Passion of the Female Christ: The Gospel According to Cassandra

This paper focuses on the two themes of passion and exile in order to explore the relationship between Cassandra and its New Testament intertext. The contention is that Nightingale's text is a feminist reworking of the gospel, in which the figure of Cassandra is characterized as a female John the Baptist. In this prophetic role she both criticizes the existing social order, and looks forward to the advent of “another order of society” brought in by a female Christ. Nightingale's rhetoric betrays certain ambivalences about gender roles in society, and about the very passions against the repression of which she inveighs. In exploring these issues, I adopt a deconstructive approach, which highlights the way in which uncertainties at a thematic level involve the text in moments of aporia at the tropological level.