Don’t touch my hair: A feminist Nigerian/British reading of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair in Luke 7.36-50

Abstract

Contextual Theology recognises that Euro-American biblical interpretation has an enduring, complex, and contested legacy of silencing particular voices in relation to considerations of race/gender identity/religion and migration. Whilst postcolonial and African biblical interpretation have become more established in recent scholarship, there has been little, if any, consideration of the particular hybrid location of scholarship which is neither ‘African’ nor ‘European’ but formed precisely in the space formed by the long historical connections between these continents and peoples. As a Black British woman of Nigerian heritage, my ‘Afropean’ epistemological lens therefore, attempts to take into cognizance: hyper- sexuality, ‘otherness’, displacement, colonisation, and power. Here an Afropean epistemological lens is applied to the Woman who Washed Jesus’s Feet with her Hair in Luke 7.36-50. In doing so new possibilities arise beyond the hypersexualised Eurocentric interpretation of this woman displaying a highly erotic act. Using a Nigerian/British epistemology, informed by Emma Dabiri’s novel Don’t Touch My Hair (2019), in which hair is viewed as a symbol of colonisation, ‘otherness’ and displacement, this woman emerges not only as a sexualised figure, but also as a heroic female prophetess.