Female Seed as a Metaphor: Queer Kinship in Revelation 12, Ancient Medical and Literary Texts and the Septuagint

Abstract

New Testament texts frequently use the metaphor of family as a concept that structures a social and religious experience of kinship. They thus point to the socially constructed aspect of family ties and can be connected to current queer notions of kinship. Not only notions of families are construed, but already the seemingly natural process of procreation. The metaphor of female seed exemplifies this. Female seed in the sense of sperm and offspring appears in ancient medical and biblical texts. It shows how bodily processes and metaphorical concepts intermingle. Female seed links the surrogate mother Hagar to Protennoia, the voice of the Coptic hymn Three Forms of the First Thought, and the mother in Rev. 12; all of them deconstruct concepts of families based on blood ties and demonstrate metaphorical kinship constructions that nonetheless cannot be detached from female bodies. In this article, I establish a notion of imaginary seed, based on Judith Butler’s idea of the imaginary phallus, and thereby link New Testament texts to current debates about queer kinship.