Ethiopian Eunuch from a Queer Perspective

From a queer perspective, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) can be read productively as a drag show with implications for inclusion in early Christian communities.

Who is the Ethiopian eunuch?

A shared experience among many LGBTQIA+ people has been attending a drag show, which can be described as one in which the performer’s assigned sex is not the same as the gender being performed. A particularly subversive drag show, however, can leave the audience unsure about which sex/gender is “real” and which is “performed.”

Eunuchs in ancient royal courts can be interpreted productively as drag performers, because they queered (i.e., troubled, destabilized) the intersecting oppositions on which masculinity depended: male–female, masculine–feminine, penetrator–penetrated, free–enslaved, citizen–foreigner. While prepubescent boys, they had been captured, enslaved, and castrated (i.e., their testicles had been crushed or removed). They were defined as foreign because of the stigma around castration. Their bodies included a mixture of features normatively coded as masculine and feminine. For example, while they still had penises, they lacked the facial and body hair normatively coded as masculine, and they tended to have enlarged breasts and buttocks due to a distribution of body fat normatively coded as feminine. Finally, while they could penetrate women without impregnating them, the Roman author Martial suggests that they also allowed themselves to be used by women for oral sex.

Such eunuchs can be found in the Hebrew Bible (see especially 2 Kings, Esther, Daniel, and Isa 56), the Deuterocanonical literature (see Judith, Wisdom, and Sirach), and the New Testament (see Matt 19). The court eunuch in Acts makes a grand entrance in a chariot, and in the original Greek he is assigned a quick succession of identities: man, Ethiopian, eunuch, powerful official, one belonging to the queen of the Ethiopians (Acts 8:27-28). But is he a man performing a eunuch, or a eunuch performing a man? A citizen and powerful official performing an enslaved foreigner, or an enslaved foreigner performing a citizen and powerful official? Is he a male, an effeminate male, one who has transitioned from male to female, or a hybrid of male and female?

What makes this drag show subversive is that the answers are ambiguous. The Ethiopian eunuch’s performance reveals that sex, gender, and sexuality (along with other identities) are unstable, contingent social constructions rather than stable, natural essences, thus undermining their use as a basis for exclusion.

Who may be baptized?

After the evangelist Philip shares the good news of Jesus with the eunuch, they come to water, and the Ethiopian eunuch asks, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36).

Up to this point in Acts, those baptized have been Jews and converts (Acts 2:9-11) and Samaritans (Acts 8:12). The religious identity of the Ethiopian eunuch is also ambiguous. Is he a Jew, a convert, or a gentile? Could the eunuch be a Jew or a convert given the Hebrew Bible’s prohibition on the admission of the castrated into the assembly of the LORD (Deut 23:1)?

From a queer perspective, we can add this question: What is to prevent a person who queers sex, gender, and/or sexuality from being baptized?

The answer is nothing (Acts 8:38), and the early Christians spend the rest of Acts slowly working through the implications. After the Ethiopian eunuch, what is to prevent anyone from being baptized? What is to prevent anyone who is baptized from joining the common table? What is to prevent anyone at the common table from being set aside for ministry?