Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. Political citations of Babylon range widely, from torture at Abu Ghraib to depictions of Hollywood glamour and decadence. In political discourse, Babylon appears in conservative ruminations on democratic law, liberal appeals to unity, Tea Party warnings about equality, and religious advocacy for family values. A composite biblical figure, Babylon is used to celebrate diversity and also to condemn it, to sell sexuality and to regulate it, to galvanize war and to worry about imperialism. Erin Runions explores the significance of these shifts and contradictions, arguing that together they reveal a theopolitics that tries to balance the drive for U.S. dominance with the countervailing ideals and subjectivities of economic globalization. Examining the confluence of cultural formations, biblical interpretations, and (bio)political philosophies, The Babylon Complex shows how theopolitical arguments for war, sexual regulation, and political control both assuage and contribute to anxieties about waning national sovereignty. Theoretically sophisticated and engaging, this remarkable book complicates our understanding of how the Bible affects U.S political ideals and subjectivities.

How Hysterical reads scenes from the films Light It Up , Three Kings , Remember the Titans , Paris is Burning , Boys Don't Cry , and Magnolia alongside biblical texts from Numbers , Exodus , Isaiah , Micah , Ezekiel and Revelation . An innovation in studies on Bible and film, How Hysterical is less centred on direct citation of the Bible in film than on analyses of hypostasized biblical influence in culture. Here, through accessible engagement with feminist, queer, post-colonial and ideological critical theories, Runions discusses the processes by which biblical and filmic texts can both bolster and disrupt identifications with the norms that drive politics and culture.

Coming from a strong gender critical and post-colonial theoretical stance, Runions takes up important questions of the reading process that arise from literary, ideological critical and cultural studies approaches to the Bible. She examines readers' negotiations with the ambiguous configurations of gender, nation and future vision in the book of Micah, using the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek-all key figures in cultural studies. Her book confronts the problem of the determined subject reading an indeterminate text and suggests that (liminal) identifications with the ambiguitiesof the book of Micah might reconfigure the readers' own ideological positions.

"This dissertation looks at the way in which the shifting configurations of nation, gender and future in Micah might affect readers' positioning as subjects---that is their positioning as agents of speech and action---in a way that might engender resistance to oppression. It is suggested that if readers of Micah identify with the ambiguous and shifting national and gendered identities, within the context of the book's visions for the future, they are urged to recognize contradictions within their own subjectivity. This has the possible effect of shifting the reader's pre-formed subject position, or at least interrogating it, a process which may allow for resistance to oppression. The theoretical problematic for this approach originates within recent discussions of textual determinacy in biblical and literary criticism: "is it the text or the reader that controls meaning?" The work of theorist Homi K. Bhabha on the negotiation of cultural difference in colonial and post-colonial contexts is used to engage the position---common to much contemporary literary and cultural criticism---that the reader comes to the text already formed as a subject within ideology, and that this will necessarily affect or control the way she reads the text. Zizek's reading of Althusser through Lacan is taken as a starting point for an understanding of "subject formation" thus conceived. This position, which tends toward the fixity of the subject, can be seen as analogous to Bhabha's discussion of the role of "pedagogical objects and discourses" (cultural icons, stereotypes, formative events) within the construction of national identity. By way of contrast, Bhabha's key concepts---hybridity, third space, outside the sentence, liminal identification, time-lag, agency in indeterminacy; in short performative practice---envision an identification with difference in a way that allows for the subject to be repositioned and for meaning to be reinscribed. Bhabha's notions of pedagogical object and" --