Chloe and Her People: A Womanist Critical Dialogue with First Corinthians - Paperback

by Mitzi J. Smith (Author)

Chloe and Her People offers an Africana Womanist reading of First Corinthians that privileges the knowledge, experiences, histories, traditions, voices, and artifacts of Black women and the Black community that challenge or dissent from Paul's rhetorical epistemic constructions. Smith reads First Corinthians dialogically from the perspective of oppressed and marginalized readers situated in front of the text and those muted within and behind the letter. Struggling toward unmitigated freedom, Chloe and Her People talks back to and throws shade on, sometimes poetically, Paul's muting and subordination of women, rhetorically constructed binary knowledge, the glass ceiling placed on women's heads, heterosexual marriage as a mechanism for managing lust, and androcentric patriarchal love built on women's passive bodies.

Author Biography

Mitzi J. Smith is J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa, College of the Humanities, Institute of Gender Studies. She is co-editor of Bitter the Chastening Rod (2022); co-author of We Are All Witnesses (2023) and Toward Decentering the New Testament (2018); and author of Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality and Biblical Interpretation (2018).