Queering “Straight” Preaching

Abstract

Well-meaning straight preachers may approach the issue of LGBTQ equality in the church from a standpoint of compassion, but queer theorists such as Lee Edelman have critiqued “compassion-compulsion” as a subconscious selfprojection, requiring that others become just like us. This article presses straight preachers to go further than simply preaching to include “others,” instead challenging such preachers to open themselves and their congregations to the risk of transformation. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, this article suggests that preachers move towards others in a gesture of “recognition” that resembles gratitude, and by such a gesture to receive the risky gifts others have to offer. This gratitude for the gifts of others becomes a motive for engaging in queer theory and queer theology, but this motive also puts us at risk. The risk of preaching that seriously engages the gifts of others includes queering ourselves, allowing ourselves to be scandalized by the risk of transformation asked of us by the gospel we preach.     

Coming Home/Coming Out

Abstract

This article is a theological reflection on one Queer Asian American woman’s experience of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease. Using Coming Out/Coming Home as a frame and metaphor, the author explores the complexity of “home” for many Koreans/Korean-Americans whose very lives intersect with and are disrupted by major events in Korean and world history. For them, the act of coming home is complex, textured, and layered with experiences of loss, trauma, dislocation, resilience and hope. Through dis-ordered memories of a mother with Alzheimer’s, this article attempts to re-order what it means to come home. Grace Cho’s “ghostly haunting” provides a methodology. Layering theory with personal narratives, stories and a dream, ot is an experiment in performance—phantomogenic words that become “staged words.” In three parts, “coming home”, “ghostly hauntings”, and “tug-of-war”, this article performs coming home/coming out of one queer family’s experience of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s.     

Husserl and queer theory

In spite of a history wherein queer theory has openly rejected phenomenology, phenomenology has gained increasing interest amongst queer theorists. However, Husserl’s phenomenology is often marginalized in attempts to integrate queer theory with phenomenology, and when Husserl is addressed specifically, his work is often treated superficially or even misrepresented. Given this, my first goal is to demonstrate how Husserl’s work is already open to positions considered fundamental to queer theory, and that Husserl is often explicitly arguing for these positions himself. In doing so, I wish to show that Husserl’s phenomenology is well fitted for complementary engagement with queer theory. My second goal is to work through some ways in which Husserl’s phenomenology and queer theory can work together in detail to accomplish shared theoretical goals. Although this will not be a full-blown analysis—which would exceed the parameters of this article—my hope is to provide a certain amount of in depth work that can then assist further analyses that combine these methods.     

Contributors

Abstract

This paper studies the interaction of the clinical theories of two major British theorists, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Through three clinical examples, we see how the “Klein-Winnicott dialectic” operates in a significantly developmental fashion to advance and fulfill clinical work. Winnicott’s “object survival” is looked at in developmental conjunction with Klein’s “mourning” as a primary clinical and developmental process. This interaction also captures the essence of working with the aggression of a self that has been traumatically disrupted within its early development. This paper demonstrates how such work leads to the assimilation and grieving of primal object loss, evolving into a “developmental mourning process.” This developmental mourning includes the working-through of an “abandonment depression” in the character-disordered patient. A clinical example in a 1989 essay on “psychic pain” by Betty Joseph is used to set up the clinical challenge of going beyond the symptomatic clinging behavior of developmental arrest, into full psychic birth as a separate other, an Other who can relate to an Other. Conclusively, the subjective visceral affect noted and monitored in its clinical dimensions here is that of human “heartache,” which can also include regret.     

Leaving to Love: Filipina Caregivers and The Queer Kinship of Transnational Childcare

This article considers the affective and psychosocial dimensions of transnational childcare. It offers a transdisciplinary engagement with the subjectivity of Filipina caregivers, suggesting that the ways in which their love and care are split across borders and nations “queers” conceptions of family, childhood, and maternal obligation. Specifically, queer theories of kinship and diaspora are employed to offer an affective reading of Canada’s Caregiver Program. D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” mother is also engaged in an effort to complicate narratives of maternal obligation, neglect, and love.     

The power of poverty: queer religious agency past and present

ABSTRACT

As a form of resistance against heteronormativity, queer theology has often also been very critical towards colonialism and capitalism. The queer perspective thus became a privileged standpoint of critique of these three levels of oppression. However, it seems that today, capitalism itself has been “queered”: the hierarchy of the heterosexual “core family” has been replaced by a global hymn of diversity and flexibility centred around consumerism. Within the context of neoliberal capitalism, queer theology seems to have lost its queerness. This contribution is inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s book The Highest Poverty (2011), in which he presents the evolution of the Franciscan rule from a “form of life” (forma vitae) to a “rule” that is a form of proto-capitalism. The Franciscan ideal of poverty is corrupted as soon as the hierarchical Church (the instance of power) affirms this rule, thereby taking it up within a discourse of the law: poverty is no longer a theological concept, but an economical one. Following Agamben’s strategy, I will ask how another spiritual movement of around the thirteenth century, the Beguines, attempted to live an alternative life, a vita apostolica, and understand this as a form of queerness. The Beguine model, I will argue, can help us imagine a deepened queer theology today that cannot be captured and rigidified by the logic of capitalism, but continues to be able to critique it.     

Queering Bem: Theoretical Intersections Between Sandra Bem’s Scholarship and Queer Theory

Sandra Bem revolutionized psychology with her research on gender, androgyny, and gender schematicity, which culminated in her book, The Lenses of Gender. Her work also provides a model for how to cross inter-disciplinary lines to enhance scholarship and reach political goals. We analyze similarities and differences between Bem’s scholarship and scholarship in queer theory, a theoretical movement in the humanities that analyzes discourses that construct man/woman and straight/gay binaries. There are important overlaps between Bem’s lenses of gender (biological essentialism, gender polarization, and androcentrism) and the ideas of many queer theorists. There are also several interesting differences between Bem’s ideas and queer theory: attention to the intrapsychic processes that make up gender, the extent to which individuals can be liberated from gender, proliferating versus contesting gender, intersectionality, and epistemology and methodology. By assessing the similarities and differences between Bem and queer theorists, we show that the two complement each other, affording a better understanding of gender and sexuality. Additionally, both Bem and queer theory lend insight into feminist and queer activism. The theoretical and political advances that can be made by integrating Bem’s ideas and those of queer theorists serve as examples for why it is worthwhile to cross disciplinary lines.     

Messianic language in trans public speech*

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how two trans public figures, Lou Sullivan and Jennifer Finney Boylan, try to realize the need for transgender legibility through messianic rhetoric. Messianism is a site of contention in queer theory, between advocates for either antirelational queer theory or queer utopianism. This essay sees messianic rhetoric as a strategy found in the public speech and writing of Sullivan and Boylan, each of whom instrumentalize it to achieve legibility. Such rhetoric works to the political end of broader transgender acceptance. However, it also relies upon a flattening of trans life into a monolith. Messianic rhetoric legitimates a singular narrative of “how to be trans” through excluding other possibilities. Public speech that rejects this universalizing messianic impulse is possible. The zine “Fucking Trans Women” represents such a possibility, focusing attention on experience and pleasure over narrative linearity, thus providing one path forward for trans public speech.     

A Paradoxical Theology of Biology

Abstract

This article examines a sermon in which Desmond Tutu advocates for gay rights in light of his activism against apartheid in South Africa. In doing so it uncovers a paradoxical theology of biology that enables him to advocate universal notions of justice simultaneously with love for particular persons and bodies. This advocacy, however, is susceptible to the critiques of queer theorists and theologians who worry that liberationist frameworks unwittingly reinscribe injustices against a variety of queer persons. The article concludes by raising new questions to be asked about Desmond Tutu’s theology, and liberation theologies in general, about the potential of liberationist and prophetic frameworks for achieving social justice. It also raises questions for queer theology about the possibility and political efficacy of queering the act of preaching.     

“The Only Safe Guide is Love”: Models of Engaging Luther's Ethical Hermeneutic for Theological Responses to the Affirmation of Same‐Sex Sexuality

Lutheran theological discussions over the morality of same‐sex sexuality not only raise “ethical” questions, but point to deeper interpretive tensions that arise when resources of the tradition are interpreted in new contexts. Responding to these debates, in this article I propose that Luther's application of the law to challenging ethical situations provides a historically situated hermeneutic that can redirect theological discussions on same‐sex sexuality. Drawing upon feminist Lutheran and queer theological work, I consider how we may reengage with Luther in a way that is both faithful to his commitments, and also takes queer people seriously as moral subjects.     

A Minimalist Theory of Truth

This article, after briefly discussing Alfred Tarski's influential theory of truth, turns to a more recent theory of truth, a deflationary, or minimalist, theory. One of the chief elements of a deflationary, or minimalist, theory of truth is that it replaces the question of what truth is with the question of what “true” does. After setting out the central features of the minimalist theory of truth, the article explains the motivation for opting for such a position. In addition, it provides some reasons for thinking that such a theory of truth is “minimal” or “deflationary” in the way that contemporary truth theorists have claimed it to be.     

Feminist Philosophy,Pragmatism, and the “Turn to Affect”: A Genealogical Critique

Recent years have witnessed a focus on feeling as a topic of reinvigorated scholarly concern, described by theorists in a range of disciplines in terms of a “turn to affect.” Surprisingly little has been said about this most recent shift in critical theorizing by philosophers, including feminist philosophers, despite the fact that affect theorists situate their work within feminist and related, sometimes intersectional, political projects. In this article, I redress the seeming elision of the “turn to affect” in feminist philosophy, and develop a critique of some of the claims made by affect theorists that builds upon concerns regarding the “newness” of affect and emotion in feminist theory, and the risks of erasure this may entail. To support these concerns, I present a brief genealogy of feminist philosophical work on affect and emotion. Identifying a reductive tendency within affect theory to equate affect with bodily immanence, and to preclude cognition, culture, and representation, I argue that contemporary feminist theorists would do well to follow the more holistic models espoused by the canon of feminist work on emotion. Furthermore, I propose that prominent affect theorist Brian Massumi is right to return to pragmatism as a means of redressing philosophical dualisms, such as emotion/cognition and mind/body, but suggest that such a project is better served by John Dewey's philosophy of emotion than by William James's.     

Queer(ing) Moves: Beyond Anthropocene,Toward Convivial,Sustainable Futures

Abstract

The essay will outline possibilities for be(com)ing other-Wise convivial, interbetween. To this end, relational possibilities for embodied enlivening are described as queering practice for moving from Anthropocene toward sustainable futures. Based on exploring certain qualities of be(com)ing queer some perspectives on queer futures are discussed. Related to Merleau-Ponty’s eco-phenomenology the paper then opens up possibilities for an embodied, convivial relation with nature (“con-naturality”) and social life (“con-sociability”). Finally, queering the type of the Anthropos, provides pathways for “anthropo-decentric” transformations toward a convivial future as an “ecocene.”     

The Problem of Having Both a Body and a Name in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion

In this essay, and following upon both Jacques Lacan’s and Jacques Derrida’s personal struggles with fatherhood and the naming of their children, I take up what I consider to be Jean-Luc Marion’s failure to deal with the embodiment of fatherhood through an examination of patriarchal signification, or, specifically, the naming of one’s children after the father — at least insofar as Marion’s brief analysis of this symbolic act points toward his failure to think through the various potential and lived embodiments of the father. I aim to illuminate how his efforts to continue this naming of the child with the father’s name speak more directly to an idealized (“theologized”) vision of our world that need not be serviced, indeed, which we would benefit from not utilizing at all. I wish, in an autobiographical-phenomenological response to Marion, to point to other names, other relationships, and other ways of perceiving how one might be situated within our world. I follow Sara Ahmed in calling “queer” ways in which a phenomenological account of the subject’s identity are not a pretext for perpetuating a quasi-theological, patriarchal agenda.     

Tough Breaks: Trans Rage and the Cultivation of Resilience

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy ( 2010, 2014 ), María Lugones's writing on anger (2003), Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction (2015), and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker ( 1994 ).     

Queer Theology and Social Transformation Twenty Years after Jesus ACTED UP†

Published in 1993, Goss's Jesus ACTED UP was one of the first attempts to articulate both a radical queer theology and a mission of mainstream social transformation. The subsequent 20 years have revealed gaps between the two, precisely as mainstream LGBT politics has embraced (or perhaps exploited) religion. I focus on four tensions for those straddling the scholarship/activism lines. First, what we are doing: queer theology, and academic discourse generally, value that which is nuanced and complex; mainstream activism prefers the simple and clear. Second, what we want: radical liberation requires systemic change, while mainstream activism works pragmatically and incrementally within the system. Third, who we are: queer theory and theology emphasize the socially constructed and mutable natures of the subject, but mainstream social transformation has “won” with essentialism (“Born This Way,” love is love, etc.). Fourth, what about God: the queer, ironic, eroticized God of queer theology remains, thus far, incomprehensible in the public square where only the unreconstructed God is known. These tensions have erupted in numerous political and social contexts in the two decades since Bob Goss tried to bring radical theology and mainstream activism together, though I conclude by noting that only now might the public square be ready for what he and other queer theologians have to offer.     

Jesus ACTED UP: Learning with Robert Goss

In this essay, I discuss my responses to Bob Goss’ Jesus ACTED UP as I re-read it 20 years after its original discussion. Bob's work is foundational for subsequent queer theology even as it is bound to the particular context of the early 1990s. Next, I place the book in the larger context of what I call the “queerification” of Christianity. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer equality movement has made significant gains in terms of opening the church to openly queer clergy and access to marriage because of the contributions of scholar/activists such as Bob Goss. I conclude by looking ahead at the need for future explorations that can agitate while also reflecting the nuance required in relation to the more complex understandings of gender and sexuality that have emerged, the growing attention to intersectionality and the instability and complexity of personal identities, and the more subtle but no less deadly forms of homohatred we now face — perhaps in the form of collaborative, even co-authored work.     

Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

ABSTRACT

This essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.     

A Window in Time: A Response to “Disorders of Temporality and The Subjective Experience of Time: Unresponsive Objects and the Vacuity of the Future” by Stephen Seligman

This response to Stephen Seligman’s “Disorders of Temporality and The Subjective Experience of Time: Unresponsive Objects and the Vacuity of the Future” considers Seligman’s ideas in the context of field theory. Seligman’s notion of becoming a self in time is elaborated through the concept, derived from field theory, of how time assumes an “essential ambiguity” that may facilitate analytic change and psychological development. This response suggests further that such “essential ambiguity” in relation to time opens both the patient and analyst up to a variety of complex, bidirectional influences, such as unconsciously mediated intergenerational transmissions of trauma. In addition, this response explores Seligman’s ideas associated with an analyst’s moment-to-moment recognitions and a patient’s corresponding development of a self in time in terms of their implications for analytic participation and analytic self-care.