How does one “lie with a woman”? The performance of gender in the Holiness Code (eviticus 17-26)

The usually virulent, and occasionally murderous, homophobia of a number of Christian and Jewish denominations can be traced back to two verses in the Hebrew Bible, Leviticus18:22 and Leviticus 20:13. One generally overlooked characteristic of both these passages is that their normative thrust is gendered: the Holiness Code does not show any interest in “lying with a male” in general, but only forbids “lying with a male as one lies with a woman”. My argument will start from this obvious fact to conduct an inquiry into the way the feminine is constructed in the Holiness Code. As the grammar of the original Hebrew makes unambiguously clear, the model of sexual transgression the text presents, and subscribes to, is structurally asymmetrical: with the very interesting exception of sex with animals (Leviticus 18:23), sexual transgressions are invariably assumed to be actions performed by the male on a passive female object. In this context, “lying with a male as one lies with a woman” can only be taken to refer to what in the whole pericope is assumed to be the defining characteristic of heterosexual sex, the structural asymmetry of positions, which constitutes it as a situation in which a subject makes use of an object, in relation to which the issue of consent is by definition immaterial; this has, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with homosexual sex, but is the definition of what we today understand as homosexual rape. Therefore the real object of the prohibition expressed in Leviticus 18:22 (and of the sanctions specified for it in Leviticus 20:13) it not sex between men but exactly, and exclusively, this objectification, which erases the social difference between man and woman, and therefore poses a formidable threat to the status of the only subject whose existence is acknowledged by the social order of ancient Israelitic culture, the adult human male. And, of course, the very anxiety associated with this possibility is a clue to the fact that in the Holiness Code gender is conceived of not as an essence, which will remain firm and unaltered through any number and kind of vicissitudes, but as the intrinsically unstable result of relationships, events, and negotiations, which have the potential to question, unsettle, and trouble it; in short, as what thousands of years later would come to be known as performative.