Susan Hylen's "Gender Mobility"

Susan Hylen is Almar H. Shatford Professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of three other books on gender: Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like (2023), Women in the New Testament World (2018), and A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (2015). She has also written three books on the Gospel of John, including Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John (2009). Hylen serves as general editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Gender Mobility: 7 Ideas about Gender in the New Testament Period, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gender Mobility provides a good snapshot of qualities that pervade this book. The book is a historical exploration of gender as it was constructed in the early Roman period (first and second centuries CE). Page 99 is the beginning of a section on eunuchs as a gender in the Roman world. Part of the appeal of exploring gender in another place and time is that it’s often different from our own culture’s assumptions, which can feel like they are the only possible options. We don’t have eunuchs as a gender today (at least not in the US), but Mediterranean cultures did. This chapter asks what it meant, from their viewpoint, to be a eunuch.

Also on page 99 is the beginning of a section entitled “Freeborn eunuchs.” Ancient societies were very hierarchical, and part of the argument of the book is that social status was incorporated into the construction of gender. So there wasn’t just a single gender, eunuchs, but multiple genders inflected by social status. Freeborn eunuchs had different rights and roles in society than enslaved or freed eunuchs.

In describing freeborn eunuchs, the portion on page 99 engages with the description of freeborn eunuchs in a number of ancient texts. One of the main tasks of the book is presenting and interpreting the evidence available on the subject under discussion. I hope to give readers a clear description of evidence so they can experience it and begin to form their own opinions.

In the case of freeborn eunuchs, there isn’t much evidence available, but what still exists is interesting! For example, on page 99 I explain that the freeborn eunuch, Favorinus, was not castrated, as enslaved eunuchs were, but was born intersex. The fact that he wasn’t castrated fits with the Roman understanding of freeborn status, because in their minds, freeborn men should not be castrated—this was not fitting to their social position. But there were still freeborn men who resembled eunuchs physically, and so the description of Favorinus reflects what it meant at the time to be a freeborn eunuch.

Learn more about Gender Mobility at the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth L. Feder's "Native America"

Kenneth L. Feder is professor emeritus of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. His books include Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory, and Native American Archaeology in the Parks: A Guide to Native Heritage Sites in Our National Parks and Monuments.

Feder applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Native America: The Story of the First Peoples, with the following results:

The story told in a book that explores the deep history of an entire continent can be likened to the story conveyed by an archaeological site. The individual pages of the book are the equivalent of the multiple layers encountered as archaeologists navigate through time. Page 99 of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples represents one of the layers the reader digs through during their journey.

Specifically, page 99 presents a map depicting the locations of many of the most important sites where archaeologists have intersected with the trail of Native People for the period between more than 20,000 to about 10,000 years ago. This is a time when these First Peoples were adapting to an America much different from our own. That America had vast glaciers covering much of the north and was inhabited by giant beasts like mammoths, mastodons, and varieties of bison that dwarf even their enormous modern cousins. Native people successfully hunted these animals with little more than stone tipped spears, guile, and the force of their will. Had I lived then, I would have strongly considered vegetarianism!

Page 99 represents a moment in a much larger history presented in the book, one told not in cuneiform, hieroglyphs, ink on vellum, or on pages produced with a printing press. Instead, the history conveyed in Native America is written in exquisite and deadly spear points found at the sites located on page 99’s map; in miraculously preserved human footprints located in the crystalline white sands of a New Mexico desert and dating to more than 20,000 years ago; in achingly beautiful and architecturally sophisticated cliff dwellings; in giant sculptures of earth in the form of bears, birds, and an enormous snake; in intriguing paintings and etchings on the walls of soaring cliffs; and in the forensic evidence of tragic battles fought and battles lost when two cultures, one native, one newly arrived, clashed in an existential conflict.

Page 99 may present a mere moment in that deep history, but it reflects quite well the overarching message of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples presenting a part of the ongoing story I tell of the creativity, sophistication, ingenuity, and resilience of the First Peoples of America.

Learn more about Native America at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Michaels's "Test, Measure, Punish"

Erin Michaels is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, and shared the following:

Page 99 is the last page of a chapter, fusing some of the book’s main themes about how neoliberal accountability policies shape the educational experiences of marginalized youth. Specifically, this chapter explains why state accountability pressures drove the school’s already harsh disciplinary regime to get worse. The first part of page 99 reviews how this traditional public school (my case study of Sandview High) operated like the rather notorious “No Excuses Charter School” (NECS). However, I argue that the school’s obsession with social control was not just aimed at improving academic performance. Instead, there was also another state accountability pressure at play: improving students’ suspension and attendance rates, and this actually heightened the punitive setting. The second part of page 99 reviews some of the most painful costs of this regime for students.

Sandview High seemed to be taking the lead from NECS to figure out how to make students perform well. Yet, the focus in NECS has largely been on test scores as the key motivating factor for harsh “no excuses” disciplinary practices for the “normalization of unethical practices.” In contrast, as this case study, and the supplementary data on the ESSA presented early in this chapter reveal, adding non-test student behavior data to the ongoing neoliberal accountability focus of “measuring and punishing” schools worsens punitive schooling, just as a focus on test scores degrades academic lessons.

The pervasive social control at Sandview High, or what I call the school security regime, shaped students in ways that undermined their socialization for citizenship. Students felt mistreated, under surveillance, and contained, and often created narratives that normalized this treatment; all of which taught them that they were “custodial citizens.” That is, they were learning to tolerate an adulthood where they could expect the state to surveil them widely, even when such surveillance did not result in a formal arrest. This models the “custodial class” that Lerman and Weaver emphasize is created in the midst of wide-ranging neighborhood police patrol practices that include routine stop-and-frisks. As they note, if state surveillance is one’s only exposure to the state, there is little room to see the state as something you can make demands on as a democratic citizen entitled to make claims on their government. The intersectional analysis in this chapter also underscores the extra layers of vulnerability in students’ experiences with off-the-record punishment shaped by gender, race, and immigration. Their experiences reflect further social consequences of highly securitized schools, which create additional harms. I expand on these social consequences in the next and final chapter.

The Page 99 Test worked better than I predicted. The book’s main argument is that neoliberal accountability policies threatening schools with closure for low performance is as much about rising state carcerality (punishment and surveillance) as it is about the “business approach” traditionally associated with neoliberal education reform. Page 99 showcases the argument that state pressure on schools to improve their suspension and attendance rates is an overlooked part of how neoliberal accountability has, and continues to, include non-test metrics (like suspension and attendance rates) that also worsen education for marginalized youth, here exacerbating surveillance. I stress how this illustrates one of the ways in which neoliberal accountability ushers in more state carcerality. I also value that page 99 discusses the key consequences of this carcerality that I reveal across the book: how policing youth in school undermines their social development in terms of what they think they deserve, have to put up with, and how this is related to broader lessons for marginalized youth about what the state is and its agents. Throughout the book, I argue that neoliberal accountability policies provoked twin punitive regimes: testing and security, which had vast consequences on students beyond degenerating their academic education: it eroded their sense of political agency.

Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue