After the Idyll Ends: Ruth and the Uses of Disappointment

Ruth - Rhiannon Graybill

Rhiannon Graybill [+-]
University of Richmond
Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her research interests include prophecy, gender and sexuality, horror theory, speculative fiction, and the Bible as literature. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021). She has also co-edited three books: Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Cooper Minister and Beatrice Lawrence, Lexington Books, 2019), The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Readings (with Lynn R. Huber, Bloomsbury / T. & T. Clark, 2020), and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (with Peter J. Sabo, Gorgias Press, 2020). Her current projects include the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Jonah(with Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner) and an edited volume entitled Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Tonstad).

Description

The book of Ruth is often considered to be a happy story. It is also celebrated as a happy text for feminist and queer biblical interpretation. However, Ruth is also frequently disappointing, as the book complicates or fails to meet our expectations of a positive female relationship of friendship, solidarity, or love. This chapter argues for the importance of disappointment in reading Ruth. Drawing on work on queer feeling and affect, it charts four forms of disappointment: unhappy objects, cruel optimism, queer failure, and “no fun.” Each of these modalities of disappointment is associated with the work of a specific queer theorist: unhappy objects hail from Sara Ahmed’s queer and feminist critique of happiness; cruel optimism originates with Lauren Berlant; queer failure is most closely associated with Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, and no fun is a framework borrowed from Bo Ruberg’s work on queerness and video games. Separately and together, they offer new ways of understanding disappointment in Ruth, suggesting that unhappy, uncomfortable, and unpleasant feeling can be useful, liberating, or even worldmaking.

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Citation

Graybill, Rhiannon. After the Idyll Ends: Ruth and the Uses of Disappointment. Ruth. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. Oct 2025. ISBN 9781800506930. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=45255. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.45255. Oct 2025

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