Our Lives Matter

A Womanist Queer Theology

Lightsey

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498206655
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Our Lives Matter uses the tenor of the 2014 national protests that emerged as a response to excessive police force against Black people to frame the book as following the discursive tradition of liberation theologies broadly speaking and womanist theology specifically. Using a womanist methodological approach, Pamela R. Lightsey helps readers explore the impact of oppression against Black LBTQ women while introducing them to the emergent intellectual movement known as queer theology. The author privileges their narratives and experiences as she reviews several doctrines and dogma of the Christian church. Theological reflection on contemporary debates such as same-sex marriage and ordination rights make this book a valuable resource to clergy, students of theology, LGBTQ persons and allies.

Chapter 1

Black Women’s Experience and Queer Black Women’s Lives

Womanists have always maintained the right to make claims about their experience and ways of knowing. As womanist anthropologist Linda Thomas put it: “the tasks of womanist theology are to claim history, to declare authority for ourselves, our men, and our children, to learn from the experience of our forebears, to admit shortcomings and errors, and to improve our quality of life.”1

Womanist theology draws upon several sources including Black literature, personal narratives, and historical texts. According to womanist ethicist Katie Cannon, Black women’s literary tradition has been the primary source for doing womanist theology: “the Black woman’s literary tradition is the best available literary repository for understanding the ethical values Black women have created and cultivated in their ongoing participation in this society.”2 If this is the case, and I believe it is, the concern of queer womanists is why womanist scholars have given such sparse attention to the lives of LBTQ Black women. The answer is simple: Queer womanists must do the work.

Though womanist scholars have been exploring human sexuality for some time, they have not yet produced a full queer theology manuscript totally committed to the lives of Black lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women. Black authors of fictional novels and queer theory have long surpassed us in their critical analysis of the lives of Black LBTQ women. Of the academic articles and chapters published, only a small percentage are written by self-identified and publicly out LBTQ womanist scholars.

While this may or may not impact the overall validity of the work, I believe there is something noteworthy about a reader being able to pick up a book knowing it has been written by someone who has experienced and may therefore understand their situation. For instance, Jacqueline Grant’s work, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (from which this chapter’s title is adapted) resonated so strongly with me as a Black Christian woman because on the basis of her experience as a Black Christian woman she was able to tap into a way of knowing and understanding Jesus Christ that our white feminist colleagues could not. We are at a point at which there is clear interest in the subject of human sexuality and at which persons are looking for such writings by Black LGBTQ scholars.

Some might take this to suggest a kind of essentialism, that is not my intent. My insistence that we have more manuscripts by LBTQ womanists is precisely because I realize no one person can be that privileged voice for any group of people/culture. Every class of people is made up of diverse ways of being (i.e. Black lesbians in North America differ from Black lesbians in Africa). What I am suggesting is that the absence of Black lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer voices representing their unique perspective is not good for the academy or our churches, especially Black churches. I do not want silence to be interpreted by anyone as meaning Black LGBTQs do not exist, do not care, or have no impact in these contexts.

In this chapter, I will survey the work of several womanist scholars related to sexuality. In that they address general themes such as Black sexuality and the nature of Black homophobia, the writings of these avant-garde scholars are resources for the growing discussion about Black LGBTQ persons. Unfortunately most of these discussions talk about us and not with us. They rarely address the theological conception of Black LBTQ women in particular and our lives in our Black communities and churches. This means that even with the best intentions womanist scholarship has rarely put its finger on the pulse of what it means to be a Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender woman living in America.

Exploring the lives of any culture is good and necessary work. We need to learn from the experience of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer Black women how the church has been helpful and harmful. We also need to discover how we as scholars can help train a new generation of clergy and faculty to affirm LGBTQ persons as people whom God loves as they live out their lives as same gender loving persons. To meet this task, Black LBTQ women must play a more immediate role in liberation theology by writing what it means to be queer bodies shaped in the image of God, by writing of our conceptions of God, and by writing against the oppression we face daily. Otherwise we run the risk of the history and theology of our people being shaped primarily from the perspective of our allies.

I am concerned not only with supplying our womanist colleagues, the academy, and the world sufficient literary and ethnographic repositories for their studies but that what comes from those studies is not a conflation of our experiences into blackness at the expense of our queerness. This of course is the well-documented critique Audre Lorde had of white feminist works, their “refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.”3

With that in mind, what follows is an analysis of the few widely accepted full monographs written by womanists dealing in whole or part with the subject of LGBTQ sexuality or Black women’s bodies: Kelly Brown Douglas’ Sexuality and the Black Church and M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being. Other monographs worth mentioning but not written by womanist scholars include: Horace Griffin’s Their Own Receive Them Not, Roger A. Sneed’s Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism, E. L. Kornegay’s A Queering of Black Theology: James Baldwin’s Blues Project and Gospel Prose, and Patrick Cheng’s Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality and Spirit.

Kelly Brown Douglas’ Sexuality and the Black Church

I remember the excitement at the Interdenominational Theological Center bookstore about Kelly Brown Douglas’ work, Sexuality in the Black Church. It was a groundbreaking publication by a Black scholar on the subject of what we seminarians understood as sex. We passed the book around squealing with excitement, “Hey doc, you need to check this out!” Students stood in an increasingly long checkout line to purchase what was to us theological porn. A salacious book written about the Black Church! Many of us thought Douglas had written a tell-all about something we all knew existed—promiscuous and adulterous preachers. We couldn’t wait to get the book home, set aside our dull readings written by dead white men, and read about Black preachers having sex. I was closeted at the time and wanted to read more about what she had to say about homosexuality. I hoped her work would help me to reconcile my relationship with the Protestant Church, but more importantly I needed to read from the pen of a Black theologian that I was not a sinner, an abomination in the eyes of God.

We’d be disappointed on the first count. Douglas had not written an exposé on the sexual exploits of Black clergy but a sustained investigation into Black sexuality. Her book is an exquisite survey of the history of oppression against Black bodies from slavery to its legacy of internalized oppression in contemporary America. Douglas’ diagnosis of the impact of slavery and its continued consequences on black bodies is rich. Her work is especially helpful for Black women who have borne the brunt of racist attacks against their bodies.

On the second count, what Douglas had to say about homosexuality was trailblazing. Standing there browsing through the book, I almost cried knowing some Black theologian had actually put forth the effort to challenge homophobia within our Black communities. Douglas was one of few Black theologians who stood in solidarity with LGBT persons in the late ‘90s. Most Black academicians were either silent or anti-gay, and certainly this was true in womanist circles. In the introduction, Douglas notes the influence of lesbian scholar Renee Hill who, in her article, “Who Are We for Each Other? Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology,” critiqued Christian womanists for avoiding “the issue of sexuality and sexual orientation by being selective in appropriating parts of [Alice] Walker’s definition of womanism.”4 Not only Hill but also Black lesbian activist Rev. Irene Monroe had aptly critiqued this void in womanist writings at the time of Douglas’ publication. Sexuality in the Black Church was a tiny step in the right direction but was not written to be a panacea for discrimination endured by Black LGBTQ people. Instead, what Douglas does beautifully, and what accounts for the continued worth of the book, is her treatment of Black sexuality, Black self-love of our bodies, and the nature of Black homophobia.

Though Douglas argues against a hyperhomophobic Black community,5 the nature of Black homophobia is nonetheless patriarchal, Platonic, and hegemonic. Black church leaders, largely male, have so appropriated these traits that it is laughable to hear Black evangelicals take issue with the idea that homophobia in the Black community has been fueled by conservative white evangelicals. It is a bit of a stretch to suggest, as does Douglas, that Black Americans were not at all influenced by White biblical interpretation.

Finally, the existence of the oral/aural tradition signifies that the Black community gives virtually no credence to White interpretations of the Bible, and for good reason. The way in which the enslavers used the Bible and the history of White biblical scholarship have caused many Black people to be suspicious of most biblical scholarship, of “book religion.”6

It is true that early African Americans viewed White biblical interpretatio...

Table of contents

• Our Lives Matter
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Black Women’s Experience and Queer Black Women’s Lives
• Chapter 2: Philosophical Background to Queer Theology
• Chapter 3: Enable Queer-y
• Chapter 4: The Biblical Crisis
• Chapter 5: Co-Caretakers of a Bountiful Blessing
• Chapter 6: Transforming Until Thy Kin(g)dom Come
• Chapter 7: Imago Dei
• Epilogue
• Bibliography