Sherie Gayle (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and Religious Studies as well as a Residential Minister at Georgetown University. A former Georgetown University, Qatar Doctoral Fellow (2024–2025), her research explores gender, race, and power in late antique, medieval, and contemporary Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts. Drawing on feminist, womanist, and postcolonial frameworks, her work examines how sacred narratives construct and constrain female religious authority. Sherie has presented her research at national and international conferences and has published in spirituality and religious journals. Through her teaching, ministry, and public scholarship, she advances intersectional approaches to theology that center embodiment, justice, and the voices of those historically marginalized within religious traditions.
Scriptural Bodies, Exegetical Borders: Race, Gender, and the Vilification of Bilqis in Islamic Exegesis
In Abū Isḥāq al-Thaʿlabī’s Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (Stories of the Prophets), the figure of Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, is simultaneously elevated as a wise and politically astute ruler and undermined through racialized and gendered tropes that mark her body as transgressive. Her narrative is shaped not only by intellect and diplomacy but also by associations with genealogical impurity, bodily excess, and geographic otherness. This study takes Bilqis as a case study for examining how classical Islamic religious narratives construct and constrain powerful female figures. It argues that tafsīr and qiṣaṣ literatures, while presented as theological commentary, function as cultural technologies that encode and perpetuate anxieties about gendered authority, racial boundaries, and spiritual legitimacy. Bilqis’s representation in al-Thaʿlabī’s narrative reflects a deliberate interpretive strategy that exalts her intelligence while simultaneously marking her exceptionality as a problem to be managed. Her jinn lineage, Hamitic geography, and the rumors surrounding her body—such as hairy legs or animalistic traits—operate as narrative devices to disqualify her from full prophetic proximity. Through close textual and discourse analysis, informed by feminist theology, Black studies, disability theory, and Arab/Islamic cultural studies, this project examines how theological texts absorb and reproduce social hierarchies through storytelling. By treating exegesis as a form of cultural production, it reorients the study of scriptural authority toward its gendered and racialized exclusions. At the center of this analysis is an intersectional framework that situates gender in relation to race, genealogy, embodiment, and geography. Bilqis emerges not merely as a feminized figure but as one rendered grotesque, racialized, and marked by inherited impurity. These overlapping layers of difference work to theologically contain her sovereignty and expose the cultural logics that have historically delegitimized dark, female religious, revealing their enduring afterlives in modern debates about leadership and prophetic ethics.