Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History
Reader 1
Andrew Aisenberg
Reader 2
Carina Johnson
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2024 Gillian R Murdock Gardner
Abstract
This thesis aims to utilize modern critical theory to reveal how the hagiographies of early female Christian martyrs follow a standardized narrative arc. The martyr’s body is hyperfeminized, transformed, and eventually eclipsed in a simultaneous process of unbecoming in the corporeal realm and becoming in a divine register. The martyr’s augmented femininity signals her ability to endure as far as womens’ abject position in the Empire allows, while her bodily transformation conveys a transgression of the ontological pairings of active masculinity and passive femininity that govern Roman social order. Finally, the martyr’s death communicates an imperial attempt to reestablish the infringed-upon binaries, but the early Christians’ unique eschatological conception of resurrection ultimately allows for the transgressive identity to survive. This process culminates in the body being ungendered in secularity while a gender of sanctity—paradoxically generated through a systematic undoing—emerges in religiosity.
Recommended Citation
Murdock Gardner, Gillian, "The Holy Abject: The Narrative Arc of Female Christian Martyrdom and Its Implications for Subjecthood in the Roman Empire" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2408.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2408
