, all of them scavengers. Yes, he or the evangelist used the term kunarion, which sometimes meant a smaller dog like those kept indoors in other cultures but the Israelites did not keep pet dogs. In my best Queen Latifah, I want to ask Jesus, "Who you calling a b-?" (I know some of you don't know that song, U.N.I.T.Y., it's from the previous century.) In our supposed-to-be-good-news Gospel lesson Jesus calls a woman like me, a non-Jewish woman, a b. The gender binary serves to keep women and feminine folk in their place and has little patience for folk who occupy an unanticipated, unscripted place in the hierarchy. In this rigid gender binary masculinity and femininity are immutable and fixed characteristics of immutable and fixed genders and those genders are not equal. Or because you're a man, woman or child who has been raped or sexually abused and no longer fit in the hierarchy in the same way. If you are a woman who is deemed not to be appropriately feminine whether because you're lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or heterosexual and in some way non-compliant - you earn more than some men, coach sports, wear your hair short and spikey, hate make up or love trucks and wrenches, think men are your equal. You don't have to be a drag queen to feel the wrath of some sections society - church and society even - for your gender performance and presentation: If you are a man who is deemed not to be appropriately masculine whether because you're gay, bisexual, transgendered or heterosexual and in some way non-compliant - you knit or love babies, puppies, kittens, manicures and mascara, and think women are your equal.
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