Scholars of antiquity ssuch as Ruth Karras and Craig A. Williams remind us that in Biblical times, the threat of gay and lesbian sex was related not to the socially constructed sexual identities as we view them today but, rather, to a concern about who is penetrating and who is penetrated. They build on Michel Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation and its connection to one’s individual identity is a modern phenomenon created by bourgeois capitalism in which the object of one’s desire defines a sexual identity, in contrast to the view in antiquity, which focused on one’s sexual role
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