The Queer God

Marcella Althaus-Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134350100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

There are those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms. Others enter churches with love letters hidden in their bags, because their need for God and their need for love refuse to fit into different compartments. But what goodness and righteousness can prevail if you are in love with someone whom you are ecclesiastically not supposed to love? Where is God in a salsa bar?
The Queer God introduces a new theology from the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion. Its chapters on Bisexual Theology, Sadean holiness, gay worship in Brazil and Queer sainthood mark the search for a different face of God - the Queer God who challenges the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness and global capitalism. Inspired by the transgressive spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with Queer interpretations of grace and holiness, The Queer God seeks to liberate God from the closet of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God's part in the lives of gays, lesbians and the poor.
Only a theology that dares to be radical can show us the presence of God in our times. The Queer God creates a concept of holiness that overcomes sexual and colonial prejudices and shows how Queer Theology is ultimately the search for God's own deliverance. Using Liberation Theology and Queer Theory, it exposes the sexual roots that underlie all theology, and takes the search for God to new depths of social and sexual exclusion.

Part I
QUEERING THEOLOGY

1
KNEELING

Deviant theologians

I live in constant negotiations

Trying to resolve

The border conflicts raging inside me

(Judit 1994: 218)

By which traditions of impropriety and stubborn tendencies to per/versity (that Queer, persistent trend to find different versions or alternative interpretations) does ‘queering’ as a theological vocation start in us? As Indecent theologians¹ we do not need to accept a claim to neutrality but maintain a responsible position in the divine cartography of pleasure and desire. Therefore, the question about who is a theologian may find an answer in a reflection on issues of relationships, love and pleasure, in tension or negotiation with the fixed borders of Heterosexual Theology. An Indecent theologian is a theologian who has learned to survive with several passports. She is a Christian and a Queer theologian or a minister and a Queer lover who cannot be shown in public and she is a woman and a worker: the list of the game of multiple representations extends. A Queer theologian has many passports because she is a theologian in diaspora, that is, a theologian who explores at the crossroads of Christianity issues of self-identity and the identity of her community, which are related to sexuality, race, culture and poverty. In Queer theologies there is, however, a primordial or first diaspora to acknowledge. It is what we can call the first and most important of the passports she needs to acquire. We are referring here to the diaspora from love or what Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton have called the journey ‘with a passport out of Eden’ (Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000: 1). That journey becomes a theological space that Patton and Sánchez-Eppler identify as the primordial and complex space of exclusion in the narratives of Genesis. It is interesting to notice how Genesis has been seen as a text which carries heavy responsibilities for the subjugation of women and also of nature. The traditional reading of Genesis has made of mastery and dominion over women and nature a theological virtue.² Even in the more benign readings concerned with the concept of stewardship in relation to the environment, that fundamental colonial motion of patriarchy persists in a relation which makes of the Other a permanent minor in need of mastery and control. However, for Patton and Sánchez-Eppler, a deeper sexual reading of Genesis may show us that beyond issues of heterosexual control of men over women, there is a more profound dynamics, a divine dynamics which creates mechanisms of sexual exclusion, one in which homosexuality (represented in this reading by Adam and God’s particular loving friendship) is in reality what ends in the exclusion from Eden. That may be the utopian beginning of the Queer diaspora, starting with Other sexualities expelled from the Eden of loving, godly relationships and exiled in lands of heterosexuality. That primordial sexual diaspora, which comes from the displaced love between a man and a God-man, may be the reason why Queer theologies are usually biographical theologies. One needs to follow that diasporic movement which allows us to understand the paths crossed, and the ways in which theological identities are still challenged, transformed, retracted and disguised in Christianity. Queer theologies are tactical theologies, ‘using tactical queerness to cruise places occupied by normative straightness’ (Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000: 14). Queer theologies go into diasporas by using tactics of temporary occupation; disruptive practices which are not necessarily to be repeated, and reflections which aim to be disconcerting.³ At the bottom line of Queer theologies, there are biographies of sexual migrants, testimonies of real lives in rebellions made of love, pleasure and suffering. On this point, paraphrasing Kosofsky Sedgwick, we may say that Queer theologies are those characterised by an ‘I’ because the Queer discourse only becomes such when done in the first person (Sedgwick 1994: 11). Queer Theology is, then, a first person theology: diasporic, self-disclosing, autobiographical and responsible for its own words.

Therefore, to reflect on issues of the theologian’s identity and ways of doing a Queer Theology, we need to begin a reflection intimately linked to a God-talk on loving and pleasurable relationships. This is one of the most important challenges that Queer theologies bring to theology in the twenty-first century: the challenge of a theology where sexuality and loving relationships are not only important theological issues but experiences which un-shape Totalitarian Theology (T-Theology)⁴ while re-shaping the theologians. The point is that in the process of queering theology, this intricate relationship between theology and the theologians cannot be pulled apart without losing something in the process. What queering theologies may lose in the process gives space for new, even if sometimes contingent, formations. For instance, Queer theologies do not disregard church traditions. However, the process of queering may turn them upside down, or submit them to collage-style processes by adding and highlighting from them precisely those elements which did not fit well in the construction of the church tradition and thus were excluded or ignored. Most of the work done around queering church traditions has been related to re-positioning the Queer, Indecent subject in theology and to do that by giving testimonies of other traditions (or the traditions of the Other) concerning love and sexuality.⁵

To queer theological sources in church traditions could simply mean to gather together all the dispersed fragments of love and sexual identity struggles in people’s lives, and add to that the struggle for spaces of freedom and social justice which constitute the real Queer traditions of the church, which are characterised by processes of sexual ideological disruption in Christianity, and not by its continuity. Disruption is our diaspora. Disruptive practices of love and sexuality have made of the Queer community a continuum and given us a sense of belonging together with our struggles for identity which are based on difference and processes of transformations.

For bigamy and God: a tradition of sexual theological rebellion

Where can we find such traditions of sexual theological disruption in the church? Everywhere. If I go, for instance, to the history of the church in Latin America, and decide to queer the history of the Jesuitic Missions, I may find that, in many ways, the missions were more sexual than Christian. The point is that Christianity came to my continent more as a sexual project concerned with the praxis of specific heterosexual understandings elevated to a sacred level (as most ideologies are), than to explain Christian theology. However, if Christian theology was difficult to explain to nations of very different cosmological backgrounds, it was more difficult to explain European sexuality to them. In the complex mixture of oppression that the original nations in South America suffered under the missions (Jesuitic or Franciscan, for instance), their theological revolt was also a political and a sexual one.⁶ Some Jesuitic missions during the sixteenth century held civil and criminal courts, where sexual disobedience to the Christian European norms was punishable (Wiesner-Hanks 2000: 153). However, the elders called people to rebel against the conquistadors’ oppression. Amongst those recorded, there are documents which testify that the religious and political leaders of the Nahua nations questioned the sexual understanding of Christian marriage and that in 1680, the revolt of the Pueblo Indians started a call to bigamy and concubinage as a way to return to their own traditions and understanding of sex and society (Wiesner-Hanks 2000: 158). This is an important part of the theological tradition of sexual disruption, for the call to fidelity, to God and bigamy started in Latin America as a result of political and economic oppression. It is interesting to notice that those people understood what today is still not clear, that is, that by disrupting the sexual ideology of Christianity, a whole political project which works against people’s lives is also disrupted. Their call was not to ignore the Virgin Mary, because at that point to believe or disbelieve in the Virgin Mary was irrelevant to their struggle, but to call for Other sexual praxis.

This represents a biographical tradition of sexual disruption in the church, because it concerns people’s lives, love stories and the suffering of the imposed Christian marriage by the state and the church terrorism of the time. As homosexuality and cross-dressing was also part of many Original Nations’ sexualities, one may consider that they were also objects of political subversion at the time, even if specific memories may have been lost. If some nation’s peoples stood up for their different understanding of sexuality in relationship to marriage, they may have also stood up for homosexuality and cross-dressing. These rescued memories which become new sources of church traditions from which we would like to reflect in theology may encourage us also to share our own stories of sexual disruption. Queer traditions are made of strange alliances of memories of discontinuity and disorder, shared by communities of people with pride and resistance. The gathering and reflection on church traditions which marks the beginning of disruption is a popular project which redefines the role of the Sexual Theologian, and helps us to discern the future.

The memories of disruption which are going to become our source of contemporary rebellious sexual traditions are not only the Stonewall riots or the memory of the courageous human rights actions by Peter Tatchell or the march in Buenos Aires organised by Lesbianas a la Vista (Lesbians in View) a few years ago, where women walked with their names written on a piece of cardboard to show that they were proud women with nothing to hide. Some even wrote their national identity card numbers under their names, an act that, in view of the recent past of dictatorial regimes in Argentina, displays a kind of political courage which might be difficult to parallel in Great Britain at this time. Apart from these stories of memorable pride marches, we also have our own stories, significant enough for us and our communities to add. That is, stories to relate by means of making alliances between Queer-biographical theology and church traditions. The story I would like to queer is related to the church tradition of kneeling, specifically to kneeling in front of a priest’s penis. It was in the city of Rosario, Argentina in the 1960s, as part of the liturgy of confession and first communion, that I knelt down in what was part of a normative thing to do for Catholics. And yet it was transgressive in its own way, because a mistake I committed on kneeling generated a flow of gender and sexuality, linking them to issues of identity; that is, the identity of women kneeling in front of priests, and of priests, and God. I was going to take my first communion and therefore I was instructed to confess to the priest who was in charge of the catechesis in his parish to which my grandmother belonged at that time. For ritualistic purposes, boys were expected to kneel in front of the priest, who used to sit on a low chair for the purpose of children’s confession. Girls were expected to kneel also, but at the right side of the priest. Children did not use the confession box. In retrospect, one could see the liturgical symbolic geography relating to gender and sexual positions in the church’s structures starting to be organised, precociously, amongst that group of eight-year-old children, gathering around the position of the priest’s penis. That was also part of the catechesis, a recognition of positions concerning the ubiquitous divine phallus. As I recall it now, insecure about what I was expected to do, I decided to follow what my (male) cousins did and instead of kneeling at the right side of the priest’s chair I assumed the position straight opposite to the priest’s genitalia. I refused to move from there, and that earned me a rebuke first by the priest himself, and then by God Almighty as I needed to add that rebellious incident to my confession. I ended by confessing my act of kneeling at the priest’s penis to the same priest but also, without knowing it, I somehow became by default a confessor in myself.

The ritual of kneeling has several interesting elements for us to consider. First, the dialectics present at the liturgy of the confessor/confessant or the ‘who is who’ of the church order; second, the sexual geography of the ritual, which may be considered at the base of heterosexual relationships and marriage. For instance, in the history of sexual rebellions in Latin America, confessional kneelings were important to disorganise the extensive practice of sodomy amongst homosexual and heterosexual people alike. However, in a way, we may say that the confessant also transgresses what she confesses, and what she confesses is the reconfiguration of space, sex, gender and politics in the church. Kneeling is troublesome and it has a theological referent in the church’s also troubled waters of sexuality and power. A whole symbolic sexual order is obviously manifested in kneelings as positions of subordination and sites of possible homo- and hetero- seductions, because these are theologically distributed around the axis of the priesthood’s male genitalia. The priest’s penis carries the sacred connotations of the phallus as a transcendental signifier of the theological discourses to everyday Christianity, and kneeling is a liturgical positing designed to centralise and highlight this.⁷ Queering theology and the theologian is closely related to queering love and God. Doing a theological reflection which takes as a point of departure the genital axis of T-Theology, confronts us with a geography in which we need to make the distinction between events and the ordering of knowledge. Following Elspeth Probyn in her distinction between ‘locale and location’ we may distinguish here between the locale as a place (for instance the marital home or the theologically adjudicated places of women in liturgical acts) and the location (the ordering of knowledge; its logical sequence from, for instance, Western heterosexuality) (Probyn 1990: 178). Through a process of Queer localising – not globalising – of our reflections we are confronted with both elements and their complex set of relationships. The locale is the event of kneeling and the special configuration of it; it is also the affectivity model (or lack of it) presented in the church. The location is theology as a type of knowledge which orders these spaces of determination for the theologian and for her love life. Probyn’s proposal here is useful for us. She asks for more work to be done in the area of the knowledge which fixes and makes subaltern units of the locale (Probyn 1990: 186).

I have said elsewhere that theology is a sexual act, and therefore to reflect on the theologian, her vocation, role and risks means to take seriously the changing geographies of Christian kneelings, and confessionary movements, and how they relate to positions of affection in Christian theology. In this way, queering who the theologian is, and what is her role and vocation is a reflection on locations, closely linked to the locale’s events and spaces made of our concrete and sensual actions. As an illustration of this, it would be useful to remember that when the then Cardinal Archbishop of Santo Domingo met a group of priests and theologians of liberation to discuss issues of marriage and celibacy in the church, he commented afterward:

These are frustrated men; they are embittered and full of stupidity … Let them leave [the church] as soon as possible. In my personal opinion, I believe that once they get married and their women ill treat them, they will become tame men.

(Pérez Aguirre 1994: 40)

Jon Sobrino commented on this as a ‘sad anecdote’, in which women (absent in the church discourse) are represented in the context of marriage as abusive of men (Sobrino 1992: 752). In this, the locale and the location of women in the church and in their heterosexually adjudicated roles become almost indistinguishable and sinister.

But the theologian is, after all, a material girl and lives in a material world. Those sensual actions we referred to are sexual and political ones, and they imply sensuous, material positions around hierarchical church models constructed from the axis of priests’ penises. They are economic and political and organisational models which organise love, finances, God and theology based on their historical positional understandings. The materiality of this reflection extends beyond the flow of desire analysed in Feminist Theology, which does not consider pleasure as the site of theological reflection. Pleasure is locale; desire is a location. Desire, as an abstract concept, matches the kneeling at the priest’s penis in the sense that, following Butler, we are here in the terrain of separating penises from phalluses, even if the penis is the prototype of transcendence and divine transcendence (Butler 1993: 103). As Lacan has already said, the Father is more present when he is more absent (Marini 1992: 172). That absence is transcendental, but only in dependence with its penis’s model.

The point for us to consider is that if we are going to take a position in the small circuit of dualistic and heavily hierarchical understandings of the behaviour of sacramental bodies and souls, then we could start by asking how the theologian should be located, that is, by considering how a theologian is positioned and also, how we can consider the theologian as an event, independently of her doing theology. As theology has been developed as a (closeted) heterosexual art, it works quite naturally in secretive spaces which tend to be violent and dyadic. For instance, the kneelings occur in the liturgical sites of the dyads of God and humanity; Father God and Son God; Creator and created. Even the Trinity has become a dyad, independently of mathematics, in this short-circuiting of amorous relational patterns of heterosexual ideologies in theology. In that short-circuit, violence occurs by death, by abortions. Life is prevented and excluded.

Troubling dyads in confessionaries

Have you obeyed? Have you scandalised anybody? … Have you been in bad company? Have you read indecent novels or magazines? Have you dressed in an indecent way? Do you keep dangerous liaisons (relaciones peligrosas), especially with people of the opposite sex? … If you are married: Have you been faithful? … If you are a worker: Do you create problems by encouraging fellow workers to complain?

(Azcarate 1960: 139–40; my italics)

Hello my name is Father Tim …

(Sheryl Crow, ‘Sweet Rosalyn’, song)

Even if the locale is clear, it is the theologian herself who needs to be considered as an event, that is, the theologian represents a certain kind of relationship related to her particular position in relation to the church and to Christianity. The event is a coming out of a significative anarchism against dyads. It must be said that nobody should consider heterosexuality as a particular type of demonic sexuality, but its hegemonic construction is. As an ideology, heterosexuality is defined by its own secretiveness between twos; this is the logic of husband and mistress; or husband and boyfriend; or wife with her beloved: their secret cannot be shared with the spouse. That quality of secretiveness has been passed to theological reflections when theology has functioned as a mere sexual ideology based on dyads. Has the theologian as a confessor and confessant the ability to disturb this? She has if we consider that confession may be considered positively, as a Queer thing both in the sense of, following Kosofsky Sedgwick, being a transitive experience or a troublant declaration (Sedgwick 1994: xii) cutting across communication with elements of sexual difference and restless positions. The Queer theologian, like any other person whose reflections come transitively (in the Freirean sense of a potentially transgressive and creative process) from some closet of her soul, is also wanted for confession. This happens because the theological art, like any other sexual art, is dependent on the persuasive power of sexual re-representations, achieved in positional confessions which are acts also of re/membering for dis/membering purposes when we realise that the past we confess is disqualifying what we are. Is the Queer theologian amongst the absolvers or the absolved of the sins of theology as ideology? Is she sitting inside the confessionary or does she prefer to kneel down on the cold church tiles? Opposite to what? Arguing with the phallus, or glancing at it from a safe distance? We can start by asking Queer things, for instance, related to what the church wants the theologian to confess and what God needs for her to say openly: Does she keep dangerous relations? Did she ever go on strike? What has she not confessed yet? In theology, complicated questions usually require far more complicated answers. In this case, any answers we attempt to give would, apparently, depend merely on a discourse on morality and ethics from a chosen Christian perspective. By that we mean the theological disquisition on responsibility, linked to confession in the discourse of Christian ethics....

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE QUEER GOD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: THEOLOGY IN OTHER CONTEXTS: ON GAY BARS AND A QUEER GOD
• PART I: QUEERING THEOLOGY
• PART II: QUEER PROMISCUITIES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY