The dance of gender: David, Jesus, and Paul

As gender is the foundational (though constructed) dialectic for every social structure, I am proposing that "dance" would be an effective metaphor for understanding the fluidity and dynamism of lived gender. Through the telling of David's dance (2 Sam 6:1-23) and an exegesis of the Q parable "Children in the Marketplace," I contrast Jesus' expression of community to Paul's: Jesus imagines the world as the "brokerless" Kingdom of God, a dynamic relationship between God and the people of God, and thus a more relaxed, undeveloped, or possibly inconsequential construction of gender, while Paul imagines a world with well-defined boundaries between his ecclesia, God, and the greater Graeco-Roman community. Paul's community-building strategies rely on strict maintenance of the body's boundaries (à la Mary Douglas).