Problem:
Create a multiple choice question, the a follow up question no multiple choice just a brief summary of question and answer from follow up. I have added summary of what questions should be based on along with format below.
Summary: Ken Stone
Ken Stone is a professor of Bible, Culture & Hermeneutics at the Chicago Theological Seminary where he teaches courses such as Interpreting the Hebrew Bible; Animals, Ecology, and Biblical Interpretation; and Homosexuality and Biblical Interpretation. He is the editor of Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (2001) and author of Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective (2000). In an essay called "The Garden of Eden and the Heterosexual Contract" in a book titled Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (2006), Stone offers a queering of the creation myth in an attempt to "reveal potential openings for queer contestation of the heterosexual contract" (50). You will note that Stone's "heterosexual contract," a term coined by French novelist Monique Wittig, can be used interchangeably with compulsory heterosexuality.
The first account of human creation, Stone reminds us, seems to convey that God intended the human species to be separated by binary sexual differences. This intention is supported by God's first command to the new human family which presupposes heterosexual coupling: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth" (Genesis 1:28). A heteronormative reading (and one hostile to homoeroticism) of this account may be what was intended by the originators of the story, but Stone points out that in the ancient world "sexual relations with members of the opposite sex were not always understood to be exclusive of same-sex sexual contact...as studies of Greek and Roman attitudes and practices clearly demonstrate" (51).
It is in the second creation account that Stone finds cause to contest the gender complementarity taken for granted by normative interpretations. Consider God's punishment to Eve: "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." Given that Trible has already shown that these punishments were "describing" not "prescribing" gender hierarchy, perhaps Eve's heterosexual desire also describes a punishment, not the original state of sexual longing.
And what about Adam? If, as normative readings assume, Adam is male even before Eve is created, this causes logical knots that are not easily untied:Just what exactly does it mean to have a single "male" creature prior to the creation of a female one? Is he "male" by virtue of these genitalia at a time when sexual reproduction or sexual contact with any other human creatures was impossible? (Stone, 2006, 56).In other words, what was the point of male genitalia in the absence of any complementary female genitalia and can male even exist without female-isn't one defined by the other according to compulsory heterosexuality?
Stone draws on Trible's literary analysis of the term 'adham, which, she argues, means an androgynous earth creature until it is separated into man and woman. One way Stone finds within this myth room for non-heteronormative and non-binary identities is to posit that the creature in the garden "is and is not recognizably 'male.' We find a creature that appears to be 'male' at certain moments but not at others" (62). Further, when this creature eventually identifies as male, he recognizes that his now female counterpart was once / is part of him ("This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" - Gen 2:23). Does this not undermine the heterosexual contract, if two supposedly complementary bodies are perhaps not clearly complementary after all but unified? Stone thinks so, and in this story finds a suitable template for non-binary folks:
Yahweh's initial created human may incorporate both "man" and "woman," but for exactly that reason it corresponds neatly to neither "male" nor "female" as defined by the binary norms of sex and gender. Such a character may thus come to serve as a useful rallying point [....for those that] fall outside or at the limits of the social norms of sex and gender that shape our notions of intelligible human experience. (63)Gay men, he tells us, also might find representations of themselves in the text:
Such readers might discover in this story a text that enacts complications of gender often associated with gay men themselves....God does not first create Adam and Eve but rather a creature who is in some strange way neither "man" nor "woman," in any strict binary sense: a creature who is instead...something else altogether (63).