Practicing Safer Texts : Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective

In this revised edition of his classic work, Ken Stone uses the ubiquitous comparison between food and sex as a framework for a queer reading of key texts. Stone reflects on these texts in an interdisciplinary fashion, with the help of traditional tools of biblical scholarship alongside less traditional tools such as Queer studies and cultural anthropology.

By utilizing a reading lens that relates food and sex to one another intentionally, rather than treating them separately, Stone questions the tendency of readers to overstress the gravity of sexual matters in relation to other topics of potential ethical, theological, exegetical and cultural concern. As the title Practising Safer Texts indicates, Stone also proposes a pragmatic approach to biblical interpretation that uses strategies of "safer sex" as a loose model.

This revised edition features a new chapter that highlights the relevance of this impactful work today. This chapter explores Genesis 1:28 and 1:29, the role of childbirth and sexual reproduction as a focal point for queer analysis, and also touches upon modern debates such as ecological destruction. The volume also includes a new preface that addresses the rise to prominence of transgender issues, what has happened to the exploration of food, sex, and queer hermeneutics in biblical interpretation since the first edition’s publication, and the continued need for an approach to biblical interpretation that emphasizes harm reduction as a framework for biblical hermeneutics.