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What Is Queer? Theology after Identity

Gerard Loughlin Theology Sexuality 2008 14: 143 DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087376 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tse.sagepub.com/content/14/2/143

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Volume 14(2): 143-52 Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore http://TSE.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087376

What Is Queer? Theology after Identity* Gerard Loughlin

gerard.loughlin@durham.ac.uk

Abstract This article discusses various uses of queer in theology, from the queerness of theology itself to queer as insult, and as insult turned. But it is chiey concerned with queer as what David Halperin calls an identity without an essence. As such, queer is a movement, a deployment, which unsettles all attempts to fix theologyand Godwithin the contingent lineaments of heteropatriarchy. Queer is what all theology should be. Keywords: Queer theory, gender identity, David Halperin

Theology is a queer thing. It has always been a queer thing. It is a very strange thing indeed, especially for anyone living in the modern West of the twenty-rst century. For theology runs counter to a world given over to material consumption, that understands itself as accidental, without any meaning other than that which it gives to itself, and so without any fundamental meaning at all. For who believes stories that are only madeup? Freud long ago told us that such people are deluded. But now that is everyone. Against this, theology relativizes all earthly projects, insisting that to understand ourselves we must understand our orientation to the unknown from which all things come and to which they return, that

* This article is a revised version of a paper read to the Gay Mens Issues in Religion Group at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Diego, California, 2007. I am grateful for their invitation and to Jay E. Johnson for his response on the occasion of its delivery.

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whichas Christian theology venturesarrives in the life of Jesus. A life not made-up, but given and received in its telling. But even when theology was culturally dominant it was strange, for it sought the strange; it sought to know the unknowable in Christ, the mystery it was called to seek through following Jesus. And of course it has always been in danger of losing this strangeness by pretending that it has comprehended the mystery, that it can name that which is beyond all names. Indeedand despite its own best schoolingit has often succumbed to this danger, which it names idolatry. To name theology as queer in this sense is to invoke queer as the strange or odd, the thing that doesnt t in. Theology doesnt t into the modern world; and if it did t in too snugly it would be forgetting the strangeness of its undertaking: to think existence in relation to the story of a rst-century rabbi. But queer has other meanings, other uses. As well as strange, it is also insult; hurled at the one who doesnt t in. To quote Didier Eribon: The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal (Eribon 2004: 16). And queer is the insult thrown at those identied as gay men and lesbian women, the sign of their social and psychological vulnerability (Eribon 2004: 15).
All of the studies done in homosexual populations (of either sex) show that the experience of insult (not to mention of physical violence) is one of the most widely shared elements of their existenceto different degrees, of course, according to which country, and, within any country, according to where they live and in what environment they grow up. But it is a reality experienced by almost everyoneit is not hard to understand why one of the structuring principles of gay and lesbian subjectivities consists in seeking out means to ee insult and violence, whether it be by way of dissimulation or by way of emigration to more hospitable locations. (Eribon 2004: 18-19)

Given this use of queer it is perhaps perverse to describe theology as queer, for theology serves the very churches where such insults are thrown, where those who love their own sex were once named as sodomites (to be burned) and are now described as objectively disordered (to be reordered). The churches are places where queers are harassed. But language, like life, is never tidy. Queer can have more than one use, and the churches are ambivalent places, as much harbingers (hosts) as harassers of gay people (see Jordan 2000). And then there is another, more recent use of queer. Queer is the insult turned. No longer a mark of shame it becomes a sign for pride, like gay. But unlike gay, it names more than erotic interests a sexual orientationand it names more than marginal, minority

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interests. Perhaps gay has wider connotations than this, but its range is often limited, as in gay culture or gay rights. Queer, on the other hand, seeks and arguably has no such limits. It nds itself curiously central to culture at large, disavowed but necessary for a heterosexual normalcy that denes itself in terms of what it rejects. This is already to speak in terms of the queer theory rst propounded by Teresa de Lauretis (1991), who argued for queer as the name of an emergent force within the cultural eld.
[R]ather than marking the limits of the social space by designating a place at the edge of culture, gay sexuality in its specic female and male cultural (or subcultural) forms acts as an agency of social process whose mode of functioning is both interactive and yet resistant, both participatory and yet distinct, claiming at once equality and difference, demanding political representation while insisting on its material and historical specicity. (Lauretis 1991: iii)

And later queer studies have gone on to nd queer interests to have been always already at play in the dominant, supposedly straight culture. As Henry Abeloves queer students say:
[d]ont focus on histories that require the trope of marginalization for their telling. Focus on the musical comedies of the 1950s. What could be queerer? Or go back some years further and focus on the songs of Cole Porter. All these cultural productions were central rather than marginal. By ignoring or neglecting them, we misconceive the past and unwillingly reduce our presence in and claim to the present, they say. (Abelove 2003: 47)

Queer studies will take us back to some of the most established authorships in Anglo-American literature, which also turn out to be some of the queerest; to the likes of Henry David Thoreau (Abelove 2003: 29-41) and Henry James (Sedgwick 1990; Moon 1998). I am that queer monster the artist, an obstinate nality, an inexhaustible sensibility, James famously wrote in a late manifesto-letter to Henry Adams (March 21, 1914), and if we give that word queer any less force and range than he does, it is our failure of nerve and imagination, not his (Moon 1998: 4). Queer theology aspires to just such nerve and imagination in its reading of the past and its address to the present. It is queer because like all theologyit answers to the queerness of God, who is not other than strange and at odds with our fallen world. Gods kingdom is not ours. When God appeared among us he was marginalized and destroyed; and yet he was the one who let his killers be. They would have had no powerno lifeif it had not been given to them. It is only natural to love ones friends and family; to love ones enemies is perverse. So perverse in fact that very few Christians have tried it.

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But queer theology is also queer because it ndslike queer theory that gay sexuality is not marginal to Christian thought and culture, but oddly central. Perhaps it would be better to speak of same-sex affections and afliations rather than of gay sexuality, of non-heterosexual structures, unexpected afnities. But however named, queer theology nds such relationships to be the disavowed but necessary condition for the Christian symbolic; and not simply as that which is rejected in order to sustain its opposite, but upfront on the surface of that opposite, playing in the movement of stories and images that constitutes the Christian imaginary. The most orthodox turns out to be the queerest of all. Moreover, queer theology reprises the tradition of the Church in order to discover the queer interests that were always already at play in the Spirits movement, in the lives and devotions of saints and sinners, theologians and ecclesiastics. What could be queerer than the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, St John of the Cross or Hans Urs von Balthasar? Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330c. 395) made desire central to his theology, to the extent that when our desires are rightly ordered they come to participate in the desire of the Trinity, the longing of God for God. This is not desire as want, but as active pursuit of the good. It is desire as donation. In Gregory virginity becomes a practice for the weak, for those who are not strong enough to order their marital relations in pursuit of God, but fear the waywardness of bodily desires. Moreover, the virginal life seeks a return to the originaland nalsameness of a life without sexual difference, which is the life of the angels in heaven. At the same time this virginal life is marital, since the soul desires the embrace of the bridegroom, and yet this eschatological embrace passes beyond sexual difference, so that as the feminine disappears, same-sex affections are established in heaven. But the more one reads Gregory the more the meaning of his terms become uncertain, with Gregory proving to be a fascinating but perilous guide for queer theology. Fascinating in that he so resolutely unsettles any complacency regarding the primacy of the heterosexual. Gender is not a stable category for him, and he holds that it is destined to pass away. But that passing is where peril lies, for on one reading it passes to leave a regnant masculinism: a genderless subject who is really a man; a man who has assumed the feminine. But nothing is ever certain when reading Gregory, as anyone who has read Virginia Burrus (2007) on him will know. Things are not much more certain in St John of the Cross (154291), who reworked the Song of Songs in his poetry and commentaries as an example of how the language of carnal desire provides a language for spiritual ascent. But Johnas Christopher Hinkle (2007) arguesis also concerned with the dangers in eliding the erotic with the spiritual, which

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is salutary for a queer theology that is always more celebratory than condemnatory of sexual desire, but which should not ignore the cunning of the latter to disorder spiritual longing. It is all too easy for the wouldbe ascetic to mistake the former for the latter, pursuing the esh rather than God. To nd St John of the Cross teaching the due ordering of sexual to spiritual desire, and not least for gay men, is not to nd John a gay saint, even if there are aspects of his life and character that tempt this identication. For such naming would be anachronistic, and instead we should attend to the queerness of his writings, to Johns written desire for the embrace of his divine lover. Having said this, Hinkle does borrow a number of historical queer identitiesthe effeminate man, the pederastic sodomite, the intimate friend and the sexual invertin order to analyse Johns account of the spiritual ascent. Johns biography suggests the effeminate man, but in his texts John adopts a pederastic passivity in relation to God. And this ancient model of sexual relationships between men answers well to the traditional Christian view of humanity married to God; of a soul that wants to submit. The soul does not merely permit penetration, but desires it; the soul burns with want of Gods love. Hinkle reads this as a shift from pederasty to inversion, and then, as the ascent proceeds, the difference between the lovers seems to disappear, the soul growing ever closer to God, until the soul appears to be God more than a soul (John of the Cross 1991: 165). Needless to say, the homoeroticism of Johns mystical ascent is shaped by a picture of a male God. But while John enables us to afrm the appropriateness of male homosexual desire for articulating, and indeed experiencing, spiritual growth, he alsoHinkle arguescautions against any easy identication of sexual and spiritual experience, for John, like his great friend Teresa of Avila, feared the misdirection of desire and the experiences to which it gives rise, which can come to seem more important than the exposure to God they should inspire. Thus, spiritual as well as sexual experiences are to be ordered and disciplined, stripped of their distractions and practised within a prayerful ascesis that teaches discernment and self-dispossession. As Hinkle notes, this stripping of desire is not unlike its deconstruction, when queer theory dissects desires social incitements. But for queer theology such constructions belie a more primordial desire, the origin of which is that which gives all to be. One might saywith Thomas Aquinasthat insofar as we desire we desire the good (no matter how mistaken we may be in identifying the good), and the desired good is that by which we desire, for to desire is to participate in the desiring of the Good. And it is for this

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reasonthat our desires are participative in Gods desirethat the discernment and ordering of our desires is such a necessary and perilous undertaking, for which we need the guidance of saints like St John. The relationship of sexual to spiritual desire is also found in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (190588), who wrote in the tradition of mystical eroticism that runs from Gregory through John down to the present day. Balthasar insisted that the Trinitarian love is the only ultimate form of loveboth the love between God and men, and that between human persons (Balthasar 198291: VII, 484). Balthasars work is a challenge to think queer love in relation to love of the Trinity; to think human loves in relation to love for God and Gods love for God, which is also Gods love for us, whom God makes to and for love. But Balthasars work also stands as a warning on how not to queer Gods love, for his own reections on the Trinity reveal an undoubtedly queer but baleful reading of the trinitarian relationships. Balthasar makes sexual difference central to his thinking of God and humanitywith Gods supramasculinity and suprafemininity analogous to human femininity and masculinityand it is this privileging of sexuality that makes his work so important and stimulating for any sexual, let alone queer theology. But what turns out to be most stimulating about Balthasars work is the way in which it identies masculinity and femininity in terms drawn from a certain ecclesial culture, that then cause Balthasar to get into endless tangles as he tries to hang onto his misogynistic sentiments within a symbolic system that has become too labile to serve his regressive interests. Balthasar rarely commented on homosexuality, but in a brief note he likened the men of Sodom to those (in non-Christian religions) who pray in a masculine fashion, seeking to take rather than be taken by God. Balthasar tells us that such prayer is a kind of religious homosexuality (Balthasar 1986: 188), an attempt to be male with a male God. It is almost as if for Balthasar their prayer was insufciently perverse; it was not queer enough. The men of Sodom should have waited on Gods messengers and so on Godas women, in a posture of feminine passivity, waiting to be taken (i.e. raped), as Balthasar has it. (See further Muers 2007.) When we pursue Balthasars masculinity and femininity we discover that he identies femininity with Marys mission, which is not so much a mission as the condition of any and all mission, the condition of waiting, and howstrangelyBalthasars masculinity begins to disappear. For in the Church all men are to become women in relation to the male God, who, while he contains suprafemininity, is always pre-eminently supramasculine; always rst and last Father. And yet, despite the dark and vertiginous places into which Balthasar leads Christian thought, we also

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nd that at the last he envisions an eschatological state in which it is not our sexual identities, however these are constructed and deconstructed, but our creatureliness which determines our joy and freedom. Balthasar returns us to a queer state, beyond the heterosexual, and, indeed, beyond the homosexual. Queer, then, is everywhere in the Christian tradition, while also more than a name for gay and lesbian interests. Those latter terms betoken identities built around erotic interests, and liberatory movements that sought to form new social spaces. They turned the pathological homosexual into the political gay. The British Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) is still battling on this front within the churches. But queer betokens something other than political and sexual identity, it includes more than just gay or lesbian identied people. As David Halperin puts it, queer is an identity without an essence. [I]t describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance (Halperin 1995: 62). Queer seeks to outwit identity. It serves those who nd themselves and others to be other than the characters prescribed by an identity. It marks not by dening, but by taking up a distance from what is perceived as the normative. The term is deployed in order to mark, and to make, a difference, a divergence.
Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis--vis the normativea positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with childrenwith, perhaps, very naughty children. (Halperin 1995: 62)

Halperin might also have mentioned the sexual practice of celibacy, which was once and is now again a strange deviancy. He might also have extended his criteria beyond sexual practices. For example, transex and transgender people are often marginalized not because of their sexual practices, but because of their mobility, their unwillingness to remain where others would have them. And yet at the same time we must acknowledge the dangers in making queer so inclusive, for doing so can, as Halperin notes, occlude the differences between que(e)rulous people, the tensions of taste and politics that drive them apart, while also admitting those who have not experienced the insult or fear of insult that so often marks out the deviant. It lets in the trendy and glamorously unspecied sexual outlaws who [dont have] to do anything icky with their bodies in order to earn the name of queer (Halperin 1995: 65). And it can turn all too quickly from a positionality into another positivity, another identity. It was for this reason that Teresa de Lauretis, having coined the term

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queer theory, abandoned it within a few years. For her it had become a commonplace of the trendy and glamorous, with no power to subvert the dominant codes of heteronormativity. But while queer, conceived as a disruptive force working from within rather than without, has a tendency to congeal, to solidify into a substantive identity, becoming one more character alongside others, it nevertheless has the ability to soften again, ow again, and so once again queer the straight and narrow. Moreover, the termand its deploymentis less well known in theology, and so it is still possible that this positionality, this distancing or divergence from what is held as normative, will serve to destabilize and undo that normativity: the surety of heteropatriarchal Christianity. But in the case of theology there is something more. Halperin describes the aim in deploying queer as ultimately to open a social space for the construction of different identities [from the heteronormative], for the elaboration of various types of relationships, for the development of new cultural forms (Halperin 1995: 67). But this might be as well said of the church, which is called in and by Christ to open up ways of living that will enable us to live in the Kingdom of God when it arrives in its fullness. With Gods reign arriving already in Christ, but not yet fully until the return of Christ, Christians are called to livelike Christas the sign of the Kingdoms arrival. That heteropatriarchy is not such a sign is afrmed by queer theology on the basis of that identity without an essence which it sees in the radical practices of Jesus, in the new social spaces that Christ opens up through his self-gift at the altar, and in the nerve and imagination with which queer Christians persist in their loving of God and neighbour. We know what past Christians looked like, but not future ones, and future ones are what present Christians are called to beharbingers of the Christ who is to come. Thus queer theology is a call to return to a more fully realized anticipation of the Kingdom, which is not a return to the previous or the same, but to the new and the future, since the Church is to be the sign of what is to come. In this way queer is also an undertaking. As with becoming Christian or woman, one is not born but becomes queer; one learns to live as a promise of the future. This is unnerving because one will almost certainly get it wrong, and Christian life is lived under judgment. But we know what it would be to get it right, for it would be to nd ourselves in a world where the beatitudes made sense. There is one other congruity between queer theory and theology that should be noted. As an identity without an essence, queer might be offered as a name for God. For Gods being is indubitable but radically unknowable, and any theology that forgets this is undeniably straight, not queer. One of the rst things that Thomas Aquinas in the Summa

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Theologiae tells us about Godabout our speaking about Godis that we do not know what God is, only what God is not (I.3). Instead of a denition we have to make do with Gods effectsi.e. everything (I.1.7 ad 1). God in Godself is an identity without an essence, or, as Thomas puts it, Gods essencewhich is identical with God (I.3.3)is Gods existence (I.3.4). This makes God pure actuality (without potentiality). The most that we can properly say about God is that God is, which is not a description but a point of theological grammar. In an analogous way we can say that queer is, even if we cannot say in what queer consists other than by pointing to the effects of its deployment.

References
Abelove, Henry 2003 Deep Gossip (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press). Balthasar, Hans Urs von 198291 The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (ed. Joseph Fessio SJ, Brian McNeill CRV and John Riches; 7 vols.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark). 1986 New Elucidations (trans. Mary Theresilde Skerry; San Francisco: Ignatius Press). Burrus, Virginia 2007 Queer Father: Gregory of Nyssa and the Subversion of Identity in Loughlin 2007: 147-62. Eribon, Didier 2004 Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (trans. Michael Lucey; Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Halperin, David 1995 Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press). Hinkle, Christopher 2007 Loves Urgent Longings: St John of the Cross in Loughlin 2007: 188-99. John of the Cross 1991 The Collected Works of St John of the Cross (trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez; Washington, DC: ICS Publications). Jordan, Mark D. 2000 The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Lauretis, Teresa de 1991 Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, differences, 3.2: iii-xviii. Loughlin, Gerard (ed.) 2007 Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (Oxford: Blackwell). Moon, Michael 1998 A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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Muers, Rachel 2007 A Queer Theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar in Loughlin 2007: 200-11. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1990 Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

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