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However, it seems that today, capitalism itself has been “queered”: the hierarchy of the heterosexual “core family” has been replaced by a global hymn of diversity and flexibility centred around consumerism.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.