A Transnational Queer Feminist Reading of Early Christian Diaspora

Abstract This chapter challenges the tendency to homogenize diaspora through nationalist, ethnocentric, and heteronormative views and approaches. Discussing complex historical experiences and contested concepts of diaspora, it proposes a transnational and intersectional hermeneutical lens to engage diasporic characters, such as Aquila, Apollos, Paul, and Prisca/Pricilla, in Acts and Paul’s letters. Then, it showcases how they are constructed through ethnicization and sexualization and across spaces and boundaries—domestic, public, and national. In this reading, the diasporic, border-crossing figure Prisca emerges as disrupting nationalist body politics and the heteroreproductive diasporic future, which are inscribed in the biblical discourse and interpretation. Attending to how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and labor intersect in spaces of diaspora, this transnational queer feminist reading illuminates Prisca’s subjectivity through her trajectory (homemaking) rather than her origin (homeland).