The future church’s vitality will unfold on the other side of deconstructed

colonial, patriarchal, and hetero-normative orthodoxies. Inspired by a Holy

Spirit who is investing Herself in the calling of leaders too long excluded
by those orthodoxies, Queer theologians are finding their voice. They are a
source of new life, relevance and vitality the Spirit will no longer sideline,
and whom the Church now ignores at its own peril. This anthology breathes
air into the lungs of a Church being newly birthed, a Church dependent on
queered assumptions, praxis, liturgy, theology, and ecclesiology: it delivers
on all of that.
—Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer, President and
General Minister, United Church of Christ

The Church was again left behind in society in 2019. The United Methodist
Church voted to uphold its ban on same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy in
February, while Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalize same-sex
marriage in May. Why is God being pitched against sex between two loving
individuals because they are not a man and a woman? This volume weaves
together the most important spiritual and theological resources to decipher
divine justice for our LGBTQ sisters and brothers. It is the most powerful
declaration of God’s love for them as much as their love for God.
—Wong Wai Ching Angela, Vice President for Programs,
United Board, and Honorary Professor, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong

Dive into this cascade of queer theologies with abandon. Appreciate the
variety of starting points, the range of conclusions. Let imagination and the
arts, play and sex instruct the one body we are about our multiple desires.
Then speak of the divine with more insight and of creation with more care.
—Mary E. Hunt, Co-Director, Women’s Alliance
for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER)

This collection of well-written essays on ecclesiology, eschatology,

hagiography, and incarnational theologies demonstrates brilliantly
the editor’s claim that “queer theologies are at their best when they are
directed beyond academic discussion to transformative praxis with the aim
to reveal new economies of grace to queer folks in dis/graceful contexts”
(“Introduction”). These essays offer a wealth of original theological insights
that are at once transgressive, provocative, inclusive, and life-saving. If only
all contemporary Christian theological writing, whether explicitly queer or
not, were this good!
—Bernard Schlager, Associate Professor of Historical and
Cultural Studies, Pacific School of Religion Executive Director,
The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS)
Unlocking Orthodoxies for
Inclusive Theologies

This book enters a new liminal space between the LGBTQ and denominational
Christian communities. It simultaneously explores how those who identify
as queer can find a home in church and how those leading welcoming, or
indeed unwelcoming, congregations can better serve both communities.
The primary argument is that queer inclusion must not merely mean an
assimilation into existing heteronormative respectability and approval.
Chapters are written by a diverse collection of Asian, Latin American,
and US theologians, religious studies scholars, and activists. Each of them
writes from their own social context to address the notion of LGBTQ
alternative orthodoxies and praxes pertaining to God, the saints, failure
of the church, queer eschatologies, and erotic economies. Engaging with
issues that are not only faced by those in the theological academy, but also
by clergy and congregants, the book addresses those impacted by a history
of Christian hostility and violence who have become suspicious of attempts
at “acceptance.” It also sets out an encouragement for queer theologians
and clergy to think deeply about how they form communities where queer
perspectives are proactively included.
This is a forward-looking and positive vision of a more inclusive theology
and ecclesiology. It will, therefore, appeal to scholars of Queer Theology
and Religious Studies as well as practitioners seeking a fresh perspective on
church and the LGBTQ community.

Robert E. Shore-Goss is a retired UCC clergy/theologian. He is the author

of multiple books including, God is Green (2016) and Dead But Not Lost
(2005). He has also co-edited several books such as, Queering Christianity
(2013), The Queer Bible Commentary (2006) and Gay Catholic Priests and
Clerical Sexual Misconduct (2005).

Joseph N. Goh is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Arts

and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. His research interests
include queer and LGBTI studies; human rights and sexual health issues;
diverse theological and religious studies; and qualitative research. He is the
author of Living Out Sexuality and Faith (2018), and co-editor of Queering
Migrations Towards, From, and Beyond Asia (2014).
Gender, Theology and Spirituality
Series editor: Lisa Isherwood
University of Winchester, UK

Searching for the Holy Spirit

Feminist Theology and Traditional Doctrine
Anne Claar Thomasson-Rosingh
God and Difference
The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude
Linn Marie Tonstad
Christian Goddess Spirituality
Enchanting Christianity
Mary Ann Beavis
Schooling Indifference
Reimagining RE in multi-cultural and gendered spaces
John I’Anson and Alison Jasper
Shame, the Church and the Regulation of Female Sexuality
Miryam Clough
Living Out Sexuality and Faith
Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and Bisexual Men
Joseph N. Goh
The Spirituality of Anorexia
A Goddess Feminist Thealogy
Emma White
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm
Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement
Melissa Raphael
Unlocking Orthodoxies for Inclusive Theologies
Queer Alternatives
Edited by Robert E. Shore-Goss and Joseph N. Goh

For more information and a full list of titles in the series, please visit: www.
routledge.com/religion/series/GTS
Unlocking Orthodoxies
for Inclusive Theologies
Queer Alternatives

Edited by Robert E. Shore-Goss

and Joseph N. Goh
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Robert E. Shore-Goss and Joseph
N. Goh; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Robert E. Shore-Goss and Joseph N. Goh to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27741-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29849-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
The editors dedicate this anthology to the late Rev. Dr Yap
Kim Hao, an indefatigable defender of human rights.

Robert E. Shore-Goss dedicates this book to all LGBTQ folks

who have suffered religious abuse; may they realize that they
are beloved children of God.

Joseph N. Goh dedicates this anthology to Robert E. Shore-

Goss, to his family, to the Hallims, to EQARS, to SASS
colleagues, and to the eternal memory of his husband – pas
même la mort ne peut nous séparer, bahkan maut pun tidak
mampu memisahkan kita.
Contents

Contributors xi

Introduction: Angels in human drag:

alternative queer orthodoxies 1
R O B E RT E . S HO RE - GO SS

PART I
Provoking church 25

  1 Toward radical inclusion 27

YA P K I M H A O

  2 Queer church: failure and becoming in the body of Christ 34

S A R A R O S E N AU

 3 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings of divine

lavishness51
J O S E P H N . G OH

PART II
Repainting saints 71

  4 Nahum Zenil: “the Virgin Mary became my mother” 73

J U S TI N S A B I A - TA N IS

  5 Queering ecclesial authority with Mechthild of Magdeburg:

a Roman Catholic perspective 94
A N D Y B U E C H EL
x Contents
PART III
Liberating flesh 113

  6 Discovering the missing body: incarnational inclusivity 115

R O B E RT E . SH O RE - GO SS

  7 Queering violent scenes: a Eucharistic interpretation of BDSM 137

B RYA N M O K A N D P E A RL WO N G

  8 Unfaithful noxious sexuality: body, incarnation, and

ecclesiology in dispute 154
H U G O C Ó R DO VA Q UE RO

 9 Deafinitely different: seeing deafness, Deaf, and

healing in the Bible from Deaf perspectives 174
K R I S TI N E C. ME N E SE S

PART IV
Expanding eschatologies 193

10 Gay eschatology: a postsecular rethinking of Christian and

“Asian Values” metanarratives in Singapore’s contexts 195
A G N E S H A N YIN G O N G

11 Embodied sexual eschatology: escaping the cage and

dreaming a world of desire and longing 215
R E B E C C A V O E L KE L

Afterword: erotic dreams, theology and the

word-(re)made-flesh233
J O S E P H N . GO H

Bibliography 243
Index 263
Contributors

Andy Buechel received a Ph.D. in Theology from Emory University. He is

author of That We Might Become God: The Queerness of Creedal Christi-
anity (2015). Buechel currently teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Hugo Córdova Quero is Associate Professor of Critical Theories and Queer
Theologies and Director of Online Education at Starr King School, Grad-
uate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California. He holds a Ph.D.
in Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion, Migration, and Ethnic Studies
(2009) an M.A. in Systematic Theology and Critical Theories (2003) both
from the GTU; and an M.Div. (1998) from ISEDET University, in Buenos
Aires, Argentina. He is a member of the research groups Emerging Queer
Asian & Pacific Islander Religion Scholars (EQARS), Multidisciplinary
Study Group on Religion and Public Incidence (GEMRIP), and the Queer
Migrations Research Network. He is also a fellow at the Institute for
Theological Partnerships, The University of Winchester (UK); and at the
Institute for the Study of Asian Religions (CERAL), Pontifical University
of São Paulo (Brasil).
Joseph N. Goh is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Arts
and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He holds a Ph.D. in
gender, sexuality, and theology, and his research interests include queer
and LGBTI studies, human rights and sexual health issues, diverse theo-
logical and religious studies, and qualitative research. Goh is the author of
Living Out Sexuality and Faith: Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and
Bisexual Men (2018), and co-editor of Queering Migrations Towards,
From, and Beyond Asia (2014) with Hugo Córdova Quero and Michael
Sepidoza Campos.
Kristine C. Meneses earned her Ph.D. in Theology at the St Vincent School
of Theology, Philippines. She is the current Coordinator of the Ecclesia
of Women in Asia (EWA), and holds membership in the Catholic Bibli-
cal Association of the Philippines (CBAP). She was a research fellow at
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, USA, in summer 2015, and is an
alumna of Bat Kol Institute, Jerusalem, Israel. Her academic interests
xii Contributors
include post-structuralism, scripture, and feminist, queer and Deaf-disability
theology. She has been volunteering as a Sign Language interpreter for
Deaf people for a decade. Meneses’ latest publications are “Creatively
Claiming Her Space for the ‘Other’: A Socio-Rhetorical Analysis and Post-
structuralist Hermeneutics of Matthew 5.39–41,” in The 21st Century
Women Still Claiming Her Space: Asian Feminist Theological Perspectives
(2018) and “Silent and Silenced: Deaf Theology and Spirituality,” in in
God’s image, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2017).
Bryan Mok is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at the Chinese Univer-
sity of Hong Kong.
Agnes Hanying Ong is a writer, an illustrator, and a former restaurant wait-
ress. She completed her undergraduate degree with a double major in
Global Studies and Communication. She is passionate about theopoetics,
queer theology, intersections between queer and autism rights, the inter-
face between film and theology, and medievalism.
Sara Rosenau is a community and spiritual leader, teacher, and writer. She
holds a B.A. from Earlham College, an M.S.W. from University of Denver,
an M.Div. from Iliff School of Theology, and earned a Ph.D. in Theol-
ogy and Women and Gender Studies from Drew University. Her current
research, writing, and professional work focuses on evolving communities
as living systems through wise practices of conversation, discernment, and
presencing. She lives with her family in the beautiful pacific northwest.
Justin Sabia-Tanis earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in
Interdisciplinary Studies in addition to a Th.M. from Harvard University
and a D. Ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary. His career
has included pastoral ministry and communications work for several
national LGBTQ advocacy organizations. In addition to Trans-gendered
Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (2003), which was a final-
ist for a Lambda Literary Award, he is a contributor to the forthcom-
ing Understanding Transgender Identity (2019). He has also contributed
chapters to the Queer Bible Commentary (2006) and Take Back the
Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible (2000).
Rev. Dr. Robert E. Shore-Goss is a retired UCC clergy/theologian. He
received a Th.D. from Harvard University in Comparative Religion with
a specialty in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Christian Theology. Shore-
Goss is the author of God is Green: An Eco-Spirituality of Incarnate
Compassion (2016), co-author of Dead But Not Lost: Grief Narratives
in Religious Traditions (2005); Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus ACTED
UP (2002), and Jesus ACTED UP A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (1993).
He has co-edited, Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at Table for
LGBTQI Christians (2013), The Queer Bible Commentary (2006), Gay
Catholic Priests and Clerical Sexual Misconduct (2005), and Take Back
the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible (2000).
 Contributors  xiii
Rebecca Voelkel is a theologian and ordained UCC clergy activist. She studied
at United Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. Voelkel is the
Director of the Center of Sustainable Justice. She is the author of Carnal
Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the Movement of Justice (2017);
To Do Justice: A Study of Welcoming Congregations (2009), and A Time
to Build Up: An Analysis of the No on Proposition 8 (2009).
Pearl Wong holds a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the Divinity School
of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the
Director of Queer Theology Academy in Hong Kong, which develops
queer theologies and promotes LGBTIQ+ rights in Hong Kong and Asia
through publication and education. As a committee member of the “Cov-
enant of the Rainbow – Towards a Truly Inclusive Church” movement in
Hong Kong, Pearl was also one of the 11 global LGBTI religious leaders
who spoke at the 2017 Ethics of Reciprocity Conference at the United
Nations headquarters, New York.
Yap Kim Hao was the first Asian bishop of the Methodist Church in Sin-
gapore and Malaysia from 1968 to 1973. He stepped down from the
episcopacy to serve as the Secretary General of the Christian Conference
of Asia from 1973 to 1985. In his retirement, he championed many social
justice causes and came to the defense of the marginalized. In July 2003,
he wrote to the forum page of the Straits Times, Singapore’s national
paper, in support of LGBT folks. It was also around this time that Free
Community Church, an inclusive Christian Church in Singapore, was
founded. Some members of Free Community Church reached out to him,
and after meeting him, invited him to be their pastoral advisor. He was a
visionary and prophet who was well ahead of his time. Yap passed away
from heart failure on November 16, 2017, at the age of 88.
Introduction
Angels in human drag: alternative
queer orthodoxies
Robert E. Shore-Goss

In an essay “In Search of Queer Theology Lost,” Mark Jordan argues that
queer theology develops from a curriculum of sexual stigma. He writes, “To
dissent from the societal judgements about what is shameful, filthy, diseased,
or demonic is to yearn for another language, another itinerary of beauties.
Camp is one way to make beauty from what others call ugly, to invent
speech out of curses and spitting.”1 For Jordan, queer theology looks like a
“camp,” a parody that subverts mainstream heterosexist orthodoxies. He
understands the inclusion of parody in queer theology as “the jolt of putting
the stigmatized next to the holy.”2 Ecclesial authority renders queer theolo-
gies as thoroughly deviant, empty of economies of grace – thus, disgraceful.
Jordan picks up the queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, who under-
stands queer theology as “the challenge of a theology where sexuality and
loving relationships are not only important theological issues but experiences
(that) unshape Totalitarian Theology . . . while re-shaping theologians.”3
She asserts that queer theology is “a first-person theology, diasporic, self-
disclosing, autobiographical and responsible for its own words.”4 Althaus-
Reid understands that the queer theologian is a “villain-theologian,” whose
transgressive writing exposes outside the boundary experiences what hetero-
normative theology eliminates from its orthodox praxis. The villainous queer
theologian breaks the silence imposed by orthodox theological praxis but
surfaces human, albeit, excluded diasporic experiences. She writes, “Borders
of thinking are crossed. Body-Borders, God may cross God’s own borders
too.”5 She observes, “Queer theology does theology with impunity.”6 For
her, queer theology stages excluded life experiences, which she variously
describes as “indecent,” “obscene,” and “libertine.” The queer kenosis of
the incarnate God requires a different theological strategy to find the liber-
tine God in outside experience.7 Queer kenosis, for Althaus-Reid, requires a
critical expansion and surprising divine economy to include a nomadic wan-
derlust within the stories of the libertine lives and the excluded experiences
of LGBTQ humanity. She further observes, “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.”8 These dangerous expe-
riences of queer wanderlust make queer people “un-institutionalized, restless
2  Robert E. Shore-Goss
nomads,”9 but it requires the queer theologian to participate in borderland
“wanderlust” of queer people to seek divine “wanderlust.”10 For Althaus-
Reid, queer theology has a transformational praxis:

Indecent Sexual Theologies . . . may be effective as long as they represent

the resurrection of the excessive in our contexts, and a passion for orga-
nizing the lusty transgressions of theological and political thought. The
excessiveness of our hungry lives: our hunger for food, hunger for the
touch of other bodies, for love and for God . . . only in the longing for
a world of economic and sexual justice together, and not subordinated
to one another, can the encounter with the divine take place. But this is
an encounter to be found at the crossroads of desire, when one dares
to leave the ideological order of the heterosexual pervasive normative.
This is an encounter with indecency and with the indecency of God and
Christianity.11

Althaus-Reid understands queer theologies as rebellions of decent theologies

and decent orders, for she focused on the sexual rebels to locate the divine:
“There are many sexual dissenters whose theological community is made of
the gathering of those who go to gay bars with rosaries in their pockets.”12
Finally, Mark Jordan summarizes the links of queer theologies to peda-
gogical instruction. Queer theologies are “scenes of instruction. They teach
not by reciting propositions or propounding rules or even marshalling argu-
ments. They work instead by narrating teaching relations in way that acti-
vate them.”13 But for Jordan, queer theologies are “scenes of instruction,”
and that these theologies are pedagogical or might aptly be described as
“pastoral” because they have a liberative goal of individual and communal
transformation through camp performances and symbolic parody as we find
in Jesus’ parables. But who do queer theologies instruct? I argue that queer
theologies are at their best when they are directed beyond academic discus-
sion to transformative praxis with the aim to reveal new economies of grace
to queer folks in dis/graceful contexts and challenge those church people
who stigmatized them as dis/graceful. Jordan adds a provocative conclusion:

They (theological writings) teach not by reciting propositions or pro-

pounding rules or even marshaling arguments. They work instead by
narrating teaching relations in a way that activates them. That is what I
mean by scenes of instruction. I could just as well as have called theologi-
cal texts drag acts: Theological writing is grace-drag or beatitude-drag
or theosis-drag (theosis, “incarnational divinization”). Theological writ-
ers lip-sync the announcements of angels or the colloquies of heaven in
order to speak as their future selves.”14

I build upon Mark’s metaphorical description of queer theological writing

by describing queer theologians as “angels in fleshly drag.” Jordan’s insight
 Introduction  3
of “theological writers lip-sync the announcement of angels” draws me back
to the angels that appear in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play about
AIDS in 1985–1986.15 In a conversation between Prior, who is living with
AIDS, and Hannah, the Mormon mother of his lover, about angels, she
encourages him to wrestle with the angel. Hannah says, “I believe this. He
(Joseph Smith) had great need of understanding. Our prophet. His desire
made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real.”16 It is not
coincidental that queer theology, and my own, emerges during the traumatic
period of HIV/AIDS where angels were birthed to give hope, and I met a
number of them in ACT UP.
Our queer clergy and queer theologians, for the most part, are frequently
angels in fleshly drag, who have been summoned into existence through the
prayers and dreams of LGBTQ folks. Rev. Miak Siew from the Free Commu-
nity Church in Singapore writes, “queer people present an opportunity for
the Church to ask itself deep questions about its call and role as the Body of
Christ.”17 American theologian Wendy Farley makes a similar observation:

The church requires the voices of those driven away because these are
the ones that Wisdom herself uses: lovers of Christ who were declared
heretics or were burned or consigned to silence, those who are difficult
to find in seminary curriculum, womanist, feminist, queer, activist. They
may not make up the structure of the institutional church, but without
them the body of Christ is hopelessly maimed and dismembered.18

From two differing and interdependent cultural areas, a pastor and a theo-
logian indicate LGBTQ people independently present challenges of inclu-
sion for the churches. Both queer clergy and theologians function as angelic
messengers of truth-speaking and prophets of compassion, heeding Jordan’s
call for queer theology: “The queer theology I await wants to change the
world by reshaping subjects in community.”19 As angelic messengers birthed
from the sufferings, aspirations, prayers, and dreams of LGBTQ folks, all
theological contributors in this volume are “angels in fleshly drag,” with
utopian or heavenly desires to transform themselves and transform their
world and churches into an inclusive, just, and compassionate society for
LGBTQ Christians.

Gospel compassion and inclusivity

In the last decades, there was an interpretative shift in biblical theology
and pastoral practice toward inclusivity based on Jesus’ open commensal-
ity and compassion.20 These impacted many churches struggling with their
failure to deal with gay men with HIV/AIDS and providing little pastoral
accompaniment. Many churches look to Jesus and his practice of hospitality
and the open table. Long before the Last Supper, the eucharist originated in
Jesus’ practice of an open table that indiscriminately invited outsiders. The
4  Robert E. Shore-Goss
synoptic gospels detail the attendance of the disciples, inclusive of male and
female followers of his inner circle. When I was a Jesuit priest, I abandoned
the exclusive Catholic politics of the table, admitting Buddhists, Hindus,
divorced and remarried Catholics, and gay/lesbians to receiving communion.
The eucharist creates church in disobedient inclusion, and inclusive eucharist
envisions an inclusive church.
Jesus practiced compassion as the core of ministry of God’s reign: “Be compas-
sionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6.36). This was central to his ministry.
Marcus Borg writes, “The inclusive vision incarnated in Jesus’ table fellowship
is reflected in the shape of Jesus movement itself. It was an inclusive movement,
negating the boundaries of the purity system. . . . But in a society ordered by a
purity system, the inclusiveness of Jesus’ movement embodied a radically alter-
native social vision.”21 Jesus purposefully rebelled against prejudice and exclu-
sive religious discrimination. Irish theologian and author, Diarmuid O’Murchu
builds upon Borg’s writing about Jesus’ ministry of prophetic compassion:

Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. It embraces and seeks

to bring in all who are marginalized, oppressed, and excluded from
empowering fellowship. It evokes a double response requiring a reawak-
ened heart that knows it cannot withhold the just action that liberates
and empowers. The transformation of the heart which might also be
described as the contemplative gaze, asks us to go where it hurts, to
enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and
anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to
mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compas-
sion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulner-
able, and powerless with the powerless.22

There was a movement in many Protestant mainline churches to develop a

position where all were welcome based on Jesus’ welcome of outsiders.
Lesbian theologian Linn Marie Tonstad compliments O’Murchu’s vision of
Jesus’ ministry of inclusive compassion: “That God stands with the excluded
demands more than agitating for the inclusion of the formerly marginalized.
Christ’s crucifixion outside the camp means that no one is cut off from the
presence of God.”23 She supports open commensality of the communion table
and widely inclusive vision of church. Jesus’ open commensality symbolically
represented a message of unconditional love, compassion, and forgiveness
to the dissolute that no one is excluded.24 At the open table as celebrant, I
pastorally followed Jesus’ example, welcoming to the eucharist table leather
folks, LGBTQ and diverse folks, and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Theo-
logically Jesus’ open commensality led me to move from a ghettoized queer
church to welcome cis-gender and open heterosexuals and affiliate with the
United Church of Christ and its open and affirming movement of LGBTQ
people. An inclusive church includes LGBTQ and heterosexual people at the
eucharist table. Anything less is not church.
 Introduction  5
Many fundamentalist and evangelical churches imitated the inclusive
movement of liberal Christianity to represent themselves. They accepted,
nevertheless, the notion of Jesus’ inclusive ministry as argued by theologian
Miroslav Volf. He characterizes Jesus as no prophet of inclusion:

It would be a mistake . . . to conclude from Jesus’s compassion toward

those who transgressed social boundaries that his mission was merely to
demask the mechanisms that created “sinners” by falsely ascribing sin-
fulness to those who were considered socially unacceptable. He was no
prophet of “inclusion” . . . for whom the chief virtue was acceptance and
the cardinal vice intolerance. Instead, he was a bringer of “grace,” who
not only scandalously included “anyone” in the fellowship of “open
commensality,” but made the “intolerant” demand of repentance and
the “condescending” offer of forgiveness (Mark 1.15, 2.15–17). The
mission of Jesus consisted not simply of renaming the behavior that
was falsely labeled “sinful” but also in remaking the people who have
actually sinned and suffered distortion. The double strategy of renaming
and remaking, rooted in the commitment to both the outcast and the sin-
ner, to the victim and the perpetrator, is the proper background against
which an adequate notion of sin as exclusion can emerge.25

Now this argument of Volf turns Jesus as a prophet of inclusion into a

prophet of exclusion. This remaking transforms the inclusive invitation into
a conditional acceptance through an economy of heteronormative grace.
Many homophobic clergy of such welcoming churches have used Volf’s
notion of “remaking” invited people to reject same-sex marriage and trans-
gender self-presentations, thus conforming to heteronormative grace. Many
churches offer deceptive invitations of inclusion that actually require exclu-
sive conformity to divine mandated heteronormativity. Progressive theolo-
gian Joerg Rieger comments on such deceptive and false inclusion:

We are a radically inclusive church: everyone who walks through the

door is welcome. Indeed, those who submit to the community (symbol-
ized by walking through a very specific door) and thus promise not to
create trouble are always welcome.26

I have heard the stories of numerous trans women who were welcomed but
instructed that they had to dress at church conforming to the gender of their
birth.
Jesus’ ministry of compassion shatters boundaries of religious stigma and
ostracism. It is a genuine ministry of radical compassion and unconditional
acceptance. Richard Rohr captures Jesus’ practice of inclusion: “The only
people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know
they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was
exclusion itself.”27 Likewise, Indonesian clergy Rev. Stephen Suleeman of the
6  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Jakarta Theological Seminary, who while in seminary in Chicago took a class
on Urban Ministry and was personally transformed, writes,

I was impressed when I met two pastors who did their ministry there,
trying to befriend LGBT people without condemning them, but instead
showing love and understanding to them. I thought the church there
really was doing the right thing.28

Suleeman has subsequently created an inclusive ministry and outreach to

LGBTQ folks in Jakarta, Indonesia: “I believe that Jesus whom I know is
the Jesus who embraced everyone.”29 Here Suleeman imitates the radical
inclusive love practiced at Jesus’ open table.
Many Christian clergy and laity in many denominations have moved to
practicing an open inclusion table, welcoming LGBTQ Christians. This
evolved into the development of open and affirming movements in several
mainline Protestant denominations, now admitting and recognizing their
families, ordaining, and marrying LGBTQ folks. LGBTQ folks have made
some political strides, but they are still at risk with authoritarian regimes –
transgender folks targeted by the current president in the US, Russia and
Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. Pauline Ong
speaks for many at risk and in danger non-normative peoples, “it is impos-
sible to remain silent because lives are at stake [and] silence perpetuates the
environment of fear within our faith communities.”30
Can we speak the truth about how the history of and current hostile
climate of Christian churches resulted in spiritual trauma or PTSD (Post-
traumatic Stress Disorder) of many LGBTQ folks?31 Many non-normative
peoples have been traumatized while others are justly angered at church and
naturally distrust God. Perhaps queer clergy and theologians have a peculiar
overlapping space of walking a tightrope between two historically antago-
nistic parties. They are called prophetically to be in compassionate solidarity
with “divine lavishness” with sexual outsiders as Joseph N. Goh argues, or
divine kenosis and incarnation among sexual/gender dissenters as described
by Marcella Althaus-Reid. They name the queer presence of the queer God,
the queer incarnate Christ, and the queer Spirit with queer outsiders.
Is the mission of queer clergy and theologians to reconcile LGBTQ folks
to churches or help churches to include LGBTQ faith seekers? Often queer
clergy and theologians feel the distrust of both churches and queer communi-
ties. They occupy a difficult middle space of angels in human drag between
both distrustful parties. There is currently a movement of inclusion away
from ghetto churches for hybrid or inclusive churches for queer and non-
queer folks at the table. Frequently, through their training, queer clergy are
more equipped pastorally than theologians to deal with the pain and trauma
of LGBTQ people abused by the church.
Queer theologians have a responsibility to listen, engage the queer dias-
pora of libertine desires, and remain in solidarity with those seeking the
 Introduction  7
divine nomadic wanderlust in unlikely spaces. Or do queer theologians assist
LGBTQ people to discover incarnational grace in themselves and in the
midst of their communities? They unmask the queer God’s presence in out-
sider embodied vulnerabilities and love which are “participatory and thus
incarnative of God’s extravagant and revolutionary love.”32 Many queer
theologians speak from their own experience of trauma and emotional
pain of stigma and discrimination. Many LGBTQ theologians like LGBTQ
clergy speak their queer truth more cogently by retrieving queer and inclu-
sive resources in Christian theological traditions and uncovering past queer
voices. In other words, they may pave the way for queer clergy to welcome
and create safe church space.
Queer theologians and clergy both prophetically disturb and challenge
religious orthodoxies to include alternative queer experiences and folks
into church space. However, serving as a queer pastor/theologian, I found
inclusion an unsteady path because one is dealing with the creation of safe
space for one group with the history of ecclesial abuse while simultane-
ously dealing with some people uncomfortable with what they describe as
a “queer agenda.” It requires listening, mediating, and providing safe space
and mutual accompaniment to all parties.
Many open and inclusive churches have an unspoken script of “antici-
pated gratitude” for no longer harming but accepting LGBTQ folks into
their churches. Rev. Jake Joseph, a United Church of Christ gay clergy,
addresses this issue and the queer right to distrust God in “An Open Letter
to the UCC: The LGBTQ Right to Distrust God Reflection”:

In order to be theologically healthy and authentic as an Open and

Affirming Movement, we need to first affirm the following difficult real-
ity: The LGBTQ community does not owe the United Church of Christ
anything in return for its theologically driven move towards inclusion –
even if that has meant great sacrifices. We are delighted to be included in
pews, pulpits, pastorates, and pensions, but the wider LGBTQ family’s
hurt and continued endangerment (especially with the current political
winds) is greater than anything the UCC alone can heal, apologize for,
or save us from. Additionally, LGBTQ spiritual gifts, theology, and radi-
cally unique perspective on liberation didn’t end with marriage equality.
Marriage Equality is not synonymous with LGBTQ Liberation. There
is so much more wisdom capacity and value yet untapped by the UCC
from our diverse queer perspectives and fabulous presence.33

This reflection circulated widely among clergy and religious leaders of Prot-
estant denominations on Facebook, and Rev. Jake Joseph’s insights star-
tled many people in welcoming and open congregations by the claim that
LGBTQ folks do not owe “thank you(s)” to progressive churches because
they no longer harm but welcome them. It may take generations to address
wounds of queer trauma, re-build trust, and create healing communities of
8  Robert E. Shore-Goss
reconciliation by narrating our faith stories in unimagined locales and non-
heteronormative spaces.
On the other hand, engaging heterosexual and welcoming Christians,
we discover that many heterosexual Christians, likewise, are victims of
a patriarchal and colonizing heteronormativity. For instance, I partici-
pated in a small bible group of the church. It was filled with wonderful
heterosexual Christians, predominantly retired clergy and their spouses.
I openly represented a queer voice, that was accepted. As we engaged
one another, we found common ground in struggles, oppressive gender
systems, and shared concerns. We created a hybrid church with partial
queer and non-queer space, a promising start in inclusivity. This gives us
“angelic” hope that we can create an open table and welcoming space
for all.
Wendy Farley eloquently expresses the need for an open table and open
church to gather those driven away:

The witness of the great diversity of Christ’s lovers is of an entirely

different order than some tepid obligation to be inclusive. The church
requires the voices of those driven away because these are the ones that
Wisdom herself uses: lovers of Christ who were declared heretics or
were burned or consigned to silence, those who are difficult to find in
seminary curriculum, womanist, feminist, queer, activist. They may not
make up the structure of the institutional church, but without them the
body of Christ is hopelessly maimed and dismembered.34

Farley cites a quote from Gregory of Nyssa, “It is through Christ’s own
flesh that the ‘other’ is my sister, my brother; indeed the ‘other’ is me. . . .
The establishment of the Church is re-creation of the world. But it is only
in the union of all particular members that the beauty of Christ’s body is
complete.”35 Many of the contributors accept the hospitality of Jesus’ open
table, and that table is large to seat us all if we listen and learn from each,
celebrating our differences but recognizing simultaneously that we share a
common table and experience of a welcoming God.

“Alternative orthodoxies”
A few years ago, Joseph N. Goh and I began conversations about the Fran-
ciscan practice of “alternative orthodoxy.” As openly gay theologians/clergy
from different cultural settings, we found ourselves involved in Christian min-
istries as well as academic theological research, teaching, and writing: Goh in
Malaysia and myself in the United States. However, we share a background
from the Roman Catholic Church and found personal and theological value
in Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan notion of an alternative orthodoxy.
“Alternative orthodoxy” is a Franciscan notion, arguing that more important
than orthodoxy is an orthopraxy that stresses praxis over doctrine.
 Introduction  9
The Franciscans found innovative strategy to be both traditional and revo-
lutionary. This strategy quietly pays attention to practices that were generally
ignored such as poverty, humility, nature, other creatures, and incarnation
rather than atonement. It gave priority to practice over orthodoxy, or often
raising up heterodoxy by living into the praxis. Alternative orthodoxy is a
minority perspective, is living simultaneously into a tradition with a majority
orthodoxy and living into outsider or queer space. It is an attempt to engage
church traditions and practices while being attentive to queer diasporic
experience excluded or marginalized. It is a method of bringing together
the traditional with the revolutionary. Franciscan Richard Rohr provides a
description of the tension included, “Being a prophet demands two seem-
ingly opposites: radical traditionalism and shocking iconoclasm at the same
time.”36 A prophet lives on the edge with an alternative critique of society.
This critical alternative of “radical traditionalism and shocking iconoclasm”
correlates with the work of queer theologians while queer clergy and Francis-
cans such as Richard Rohr are frequently under the pressures of “breaking
the rules properly within the church.” It is a hybrid position of being both
“insider” and “outsider,” orthodox and heretic. Prophets, across Jewish and
Christian histories, provided critical alternative visions by living into those
social alternatives. Nevertheless, queer theologians, with tenure protections,
may often jolt or transgress traditions with queer camp and queer libertine
experience, with less consequences than queer clergy.
Alternative orthodoxy is a practiced spirituality and exploration of alter-
natives or praxis of seeing differently. Philosopher John Caputo observes,
“We are always, constantly haunted by the memory of Jesus, by the unnerv-
ing prospect that one day Jesus will drop by unannounced.”37 This is the
deconstructive dream of Jesus’ ministry and praxis of God’s reign. For Rohr,
it involves “an inner and outer freedom by structurally living on the edge of
the inside of the church and society.”38 The Franciscan stress is on action,
practice, and lifestyle of Jesus (and followed by Francis of Assisi) as foun-
dational for spirituality. It leads to personal transformation, or as Richard
Rohr describes it, “That humans tend to live themselves into a new way of
thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.”39 Introducing
deconstructive dreams or alternatives into “inside” traditions reframe those
traditions creatively into new possibilities and expansions of Christian praxis.
Queer theologies have used various theological strategies in the form of
transgression and dissidence (Mark D. Jordan, Robert E. Shore-Goss, Mar-
cella Althaus-Reid, Lisa Isherwood, Gabriela González Ortuño), eliding dual-
isms through radical love (Patrick S. Cheng); affirming inclusive hybridity,
intersectionality, and liminality (Patrick S. Cheng, Justin Sabia-Tanis, Susan-
nah Cornwall, Nicolas Panotto, Rose Wu, Adriaan van Klinken, Michael
Sepidoza Campos), radical excavation (Gerard Loughlin, Elizabeth Leung,
Jill Cox, Lai-shan Yip), radical inclusivity (Michael Bernard Kelly, Joseph N.
Goh, Chris Greenough) or making theologically indecent, obscene, and per-
verted transgressions (Marcella Althaus-Reid, Robyn Henderson Espinoza).
10  Robert E. Shore-Goss
These queer theologies are alternative orthodoxies or subversive strategies
that engage Christian traditions and resources to make them less restrictive,
exclusive, and harmful to queer folks.
Joseph N. Goh observes:

What I really enjoy about this piece is Rohr’s statement that one “can
only unlock systems from the inside.” This resonates with what I’m
doing some of my work, i.e. using Roman Catholic theological thought
to queer Roman Catholic disapprobations of homosexuality. In addition
to eliding binaries, producing liminalities and inducing perversions by
looking to tensions between radical traditionalism and shocking icono-
clasm, I think it is important to include antagonistic outsiders within
the conversation, to “befriend the enemy,” so to speak. I would like to
add a dimension of radical befriending and listening to the list. Rohr’s
“holding the tension of opposites” by being “on the edge of the inside”
in order to “unlock systems from the inside” can never work unless there
is radical befriending and listening on both sides.40

Goh suggests a subversive theological strategy of unlocking systems from

within that is comparable to Patrick Cheng’s “dissolving binaries” or “radi-
cal love.” Goh’s comment on “holding the tension of opposites” and by
being “on the edge of the inside” to unlock systems from within is the
language of eliding boundaries or deconstructing barriers, but he notes that
these can never happen unless there is a “radical befriending and listening
on both sides.”41 It is radical inclusion that simultaneously dreams and
deconstructs.
I concentrate on a theological strategy of radical inclusion based on Jesus’
practice of radical inclusive love.42 I use the word “queer” as a verb, meaning
“to spoil or interfere with.” When you spoil or interfere with an exclusive
orthodoxy and its practices, you create inclusion of the outsider or queer
experience into the mix. Radical inclusion is ultimately transgressive, for it
simultaneously returns to the story of Jesus as a “dangerous memory” for
queer liberative practice and a contemplative appropriation of the dangerous
memories of the gospel stories and the resurrection (a thoroughly “queer”
and apophatic event). Johann Baptiste Metz’s notion of the “dangerous
memories”43 of Jesus’ ministry of radical inclusion and compassionate care,
his execution by the Roman Empire, and God’s resurrection of Jesus exem-
plifies queer theology as transformational practice.
There was no question that Jesus was a rule breaker as any ACT UP
member or queer activist, with impunity and compassion. The Holy Spirit is
a mischief-maker, who colors outside the lines of orthodoxies. Jesus and the
Spirit as boundary breakers have inspired and created insurgent movements
in liberation and queer theologies. Queer theologies seek the kenotic pres-
ence of the queer God incarnated in Jesus the Christ and ensouled in queer
space, the deviant, the poor and the marginalized, and the vulnerable Earth.
 Introduction  11
Writing queer theology has a shocking jolt because it united the stigmatized
with the divine.

Inclusivity: “unlocking systems from within”

This volume carries on the genre of queer theological anthologies, a queer
potpourri of geographically diverse voices from Southeast and East Asia,
Hispanic, and US white cultural elements that continue to shift and change.
What the contributors share in common is a history of struggle with a white,
supremacist Christianity that colonized each of the geographic areas with a
narrow, heteronormative economy of God’s grace. Queer theology is not sin-
gular but pluralistic; the acronym LGBTQ necessarily looks to plurality with
numerous shades, tonalities, and variants.44 Thus, an anthology represents
an assemblage of queer voices with differing shades, tonalities, and variants.
It points to the divine excess beyond particular queer theologies that remain
partial (and of course, tentative) and evolutionary in their inclusions and
representations of divine incarnations. Queer theologies are hybrid, postco-
lonial, intersectional, ecological, political, and inclusive of mixed identities
and multiple religious participations. At the heart of queer theologies is the
creative tension between divine apophasis and incarnational liminality that
incites “divine undoing” and excites queer passions and desires in what
Catherine Keller describes as “intercarnations, naked resistance, life beyond
the bounds, the entangled flesh of a new assemblage.”45 The queer God is
apophatic and is yet exponentially located in the multiplicities of fleshly
incarnations and intercarnations in economies of dis/grace.
God is “queer” just as the term “queer” does not have a fixed identity. God
and “queerness” do not delineate anything substantial but fluid positionality
vis-à-vis the “normative.”46 This leads Gerard Loughlin to the conclusion
that God and queer “are indefinable, a relational positionality that we can
only point to the effects of the deployment.”47 Queer theological anthologies
just accentuate their assemblage of diversity and discover the inexhaustible
mystery of the interrelated God, who always exceeds and resists the limits
of human theological narratives and explanations. The Queer God stretches
Christ’s incarnation into polymorphous incarnations and intercarnations
into human and non-human media. Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-
Reid writes, “That God is in flesh changes everything. . . . Incarnation will
not be thus confined. It throws down a challenge to imprisoned and impris-
oning theology.”48 The word became flesh and pitched a tent into a fleshly
world, and that tent is mobile often picked up and pitched anew into what I
call “dis/graceful economies,” coined from Althaus-Reid’s words.49
Queer theologies are, likewise, transformational, whether addressing
themselves, unchurched queer folks, church, or the academy. As transfor-
mational praxis, they use the methods of contextual and liberative theolo-
gies to explore the intersectional roots of oppression and marginalization.
Queer theologies insert a strategy of radical inclusion that disrupt exclusive
12  Robert E. Shore-Goss
theologies and elide dualistic boundaries – deployed for sustaining bio-power
while challenging ecclesial control. The queer God dissolves boundaries
through radical love. Patrick S. Cheng writes:

God functions in the same way as LGBT people with respect to radi-
cal love. To the extent that LGBT people break down boundaries of
sexuality and gender in our relationships, both God and LGBT people
send forth a radical love that breaks down fixed categories and bound-
aries. For God, these categories include the divine and human, and life
and death. For LGBT people, these categories include the categories of
female and male, and homosexual and heterosexual.50

Cheng, as many queer theologians here, writes and thus understands that
the queer God is incarnated in the inclusive loving, the interrelatedness of
queer people and non-queer people, relationality without boundary fixity.
Let’s examine this queer potpourri.

Provoking church
The first contribution is the keynote address, “Toward Radical Inclusion,”
of the then retired Bishop Yap Kim Hao of Singapore and Malaysia, to the
Conference renew at the Free Community Church (2014). In 1968, Yap Kim
Hao was consecrated the first Asian Bishop of Singapore and Malaysia in
the Methodist Church. He became a “Pastor of the Marginalized,” a hetero-
sexual ally, arguably the first religious leader to speak against the political
mistreatment of LGBTQ peoples in his country. His views were repudiated
by the Methodist bishop who succeeded him in office. Bishop Yao passed at
the age of 88 in 2017. Bishop Yap’s words for LGBTQ inclusion are more
urgent at a time when the United Methodist Church worldwide voted in a
contentious church meeting to continue its opposition against same-sex mar-
riage and ordination of gay and lesbian ordination. Many LGBTQ Method-
ists and their allies have been deeply pained over the decision, and the table
of the church has been closed.
His address lays out what an inclusive church might look like. These
involved: inclusivity of members, lesbian inclusion on an equal basis, inclu-
sivity of the heterosexual community, helping LGBTQ folks reconcile their
sexuality to their faith, and finally an inclusive theology. He remarks, “We
are familiar with the Buddhist emphasis on compassion and doing no harm.
I recall the question of doing good and the way in which Micah answers: ‘He
[sic] has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require
of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your
God (Micah 6.8).’”51 Bishop dreamed of and invited the church to move to
inclusive practice and inclusive theology.
There is no question for LGBTQ believers, who grew up in churches before
their sexual orientation and/or gender identity underwent transition, that the
 Introduction  13
church was a stumbling block. Churches failed at inclusion and chose a man-
agement strategy of excluding those who do not fit into their heteronorma-
tive agenda. They stopped being vehicles of grace! Here in this section are
two authors who examine the failure of the church to heed Christ’s call to
companionship with the marginal. In the next two chapters, we discuss the
experience of queer failure at church and the church’s failure to recognize
God’s presence in queer lives.
In “Queer Church: Failure and Becoming in the Body of Christ,” Sara
Rosenau argues that the church failed spectacularly with queer people.
Rosenau develops Judith Halberstam’s notion that queer folks have failed
at gender conformity and opposite sex-attraction, and patriarchal families.52
Queer failure differs from heteronormative failure because it includes resis-
tance as well as imagines alternatives to heteronormative failures. Queer eccle-
siology recognizes the queer failure of the church to its LGBTQ people as its
foundation. Queer failure for ecclesiology invites “a transformed understand-
ing of sin, returning the church to humility.”53 Queer failure affirms that all
Christians have failed in sinning, and it raises the question of the church in
recognizing the universality of sin. Queer failure unmasks the failure of church.
To queer the church’s failure includes the realization that the church needs
the help of queer people to become church. Being undone by queer life, the
church is now poised to learn from the practices of queer Christians, prac-
tices of vulnerability and interdependence. In this way, queer Christians act
as a leaven, helping the whole church rise (Matthew 13.33). What emerges
from the church’s queer failures is a deeper understanding of its own vulner-
ability and need, and ultimately of its permeability to the world. Church and
world intermingle, and the incarnation of God is found queerly in-between.
As a leaven, queer Christians remind the church of the parable of the Good
Samaritan and the bleeding queer on the road to Jericho.
Joseph N. Goh, in his contribution “Songsang, Confessions, and The-
ologizings of Divine Lavishness,” explores how four gay men found divine
lavishness in personal spiritualities, sometimes having a foot in the church
and foot outside the church. He notes that the Federation of Asian Bish-
ops’ Conferences has made significant impact on the development of Asian
Catholic spirituality and growth by linking theology to lived Asian experi-
ences but at the same they overlook, dismiss, and exclude the lived experi-
ences of non-heteronormative Asians. Goh unpacks divine lavishness in the
sexual lives and stories of four Malaysian songsang (culturally equivalent to
queer without political agency) men: Henri, Freddie, Buck, and Hosea. Like
Marcella Althaus-Reid, who finds divine incarnation in the indecent sexual
lives of non-heteronormative folks, Goh expresses divine lavishness in their
lives. Goh writes:

this divine lavishness is encountered in their experiences of a Creator

God who purposefully and lovingly creates gay men. In this regard, God
is also the Instructor and Generous Provider who pours out wonderful
14  Robert E. Shore-Goss
teachings and gifts to all people, including gay men. God is the Plenti-
tude of At-Homeness, or the One whose comforting presence is learned
from and experienced in the lives of (other) gay men who embody
self-confidence.54

Goh argues that locating spiritual agency is found in stories of the lives of
queer men, and Christian leaders have failed to listen and thus discover God’s
economy of grace in the lives of songsang men. The witness of queer outsid-
ers is absolutely needed by the church to overcome its queerphobia and to
become a site of the liberating love of Christ, just as the witness of the church
is crucial for queer folks to overcome ecclesiophobia and Christianophobia.

Repainting saints
Roman Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson speaks of saints as
“friends of God,” for she refuses to divide the church into saints and non-
saints. The communion of saints is not an apartheid concept of separat-
ing people, but one that reconnects saints with living people to empower
them. Saints have inspired and impacted people’s lives. Johnson writes, “The
point is that corporately, inclusively, without discrimination, the whole liv-
ing church is a communion of saints.”55 Here we speak about holiness of
people in ordinary life, and the communion of saints graciously exemplify
and empower holiness in ordinary life. Here also we find an appropriation
of saints to impact queer lives. This section introduces two Catholic forms
of appropriating a relation with saints that promote queer resistance and
empowered religious faith.
The first is Justin Sabia-Tanis’ chapter “Nahum Zenil: ‘The Virgin Mary
Became My Mother’” that presents a unique strategy that impacted Zenil’s
life as a gay man and his art. Originally, the Virgin appeared to the indig-
enous Mexican peasant Juan Diego at the shrine of Aztec goddess Tonantzin,
“Our Revered Mother.” Our Lady of Guadalupe was used to further the col-
onization and assimilation of indigenous peoples into the Catholic Church.
As a youth, Nahum envisioned the Virgin Mary and Jesus as members of
his family, thus creating a “holy family.” He yoked his Catholic traditional
piety and devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in such a radical way that
juxtaposed his gay life and lifestyle and consequently found acceptance from
the Virgin as his own mother. Nahum Zenil experienced an abiding presence
Our Lady of Guadalupe and her passionate care for all Mexicans. It included
all Mexicans, including gay Mexicans like himself.
The Virgin of Guadalupe becomes a force of undermining Catholic ortho-
doxy on homosexuality for Zenil. Nahum includes his own self-portraits
to integrate his sexuality with his spiritual devotion. Sabia-Tanis writes,
“Through his self-portraits, he depicts a wide range of theological images,
connecting both radical sexuality and traditional iconography, and chal-
lenging cultural and religious homophobia.”56 One of his unique paintings
 Introduction  15
is the Virgin appearing to Zenil and a male lover in adjoining beds with
approval. Another is the Virgin’s blessing of their marriage. Traditional
Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe radically undermines Spanish
Catholic morality. This essay reminds us of the colonial Spanish conquest of
indigenous peoples. The vivid wood block print is of an incidence of Vasco
Nunez de Balboa as he crossed Panama; he set his fierce dogs upon two-
spirited indigenous people and killed them. Now Zenil Nahum comprehends
his gay sexuality as natural, joyful, and religiously sanctioned by the Virgin
and subverting colonial Spanish Catholicism.
Andy Buechel turns his attention to Mechthild of Magdeburg in “Queer-
ing Ecclesial Authority with Mechthild of Magdeburg: A Roman Catholic
Perspective,” to explore how he might queer the response to Catholic author-
ity today. Mechthild was a member of the Beguines, a medieval lay religious
counter-movement of women who lived voluntary poverty, chastity, prayer,
and care for the poor. The Beguines did not hide away in monastic enclosures
as religious women but lived in a liminal space as unmarried women among
the poor. Mechthild queered the boundaries of traditional women, either
nuns or married women, and were committed to a life of celibate religious
service to the poor. She risked ecclesial attention and sanction in her writings
to describe erotic longings between herself and God and within images of
female homoeroticism.
Mechthild understood God’s power as “formation, maintenance, and
consummation of intimacy.”57 She recognized the Church’s authority but
relativized that authority when it failed to be living up to appropriate use of
power. Andy Buechel applies Mechthild’s response to authority to unpack
Pope Francis’s ambivalent statements in his letter Amoris Laetitia (Joyfulness
of Love) that full inclusion of LGBTQ is harmful to society while he affirms
that LGBTQ people are loved by God and made in God’s image. Buechel
finds the dualism disappointing if not harmful to LGBT people. He affirms
Mechthild’s “example of finding, supporting, and accepting the authority
of those figures who are supportive and life-affirming.”58 Buechel recom-
mends that queer Catholics seek out supportive and life-affirming figures
of authority on the local level to live lives of loyal resistance and challenge.
His “queer loyal resistance” resides in the hope that the supportive ecclesial
leaders will recognize that LGBTQ folks reflect the divine image and live in
loving relationships. This will provide the leaven for the transformation of
the Roman Catholic Church.

Liberating flesh
Marcella Althaus-Reid asks a poignant question for the essays in this section:
“Is Fetishism an obscene trace of Christianity then?”59 Fetishism is frequently
associated with an inanimate object or particular body part, usually separate
but not exclusively from the genitals. Roman Catholic spirituality, along with
many of the world’s spiritualities, uses bodily fetishes to express ritually an erotic
16  Robert E. Shore-Goss
spirituality or emotional satisfaction. Ascetical practices – bodily disciplines from
floggings and bondage to the discipline of bodily practices of yogic meditation –
can be construed as fetishes. Nietzsche says that the saint “takes pleasure in the
wild uprising of his desires.”60 Carmen MacKendrick aptly observes:

Religious asceticism sacrifices and sanctifies the body, whether or not it

is “spiritual” – and so too do the erotic pleasures of pain and restraint,
spiritual or not. The search for the ecstatic and the sacred takes place
in the body.61

Christianity has made a central claim that God entered the human world
of bodies in the person of Jesus. Yet Christianity has been historically disin-
carnational, despising non-compliant bodies in preference to “white, male”
heteronormative bodies. The following essays look at a variety of fetishes
that are considered obscene but have been reimagined as queer ascetical
practices, navigating charts of incarnational grace.
I explore an ascension theology in my essay, “Discovering the Missing
Body: Incarnational Inclusivity.” God’s incarnation endangers the church
because it cannot be confined to itself. In the Ascension, the body of the risen
Christ disappears from the sight of the disciples. However, with Pentecost,
the bestowal of the Spirit, the church has claimed authority to recognize and
confine incarnational presence of the risen Christ within its structure, liturgy,
word, prayer, and leadership. Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright, along with les-
bian theologian, Linn Marie Tonstad, observes that the risen Christ’s body
has disappeared in the clouds at the Ascension. There are very queer incar-
national consequences for the missing body of the risen Christ. By confining
incarnational presence, the church has promoted unjust incarnation by con-
fining it to heteronormative economy and colonizing non-normative bodies.
The Ascended Christ results in a promiscuous multiplication and expan-
sion of incarnational presence into indecent embodiments. I suggest that
the Stonewall Rebellion became the Queer Pentecost, unleashing theatrical
embodiments through drag, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Drag
King Christ in John’s Gospel, and artistic media of gay stations of the cross
of Delmas Howe and Douglas Blanchard and the performative of Terence
McNally’s play Corpus Christi. I focus on Blanchard’s Ascension Station
where the risen Jesus, bare-chested, is embraced by a winged angelic hunk,
is kissed, and Jesus swoons in his arms. Both the winged angelic figure and
the ascending Jesus share crucified arm wounds. Symbolically, the ascended
Jesus unites with the wounded queer body of Christ.
Corpus Christi became a designated mission of mine church in North
Hollywood, California. I describe the cast as a postmodern church carry-
ing the emotional and passionate play for eight years in churches, theaters,
winning awards at the Edinburgh and Dublin Fringe Festivals, and brought
back to Broadway. The play often brought audiences to tears, and they, in
turn, found grace in their own sexual lives. The cast produced a documentary
 Introduction  17
of their experience in finding faith, “Playing with Redemption,” now on
Netflix. They became queer church. Embracing an ascension theology recog-
nizes that Christ’s incarnation is embodied in queer bodies and the theatrical
performances. The Ascended Christ is promiscuously found everywhere in
fleshly bodies, even dis/graced and non-normative bodies.
In “Queering Violent Scenes: A Eucharistic Interpretation of BDSM,”
Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong explore BDSM as a theater or ritual of trans-
formation, noting the possibilities of transformation and healing through
reenactments of some violent or miserable scenes. The authors interview
Avem Tenjou Rika (a pseudonym) who is a shibari model, an ancient form
of Japanese rope bondage. They report from conversations that she experi-
ences not arousal but a tranquility, a meditative state that I have witnessed
among practitioners of bondage scenes. For Rika, shibari is a form of medi-
tation that remains sexual and erotic in which she has learned much about
herself as well as her relationship to others. After reviewing modern Chris-
tian explorations of BDSM in the theologies of Kent Brintnall, Lea Brown,
and Nicholas Laccetti, Mok and Wong shift the discussion of BDSM to the
eucharist, a ritual enactment of the cross. The eucharist represents an eating
of the body and drinking the blood of Christ, in which “this anamnesis of
the death of Jesus Christ directs people to a brutal and sanguinary event.”62
The eucharist does not just repeat the violent death of Christ but transgresses
the ritual boundaries into a sacrament of grace.
Mok and Wong argue that an eucharistic interpretation is an appropriately
queer interpretation of BDSM. Both are analogously rituals of potential grace
and divine presence. As a chaplain to the Los Angeles leather community, I
have witnessed and interviewed folks and friends involved in BDSM, who
lost a self-centeredness and liberated into a sublation into divine presence.
Both the rituals of BDSM and eucharist “have symbolically queered violent
scenes so that these scenes can be transformed into healing and liberating
grace.” The authors offer a convincing and persuasive argument to open
Christians to read BDSM through the lens of eucharist, but also it allows
BDSM practitioners to understand that their rituals may share the trajectory
of grace and liberation of eucharist.
Hugo Córdova Quero uses Marcella Althaus-Reid’s deployments of the
economy of dis/grace in the sexual stories of the poor to mediate between
the contributions of Mok and Wong with Shore-Goss in sexual stories. Cór-
dova claims that most churches perceive bodies as dangerous, indecent, and
uncontrollable, for they legislate which bodies are deemed holy enough for
salvation. He follows Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology to uncover the rela-
tionship between sexuality, bodies, and incarnation through an exploration
of the film La Mala Educación. The film denounces what Marcella and queer
theologians denounce, that:

traditional Christianity has denied the body by viewing it as the locus of

per/version, and that vision has split humanity into selves and bodies.
18  Robert E. Shore-Goss
While selves are to be saved, bodies are to be punished . . . Unfortu-
nately, this divide facilitates the overuse of power on those who are more
vulnerable, lower in the chains of institutional power and control.63
La Mala Educación in its complicated interactions between institutional reli-
gion represented by nuns and priests and children’s sexuality is encapsulated
when the nun tells Soledad, “It is not God who rejects you; it is I in the name
of my order.”64 Thus, Córdova Quero underscores that Christ’s incarnation
came outside of heterosexual grace to restore justice by restoring context
and bodies to disrupt the hetero-patriarchal matrix and cries out for libera-
tion of queer bodies and genders. Hugo Córdova Quero affirms in the last
sentence of his essay: “Queer theologies and theologians are midwives in the
unfolding new life of the creation. Our bodies are the locus for that marvel-
ous cosmic process.”65
In “Deafinitely Different: Seeing Deafness, Deaf and Healing the Bible
from Deaf Perspectives,” Kristine C. Meneses intends to insert the Deaf
into biblical stories to challenge the closeted normative reading of dis-
ability and, in particular, Deafness in scripture. Meneses argues that the
word became flesh differently in the gifted language of the deaf. God is
enfleshed in the embodied communication of the Deaf. She claims, “To
(en)force normalcy onto the disabled is to disregard their uniqueness. Con-
sequently, we fail to recognize other dimensions of their personhood –
their disablehood.”66 In certain parts of Asia, Deaf narratives are ignored
because deafness is understood as a curse, thus made invisible. Deafness
is stigmatized. Meneses dismantles the frequent coupling of queer theolo-
gies with deafness. There are a number of queer Deaf people, who suffer
double stigmatization.
Meneses presents the principles of Deafness created by the Deaf com-
munity. The first is, “Deaf Communities possess the gift of languages so
special that they can be used to say things which speech cannot.” 67 Mene-
ses queers the reading of Mark 7.31–37 not as the healing of the deaf man
but that of Jesus and the community around who learn the language of
the deaf man. This chapter needs to read with David Abram, The Spell of
the Sensuous, who speaks about the somatic basis of language.68 Earlier
human language is connected to the natural world with “synaesthesia,”
an ability to participate in and communicate reality through the inter-
penetration of other sense experiences. Deaf language is an embodied
language that harnesses other senses in communication that hearing folks
have lost as they moved away from immersion in the more than human
world connections. Communication is embodied physically in sign and
gestures; language is seen. Other sensory perceptions are at work in deaf
communication. The affirmation, “the word became flesh and pitched
a tent among us” (John 1.14) becomes queerly opened in a new fleshly
encounter.
 Introduction  19
“Expanding,” resistant eschatologies
Jesus’ practice of God’s reign had conflated the present with future anticipa-
tions of God’s presence breaking “into our midst.” His notion of this immi-
nent eschatology contained God’s dream for us. This is what was preached
by and practiced in his open table and healing of outsiders. Both essays share
experiences of the colonizing legacies of white supremacist Christianities but
struggle in different cultural contexts to create free queer space for God’s
flourishing presence.
In “Gay Eschatology: A Postsecular Rethinking of Christian and ‘Asian
Values’ Metanarratives in Singapore’s Contexts,” Agnes Hanying Ong writes
in the spirit of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s diasporic, indecent theology against
heteronormative Argentina Christianity. Frankly, Ong’s description of the
fusion of Pentecostal Christianity with Neo-Confucian values reminded me
of the current American cultural milieu of the fusion of white nationalism
and Evangelical Christianity. My skin was crawling at such homophobic
rendering of Christianity.
The LGBTQIA+ agenda threatens with a doomsday, apocalyptic perspective
the Neo-Confucian and Pentecostal Christian citizenship in Singapore. Queer
represents the otherness of apocalyptic evil, luring heterosexuals to become the
evil other. The AntiChrist and fundamentalist eschatology is conflated in a cul-
tural synthesis of the pro-national, Singapore Christian and Neo-Confucian fam-
ily values, termed as Asian Family Values. Ong notes, “The formerly colonized
becomes luxuriantly self-colonizing; the oppressor’s values become rationalized
and internalized moral beacons of the oppressed, eventuating in neo-colonial
violence.”69 The Christian agenda has attempted to duplicate heaven as a safe
place from “otherness.” She articulates that Singapore Christianity has a “post-
lapsarian nostalgia, that excludes diverse embodyings and all non-normative
gendered and/or sex bodies.”70 Such an apocalyptic dualism compels a bodily
deference to a sacred heterosexism that will be raised up in the eschaton while
queer rebellious bodies are destined to a “totalizing destruction of God in the
event of eschatological genocide.”71 Ong argues that an undermining of such
a heteronormative eschatology is a key strategy for claiming the dignity of
LGBTQIA+ persons and diminishing Christian, nationalistic, homophobia.
Rebecca Voelkel’s “Embodied Sexual Eschatology: Escaping the Cage and
Dreaming a World of Desire and Longing” is paired with Agnes Hanying
Ong’s. It is a good intertextual read about culturally competing persecuting
and LBGTQ affirming eschatologies. They have a similar goal of raising
oppressed desires and bodies that have been caged by colonizing systems.
Voelkel rehearses the destructive colonization of the US by Europeans who
fused white supremacy and Christian supremacy in the Doctrine of Discov-
ery into colonial conquest. She notes that such a Christianity was predicated
on a particular embodiment, sexuality, and gender. All deviants beware!
Voelkel identifies herself as “a ‘bad’ white, Christian woman”.72 She was
20  Robert E. Shore-Goss
a rebel against the caged categories of a Christianity of the Doctrine of
Discovery. She declares her preamble to her own Declaration of Indepen-
dence that weaves “sexual, spiritual, and justice-seeking”73 eschatology. She
writes, “any eschatological visioning needs to root itself in the blessing of
sacred longing, desire, connection and communion that resists the cage of
interlocking forces of colonization.”74 Queer eschatological dreaming is dif-
ficult, but she claims,

creativity and dreaming are particular charisms of queerness. . . . This

makes queering theology delicious. Queering theology demands of us a
big enough vision to heal bodies, reclaim sacredness/fabulousness, bust
binaries, embody resilience and resistance, and kindle-into-a-dancing-
fire a hope which is strong enough to inspire. All of this is delicious.

Amen to queer resistance to Christian supremacy!

Toward a greater inclusive church

So what is the reader to make of this curious potpourri? Is this anything more
than a series of educated essays that yet rehearses a demand to be heard and
taken seriously in a heteronormative theological world? While there is a risk
that this collection will end up being just that, or little more than yet-another-
queer-theology volume, Goh and I are hopeful that the insights from this
anthology will bridge the divide between academia and action, and propel
the reader into deeper consideration of theological action.
I had expressed earlier that queer theologies attain greater potential when
they leave the halls of academia, and are deployed for the empowerment and
transformation of those long dis/graced. Goh suspects that certain forms of
queer theology – especially, the radical transgressive ones that evoke embar-
rassment and unease among the respectful and decent – may continue to be
held in suspicion and disdain as the pathetic attempts of a select few who
clamor for ecclesial acceptance and approval. It is possible that we as LGBTQ
people in “articulating the meaning and purpose of Christian faith drawn
from our own peculiar experiences, sensibilities, and relationships”75 may
never meet the standards of those who have already decided that we may
never leave the confines of invalidity. Those who do so are not merely the
proponents of heteronormative and cisgender religiosity. They also include
LGBTQ Christians who have appropriated (and wish to preserve) a sense of
“heteronormativity and respectability” in Christianity.
Nevertheless, just as Goh and I agree with Rev. Jake Joseph that LGBTQ
people need never be beholden to churches that have become affirming and
supportive (as they really ought to be), we are not looking to convince, per-
suade, or impress any Christian community or theological circle. Neither
are we engaging in self-gratifying theological thrill-seeking. What we offer
in these pages are continuing conversations. The titles of the sections in this
 Introduction  21
anthology are deliberately verbed as a reflection of our desire for the works
of the contributors to stimulate independent, active contemplation, on the
part of the reader, which may eventually foster contemplative action among
individuals and communities toward greater radical inclusivity.
We are thus hopeful that queer theological actions may evolve into newer
forms that prophetically allow for alternative orthodoxies as a way of think-
ing and acting. In this manner, queer theologies do not only depart from
safe but hidden confines of the theological academe. They assume greater
efficaciousness for queer clergy and queer persons in ministry and life. They
attain a level of democratization and turn into “spaces of the Spirit, in which
the Holy One is incarnated in discourses of human vulnerability.”76

Notes
  1 Mark D. Jordan, “In Search of Queer Theology Lost,” in Sexual Disorienta-
tions: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent L. Britnall, Joseph A.
Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University, 2018), 7689.
  2 Ibid., 7849.
  3 Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8.
 4 Ibid.
  5 Ibid., 50.
 6 Ibid.
  7 Ibid., 38.
  8 Ibid., 8.
  9 Ibid., 49.
10 Ibid.
11 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gen-
der and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 200.
12 Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 2.
13 Jordan, “In Search of Queer Theology Lost,” 7860. See also Jordan, “Missing
Scenes,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 38, no. 3–4 (2010): 58–67.
14 Ibid., 7860.
15 Tony Kushner, Angels in America is broken down into two parts: Millennium
Approaches and Perestroika (New York: Theater Communications Group,
2014). There has a been 2018 revival of the play on Broadway.
16 Kushner, Perestroika, 4.6, 19. 18–19, ibid.
17 Miak Siew, “Learning to Be Queer: Questions the Church Should Be Asking,” in
God’s image 34, no. 2 (2015): 65.
18 Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Lou-
isville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 5.
19 Jordan, “In Search of Queer Theology Lost,” 7768.
20 For instance, the works of J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a
Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991);
Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) and Jesus A New
Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (San Francisco, CA: Harper
& Row, 1987).
21 Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco, CA: Harp-
erColllins, 2009), 1346.
22 Diarmuid O’Murchu, Inclusivity: A Gospel Mandate (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Press, 2015), 618.
22  Robert E. Shore-Goss
23 Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Trans-
formation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2015), 276.
24 O’Murchu, Inclusivity, 1157–406. His whole book argues for radical inclusivity.
25 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,
Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 72–3.
26 Joerg Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary
Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 37.
27 Richard Rohr, “The Unnamable One,” Center for Action and Contemplation,
February 14, 2019, https://cac.org/the-unnamable-one-2019-12-14/.
28 “Activist of the Week: Stephen Suleeman (Indonesia),” Being LGBT in Asia, July
10, 2013, https://beinglgbtinasia.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/64/.
29 Quoted in Joseph N. Goh, “Practical Guidelines for SOGIESC Theologising in
Southeast Asia: Foregrounding Gender Nonconformity, Sexual Diversity and
Non-Dyadic Embodiment,” in Siapakah Sesamaku? Pergumulan Teologi dengan
Isu-Isu Keadilan Gender (Jakarta, Indonesia: Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Theologi
Jakarta, 2019), 185. See also Greg Carey, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Fol-
lowers (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 30–6 and Patrick S. Cheng,
Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Press,
2011), x.
30 Pauline Ong, “Towards a Responsible and Life-Giving Ministry with and among
Sexual and Minorities,” in A Theological Reader on Human Sexuality and Gen-
der Diversities, ed. R. Gaiwad and T. Nainan (New Delhi and Nagpur, India:
ISPCK/NCCI, 2017), 343.
31 Serene Jones, Trauma + Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville, KY:
John Knox Westminster Press, 2009), 3–22. For religious/spiritual trauma, see
Dalene Fuller Rogers, Pastoral Care for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Healing
the Shattered Soul (New York: Routledge, 2002), 31–42.
32 Joseph N. Goh, Living Out Sexuality and Faith: Body Admissions of Malaysian
Gay and Bisexual Men (London: Routledge, 2018), 89; original emphasis.
33 Jake Joseph, “An Open Letter to the UCC: The LGBTQ Right to Distrust God
Reflection,” Plymouth Staff Reflection, June 5, 2018, https://us10.campaign-
archive.com/?u=41554bb1f38e3437f605e9439&id=af68a84deb, author’s bold
print.
34 Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Lou-
isville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 5.
35 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, 1.
36 Richard Rohr, “Prophets: Self Critical Thinking: Who Would Want to Be a
Prophet?,” Center for Action and Contemplation (blog), February 19, 2015,
para. 2, https://cac.org/who-would-want-to-be-a-prophet-2015-02-19/.
37 John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmod-
ernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 31.
38 Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Cincin-
nati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2016), 33.
39 Ibid., 84.
40 Originally, the prospectus to contributors from Robert E. Shore-Goss and Joseph
N. Goh, “Unlocking Theological Systems from the Inside,” author’s bold print.
41 Cheng, Radical Love, 6–11, 36–8, 47–8.
42 O’Murchu, Inclusivity, 1157–407.
43 Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Fundamental Practi-
cal Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980), 111.
44 Robert Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus ACTED UP (Cleveland, OH: Pil-
grim Press, 2002), 253.
45 Catherine Keller, “Response: To Mark Jordan’s ‘In Search of Queer Theology
Lost,’” in Sexual Disorientations, 7997.
 Introduction  23
46 David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 62.
47 Gerard Loughlin, “Introduction: The End of Sex,” in Queer Theology: Rethink-
ing the Western Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 10.
48 Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Queering Theology,” in The Sexual
Theologian: Essays on Sex, God, and Politics, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and
Lisa Isherwood (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 7–8.
49 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Hard Core Queer: The Church of Dis/Grace (Paper read
at the Queering the Church conference, Boston, MA: Boston University School
of Theology, 2007).
50 Cheng, Radical Love, 31.
51 Page 32 of this volume.
52 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press), 2009.
53 Page 44 of this volume.
54 Page 64 of this volume.
55 Elizabeth A. Johnson, “A Community of Holy People in Sacred World: Rethink-
ing the Communion of the Saints,” New Theology Review 12, no. 2 (1999): 6.
56 Page 73 of this volume.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1956), 142.
61 Carmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1999), 157. See
her discussion on asceticism and sadomasochism, 65–6.
62 Page 145 of this volume.
63 Page 162 of this volume.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Page 176 of this volume.
67 Ibid.
68 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More
Than Human World (New York: Vintage Books), 1996.
69 Page 204 of this volume.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Page 221 of this volume.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Jay Emerson Johnson, Peculiar Faith: Queer Theology for Christian Witness
(New York: Seabury Press, 2014), 3.
76 Donald E. Messer and Joseph N. Goh, “Locating the Face of God: Practical
Theological Reflections on LGBTQ People and Churches,” in God’s image, 36,
no. 2 (2017): 23.
Part I

Provoking church
1 Toward radical inclusion
Yap Kim Hao

Let me preface my keynote address on the Conference theme “reNEW” this

morning with expressing my amazement with what Free Community Church
(FCC) in Singapore has thus far accomplished in this comparatively short
space of time, going on to only ten years. We started from Ground Zero and
now we have purchased this space as sacred ground for our congregation.
About six years ago Rev. Miak Siew responded to the challenge and accepted
the calling to be the pastor. He left his comfortable job, sold his apartment,
completed his theological training, received his ordination and returned to
serve as the first and only fully ordained, full-time, openly gay pastor, thus
making history. I have a great appreciation of FCC under his leadership.
It is with reluctance that I appear before you and especially in the presence
of two distinguished leaders of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) movement from the United States. But Miak insisted and he is hard
to resist. I am but an accidental activist in the LGBT community here. As an
outsider who was privileged to be around from the inception of Free Com-
munity Church, Miak felt that my observations and insights are of some
value for the life of this Church and its future in Singapore. Let me take you
on my personal journey with FCC.
Allow me first to share a little bit about my early background. I was
baptized as a Christian when I finished my secondary school education in a
Methodist Mission school. The missionary pastor, Ralph Kesselring, was a
graduate from the liberal Garrett Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.
I find it strange that the one sermon that was etched in my mind is his ser-
mon on Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an
ever flowing stream” (Amos 5.24). A colleague later presented me with his
Chinese calligraphy work of that Biblical verse. What was stranger is that
when the daughter of this missionary was rummaging through his archives,
she found the original sermon with his hand-written notations. She made
a copy and sent it to me. That was the theological foundation brick that I
built upon subsequently in Boston University School of Theology, and which
developed into progressive and queer theologies.
I began my ministry serving in three local churches. In 1961, I was
appointed pastor of the Kuala Lumpur Wesley Methodist Church with the
28  Yap Kim Hao
tag line: “Witnessing for Christ in the Heart of the Nation’s Capital.” In
the congregation were Cabinet Ministers of the government. In 1968, at the
age of 39, I was elected the first Asian Bishop of The Methodist Church in
Malaysia and Singapore. I resigned in 1972, as I was drafted to serve for the
next 12 years as the General Secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia, a
regional ecumenical organization of all the mainline churches and National
Council of Churches in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand. After
retirement and before I had time to smell the roses, I found myself in the
“gay scene,” which was only ten years ago.
In 2003, the Prime Minister of Singapore made a public announcement
through the influential international Time magazine that although homo-
sexual acts remained illegal in Singapore, his government would not dis-
criminate against gays for employment in the civil service. In opposition, the
National Council of Churches of Singapore immediately declared that homo-
sexuality is a sin. A few years prior to these events, some gay Christians had
been meeting secretly as Safehaven, the precursor of FCC. I was not aware
of its existence. In the course of my ministry I had personal encounters with
only one gay person who came out to me. Gays were tightly closeted then.
The question of homosexuality was settled in the churches. With my passion
for social justice, I wrote a letter to the local press in support of this new
government policy. Immediately the leadership of Safehaven contacted me,
and without any hesitation I volunteered to support them in their struggle,
and journeyed with them.
My address will explore the nature of the ministry and mission of the
Church with reference to FCC, and I will explicate my understanding of the
principle of inclusivity. What is the shape of a truly inclusive Singaporean
Church that I project?

1  The inclusivity of membership

The religious affiliation of most of the LGBT people who formed FCC was
from the conservative and charismatic churches that were more openly
homophobic than the mainline churches. For a long time, churches were
silent on this issue and LGBT people were isolated and stayed closeted. Open
public condemnation came mainly from conservative pulpits. Known gays
who were serving in such churches were rejected and expelled.
As soon as FCC was established, we were sinned against by being the tar-
get of anti-gay attacks. Yet, the only real difference that FCC makes in rela-
tionship to all other churches is that LGBT people are welcomed and fully
accepted. We flash our Welcome Home sign prominently, and even composed
an original song called “Welcome.” We recite the mantra of welcoming all
regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status.
However, the culture of FCC is for the most part charismatic, with its
emphasis on praise and worship and personal salvation. We are able to attract
members who were rejected by their former churches which disapprove of
 Toward radical inclusion  29
homosexual relations. They find acceptance and feel at home at FCC. Slowly
but surely, there is a quiet reconciliation of their faith with their sexuality in
spite of their baggage of conservative theology.
I have watched transformations taking place before my eyes. “J” is one of
those who initially appeared as sheepish, but eventually became a confident
leader. She wore a baseball cap to hide herself and avoid relating to others. I
intentionally reached out to her. Today she is a church leader and regularly
preaches the sermon, and many times preaches a better one than I do. But
I must also admit that after a few years not a small number do not find it
meaningful to remain as part of the congregation. We do have a wide open
door to welcome them, but unfortunately as wide a back door for them to
depart. For a number of years we stayed at the plateau of around one hun-
dred attendees at our Sunday services. More than half of the present con-
gregation were not with us when we began. Each Sunday we have a number
of first-time visitors. It has therefore a fluid membership and a transient one
without long-term commitment. Critically we may say we are more like a
hotel/hospital than a home.
I must also recognize that a much larger number of LGBT and other out-
siders appreciate what we are doing, but do not feel compelled to take an
active part in the daily life of FCC.

2  Inclusivity must include lesbians on an equal basis

Safehaven and subsequently FCC was initiated by a small number of gays.
It was later when FCC was organized that lesbians came to their worship
services. Lesbians feel the male domination and I hear the terms “patri-
archal” and “misogynist” being tossed around. Cells or support groups
along gender lines exist and only one support group has mixed gender
representation. Incidentally, we have now structured our toilets to be uni-
sex, or toilets that transcend strict gender categories. It is helpful espe-
cially to the transgender people. Last month we held our annual Women’s
Event planned by an all-women group with the deliberate exclusion of the
males. Our lesbian pastor Pauline Ong reported that of late, more and
more women find a sense of belonging and involvement in our church. She
was encouraged by the changing attitude of the men of FCC. The women
were so touched when they received an anonymous donation from one of
the guys for the women’s event because he wanted them to “have better
food or flowers or whatever we needed to make this event special.” What
a sweet and loving gesture!
FCC is overcoming this gender divide and the lesbians are well on par-
ity with the gays. It is not just a sexual orientation issue that we have to
address but a gender issue as well, and allied with it is the ministry to the
transgender people. We had sessions to acquaint the gays and lesbians with
the issue of the transgender people. A few transgender people attend our
services regularly.
30  Yap Kim Hao
3  Inclusivity includes the straight community
From the very beginning FCC did not want to be labelled a gay Church,
and it tries to welcome straight people, but not always successfully. The
culture is still predominantly that of LGBT people. When I started to
stand in solidarity with the people in FCC there were some straight people
who came to visit; some out of curiosity and some with sincere interest to
find a congregation which is different from their own. They too did not
discover what they needed. Only a few remain to lend their support to
the LGBT cause.
What the Church must realize is that there are others out there who have
questions with the prevailing forms of church life. Whether it is a funda-
mentalist, evangelical, conservative or mainline church, there is a growing
disenchantment with established religious institutions. Many are looking for
alternatives and not all of them are secular or atheists. Of late we have in
Singapore a fairly active Humanist Society.
Those who have chosen to belong to no religion have risen from
14.3 percent in 1900 to 17.0 percent in 2010. The Christian population
increased from 12.7 percent to 18.3 percent in the same period. I suspect
there is a majority of people in our country who are spiritual but not reli-
gious. Traditional religious beliefs do not “sell,” and that is a world-wide
phenomenon.
In the United States, the 2012 survey by the Pew Religion and Public Life
Project reported that nearly a fifth of those who were polled said that they
were not religiously affiliated. Nearly 37 percent of that group said they were
“spiritual” but not “religious,” 37 percent of all Americans, a bigger group
than atheists, and way bigger than Jews, Muslims or Episcopalians.
This rising phenomenon views “religious” as associated with the public
realm of membership in religious institutions, participation in formal rituals,
and adherence to official religious doctrines. And “spiritual” is regarded as
associated with the private realm of religious thought and experience. This
affects the status of religion in our multi-religious society in Singapore.
As much as our conservative Christians hold on to the supremacy of Chris-
tianity and the hope of converting all people to Christ with the belief that
Christ is the only way to salvation, they are not reaping the wishful harvests
of their evangelistic efforts. This is true also for those in the other traditional
faith communities. Many are abandoning their ties to their faith communi-
ties. Being a secular state, Singapore has pushed religion to the margins yet
looks toward faith communities to support government policies and prevent
religious conflicts.
I sense that there is an increasing number of people, especially the young,
who are spiritual but not religious. They gather around issues that affect the
lives of the people. Faith communities for the most part are only engaged in
welfare services, and are unwilling to take the important advocacy role to
remove the root causes of social problems.
 Toward radical inclusion  31
With this religious and cultural backdrop, what then is the ministry of the
Church like FCC? We should try to be inclusive where everyone, including
heterosexuals feel welcomed and ministered to.

4  Moving on beyond ministry, we must engage in mission

There is always a continuing work of helping the LGBT to reconcile their
Christian faith to their sexuality. We will be deemed exclusive if we are only
doing this essential and important mission.
When we look at the LGBT community outside of FCC, we tend not to
get a sense of our responsibility as wounded people who have been healed
to become healers to those who are still struggling with their sexuality in
Christian and other faith communities. Yes, we welcome them but we have
not been able to reach out to them sufficiently to assist them with their prob-
lems. We may have been too used to living in isolation and nursing our own
hurts that we do not feel the need to help even the members of the LGBT
community at large.
In moving here to One Commonwealth, Singapore, we are intentionally
going to be involved in the mission project called “Dirty Hands.” We have
already connected with the aged poor, the mentally challenged and migrant
workers. This effort will have to escalate, in order that we may participate
in the advocacy work of those who are concerned with human rights, LGBT
rights, and the rights of women, sex workers, and migrant workers. Dirty
Hands symbolizes our right hand in mission and our left hand in advocacy.
We want to be part of the movement to empower the marginalized to secure
equality and justice. We are called to engage in what Lynette Chua, a Sin-
gaporean law professor and activist, refers to as “pragmatic resistance” to
achieve visibility and support of LGBT people, tackle political and cultural
norms that suppress dissent, and oppose discriminatory practices.
How inclusive are we if we do not include all these in our mission agenda?
We must resist the temptation to be exclusive and stay within the walls of this
sacred sanctuary, dark and cave-like. We have to part the curtains, raise the
shades, and see out of our windows the world outside groaning in travail,
and challenge the Church to transform our community to be more loving
and caring for one another. We cannot view religion exclusively as a private
matter or as personal salvation. By the same token we cannot be exclusively
involved only in the transformation of society and changing social values.
We strive to be inclusive in terms of personal and social salvation.

5 Finally, inclusivity involves theology and more

importantly how we shape it
As a Church committed to the way of Jesus, we have to explore our theo-
logical foundations. We are all in our respective theological journeys. Do
we just pass by one another in the dark? We have to unload our theological
32  Yap Kim Hao
baggage, and undergo the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. We
often hear the word “contextualization” in the theological arena, which is
relevant to our time and situation. Do we recognize that theology from the
Biblical times is always time-bound, historically based culturally conditioned
and socially constructed?
Our praise and worship should be inclusive too of traditional and con-
temporary music. Worship is more than the segment of praise songs at a
service. A progressive musician has proclaimed that “the varieties of reli-
gious experience call forth hymns and songs, emerging from the varieties
of cultures, personality types, and religious expressions. Our worship and
song should reflect this diversity. We join in sacred worship traditional and
contemporary, North American and African, and European and Asian. We
chant hymns from Taize and melodies from Iona, and dance to ‘Siyahamba’
(We are marching in the light of God), sometimes in the same service.” In
the words of an old hymn, “New occasions teach new duties/Time makes
ancient truth uncouth/They must upward still and onward/Who would keep
abreast with truth.”
We cannot stay in the safety of our shores, but have to launch out into the
deep to cast our nets on the other side. The theological task is a continuous
one and a lifelong process. We are to be in the mode of praxis, as that is
the application and practice of what we believe in and confess. Only then
can we expect to come closer to the truth. There will be differences in our
theologies. Inclusivity does not mean that we merely tolerate the differences
and hold tightly to our own. We must not close the door to other schools of
theology. We have to be open, and interact and learn from one another. We
cannot own an exclusive unchanging theology and discount other theologi-
cal explorations.
We dare not submit ourselves literally to the mantra “the Bible tells me
so.” We must not lean on another jingle that says “the Bible says it, I believe
in it and that settles it.” We have to take seriously different interpretations
of the same Biblical passages and continually evaluate them. We have to
continue to discover what we have in terms of common understanding and
commitment. The theological journey can never end, and we can only ever
claim tentative truths that are relevant to a particular moment in time.
We are familiar with the Buddhist emphasis on compassion and doing
no harm. I recall the question of doing good and the way in which Micah
answers: “He [sic] has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does
the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your God” (Micah 6.8).
In moving here, the premises of FCC bear a postal address with the word
“Commonwealth.” This is an old English word. “Weal,” translated as
“wealth,” is about the well-being of a sound, healthy or prosperous state.
This is what I call the common good. I am reminded of Jeremiah calling the
faithful to seek the welfare of the city, for in its welfare one can find one’s
welfare (Jeremiah 29.7). Then the Epistle of Barnabas exhorts us, “Do not
 Toward radical inclusion  33
live entirely isolated lives, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were
already (fully) justified, but gather instead to seek together the common
good” (Epistle of Barnabas 4.10).
Here at FCC@One Commonwealth, we are constantly reminded of com-
monweal, or the common welfare, or the common good. This is the unceas-
ing challenge we face. As long as the majority of the LGBT community
outside has not embraced FCC, we need to examine our work. As long as
LGBT people come and stay for only a while, or come and go, we have to
review our congregational life. As long as other people within their faith
communities and beyond are not attracted to FCC, we have to evaluate
our performance. We must labor with them and envision the shaping of
the human community with love and compassion, peace and justice. In our
respective contexts, we have to be honest and bold enough to admit that we
have not responded fully to the challenge. Let us not make a mockery of our
own form of inclusivity.
Do we recognize that we are no different from other churches except for
our acceptance of the issue of homosexuality? There is a belief that over the
course of time, more of our mainline churches, like in the United States, will
be gay-affirming and reconciling congregations. We look to the day when
homosexuality is no longer an issue in all our churches.
People out there are still spiritual but not religious. People in our faith
communities are searching for alternatives. FCC is poised to be authentically
inclusive in its church life, and faithful in its ministry and mission to God’s
people. All our congregations must be geared into innovative and experimen-
tal modes, and ready to make the paradigm shift. Otherwise, we will wither
away while hanging on to our traditional ways.
As we gather here for the Amplify Conference, the time has come for us
to recognize, examine, evaluate, and explore what we are doing as churches
that now primarily serve the LGBT community. Each one of us comes from
a unique context, and this fact has to be taken into account more seriously in
order to enable the Church to flourish fruitfully. This is the challenge that we
all face individually and collectively to renew, enhance, and fulfil the ministry
and mission of a truly inclusive Church.
As I end, let me catch my breath. The present has been the must fulfilling
and satisfying time in my ministry in the past ten years. I pledge to stand in
solidarity with, and to stay alongside you. I look with anticipation to the
future, and in the words of the New England poet Robert Frost:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And
miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

Amen! Amen! Amen!

2 Queer church
Failure and becoming in the body
of Christ
Sara Rosenau

I explore a queer ecclesiology, focusing less on what bodies do with each

other sexually and more on how we are one body together. As anticipated
in 1 Corinthians, this queer ecclesiology asks how church can be both one
body and a multitude of members. How does our understanding of the body
as a whole function to include some members and exclude others? This work
theorizes the one body because of, and not despite, continued discernment,
dialogue, and disagreements. I seek an ecclesiology that does not focus on
one right way to think about church but rather breaks open the concept of
church to find more imaginative and playful ways for the church to continue
to become.1
To queer ecclesiology is also to offer a queer church. In other words,
“queer does not have a relation of exteriority to that with which it comes
into contact.”2 Rather, to queer ecclesiology is to find what is queer in church,
specifically queer Christians, in order to point toward what church is and
what it might become. That is, how we understand church, how church is
thought, is transformed by queer experience in church and by the practices
of queer life. Embodied queer life has already been disruptive to the ecclesial
body, a disruption that has the potential to transform social norms of self
and community. Thus, I explore three queer practices to uncover the deeper
meaning of what queer lives offer the church. These include graceful recogni-
tion, prophetic performativity, and faithful failure. Queer Christians invite
the practices of recognition as a way for Christians to practice God’s grace
with one another. The performative presence of queer Christians disrupts the
heteronormative logic of sameness as a unifying principal in understanding
community. Queer failure invites church to divest from success in order to be
faithful to its own becoming. By faithfulness I refer to a reorientation of com-
munal life toward an incomprehensible but present God. In becoming plastic
again, the body engages in communal discernment about who churches are
and who they can become.
Together, these transformative practices open a fresh possibility for
becoming the body of Christ. I consider the question of how the gift of
God’s grace is exchanged among Christians and how do Christians, in their
differences, craft a life together as the body of Christ? I utilize Kathryn
 Queer church  35
Tanner’s ecclesiology of plasticity where humanity is shaped and transformed
in the image of God.3 I pair this with queer theory, connecting Judith Butler’s
theory of the becoming subject with how Christian selves are formed and
transformed together through baptismal vows.4 Further, Butler’s performa-
tivity combined with Sara Ahmed’s queer orientation interrupts the norm of
community as a unified whole, specifically as Christians gather in the practice
of communion.5 Both the practices of baptism and communion are woven
together with stories from the everyday lives of queer Christians in church.6
Last, I suggest the practice of queer failure as a form a resistance against
norms of success. If the body of Christ is always in the process of becoming,
this invites church to continually repent of modes of perfection that stifle
humility. The practice of queer failure returns churches to the Protestant
confession of “reformed always reforming” and reminds church of the call to
become plastic again in relationship to its neighbors, orienting toward those
it has othered.7 Queer failure as a practice also connects back to ecclesial
politics. In a post-Christian context, church can become the body of Christ
by reorienting toward Christ, which is to also be oriented toward “the great
diversity of Christ’s lovers,”8 including queer Christians. Through these three
practices of graceful recognition, prophetic performativity and faithful fail-
ure, the church witnesses to God’s faithfulness in completing the good work
that was started in us as church, the body of Christ.9

Graceful recognition
The queer practice of recognition in community helps articulate an ecclesiol-
ogy where the church is faithful to changing and becoming in and through
relational exchanges between people. I describe graceful recognition as a
process of communal relationality whereby the community recognizes oth-
ers both within and outside their community by holding open an account of
the other, thus extending God’s gift of grace to the other. But the opposite is
also true, the other holds open an account of the community, and the com-
munity is transformed by this gift of grace. I use the example of the practice
of Baptism as a practice transformed by graceful recognition understood as
faithfulness to the promises and potentiality of God’s grace active in com-
munal becoming.
Butler’s ecstatic subjectivity draws on and reformulates Hegel’s descrip-
tion of the moment of recognition that forms the subject. Following Hegel,
Butler describes the self as constituted outside of itself, through relation to
others.10 In this ecstatic subjectivity the self relies on the other because it
is dependent on the other for its constitution. For Butler, the self does not
belong to itself; in fact it remains in a kind of self-unknowing, because it is
in part constituted by what it cannot know.11 The self realizes this radical
dependency in the act of recognition where it is exposed to its own opacity,
a sense of being other to oneself.12 Butler calls this the “ontological primacy
of relationality itself.”13
36  Sara Rosenau
There is a parallel to Butler’s ecstatic self in Kathryn Tanner’s ecclesiology
of plasticity. In Tanner’s work, God is the giver of all that we have, God is
overflowing with gifts and the world is created, exists, and continues because
of God’s giving.14 Humanity is ecstatically oriented toward God, receiving
God’s gift through participation in Christ. This participation is made pos-
sible by the plasticity of human nature, a plasticity that mirrors God’s own
incomprehensibility.15 Thus, becoming more like God is to become plastic
again, shaped in God’s own image.16 Tanner’s plasticity of individuals is
repeated in her ecclesiology. The mission of the church is to both receive the
gifts of God, and give them away.17 However, no one practice or set of prac-
tices defines Christian community. Rather, community is constantly being
formed and reformed through the “messy, ambiguous, and porous character
of the effort to live Christianly.”18
Butler’s relational self helps to nuance how the ecstatic moment of recog-
nition is dependent on community. First, there is a self-awareness that takes
place at the moment of recognition when the self realizes “the fact that we
cannot exist without addressing the other and without being addressed by
the other.”19 Second, the moment of awareness of my fundamental “social-
ity” also brings with it an awareness of my opacity to myself. The exchange
of recognition reveals to me not only that I cannot go back to the self I was
prior to the exchange but, more fundamentally, that I never was an indepen-
dent “I” to begin with. Butler writes, “What is recognized about a self in the
course of this exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying
inside itself proves impossible.”20 Butler claims that it is “precisely my own
opacity to myself [which] occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of
recognition on others.”21
For Butler the opacity of the self protects the exchange of recognition
from appropriation.22 This is true in part because the exchange of recogni-
tion between self and other is not enclosed in a dyadic relation but, rather,
is dependent on norms. “The social dimension of normativity precedes and
conditions any dyadic exchange.”23 The classic example of gender helps to
explain this relationship. If I understand myself as a woman it is, in part,
because others have ‘recognized’ me as a woman for my entire life. To under-
stand myself as a woman I am dependent upon others’ recognition of me as
a woman. However, everyone, myself as well as others who recognize me,
utilize the norms of gender that inform and determine the norm of “woman”
prior to my being recognized as such. Therefore, the “I” does not offer rec-
ognition to the other from its “private resources” but from the norms that
are socially available.24 The self becomes aware of its own opacity in the
exchange of recognition. This opacity of the self is also related to the excess
of the self. Butler explains this by way of narrative. Because I am constituted
by others and by norms, which proceed me, I can never say everything that
I am in my self-narrative. Further, I cannot explain or narrate my life fully
because the discourse, the words I use to narrate, are not my life. My life
goes on even as I narrate and I am unable to fully capture it.25
 Queer church  37
Queer people know well the communal dynamic of recognition described
by Butler. Many queer people can reference an experience of being able to
recognize themselves when they were recognized by the queer community.
This moment of recognition points to one’s opacity to oneself in that it
reveals one’s dependence on communal recognition to make one’s life “liv-
able.”26 This is especially poignant because queer people exist in a heteronor-
mative society where the livability of queer people is not always recognized.
An example of this surfaced after the Pulse Nightclub massacre of 49 queer
people of color in June 2016. In grief, solidarity, and resistance, queer people
began to share online their first experiences of going to gay bars and clubs.
The stories revealed vulnerable moments of how the self becomes in and
through community. Carrie Brownstein speaks about discovering what kind
of other selves are possible in a lesbian club. “Only away from the glare of
homophobia could we experience malleability, a flexing of the self, a full
rotation. Who knew there were 360 degrees?”27 Brownstein’s flexible self,
known in community, connects with Tanner’s movement of the self becoming
plastic. As Brownstein describes, when queer individuals are first seen by the
queer community they become recognizable to themselves, or they recognize
the possibilities of what they might become.
The point of becoming “away from the glare of homophobia” highlights
the difficulty of recognition when it pushes against social norms, as a lesbian
request for recognition does. Here, Sara Ahmed’s point is helpful as she
describes becoming a lesbian as a process of “becoming reoriented,” turn-
ing away from a compulsory heterosexuality.28 Becoming reoriented is also
to be disoriented in one’s self and with the world as it was before.29 Yet this
disorienting state, which connects with Butler’s opacity, also opens up pos-
sibilities of new futures. For queer people this is the possibility of becoming
other than heterosexual; the queer community holds open this possibility.

Practicing graceful recognition in community: baptism

We can apply Butler’s concept of recognition to ecclesiology to understand
how the self becomes and is recognized in Christian community. The self in
Christian community is always becoming plastic, continually formed in rela-
tionship to being in Christ and oriented God-ward. Grace is the primary gift
that Christians receive from God that enables the plasticity of the self. Here, I
connect grace with recognition. The church community extends God’s grace to
the other by both recognizing the other and continuing to hold open an account
of the other. The self does not come to the community fully formed, rather the
question of “Who are you?” remains open as the self continues to become in
community. By holding open an account of queer Christians, the church com-
munity gives life to the queer Christian by extending God’s grace to her.
However, the self extends grace to the community as well. Church is con-
stituted by a multitude of relationships and church continues to become in
relation to the other. The church community’s encounter with the other is a
38  Sara Rosenau
challenge to recognize its own opacity, to understand how dependent it is on
the other for its continued becoming. By asking for recognition, queer Chris-
tians ask the church community to expand, and thus enable the church’s
further becoming.30
In baptism the church community recognizes the gift of grace in the life of
a Christian. Baptism is not only an individual act, however, it is also a com-
munal one. In the practice of baptism, the Christian community recognizes
the person joining the community and promises to nurture that person and
help them grow in their faith. Elizabeth Stuart writes that baptism repre-
sents an ontological shift, where the baptized become “ecclesial persons”
characterized by a new communal subjectivity.31 This communal subjectivity
is not fixed, however, but is always in the process of becoming. In baptism
the “not yet” of both the individual and the body of Christ is recognized.
Stuart writes, “to be baptized is to be caught up in a kingdom that does not
yet fully exist, that is in the process of becoming; it is to be caught up in the
redemption of this world.”32
If baptism is understood as a ritual of graceful recognition, an individual
and communal promise to faithful becoming, then the exclusion of queer
Christians from church is a broken baptismal promise.33 Our baptismal iden-
tity, Stuart writes, “rests in being bound together with others not of our own
choosing by an act of sheer grace.”34 We also are made subjects, and continue
to become as selves by and through the gift of our relations with others.
Graceful recognition mediates this process of becoming. To be church is to
gracefully hold open our account of one another. Another way to put this is
that our baptismal promise is a promise of communal plasticity – a commit-
ment to continue in our individual and communal becoming.

Queer story of graceful recognition

As an example of a Christian community’s practice of graceful recognition
I turn to Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s story about a naming ceremony at her
church, House for All Sinner’s and Saints. Bolz-Weber tells about her parish-
ioner, Mary, who was baptized as Christian as a child but had been excluded
from her church community in college when she came out as a lesbian. Sev-
eral years later, Mary came out as transgender, identifying as male and taking
the name Asher. For many years Asher did not dare enter a church. He feared
that what the church of his birth said about him might be true – that he was
following the devil, that he was sinful and lost.35 But when Asher came to
House for All Sinners and Saints, he realized that he not only belonged there,
but he belonged to God as God’s beloved.36
House for All remained committed to the Christian baptismal vows made
to Mary, even as Mary was becoming Asher. In marking this commitment,
Bolz-Webber and Asher decided to hold a naming rite for Asher on Bap-
tism of our Lord Sunday. Bolz-Webber writes, “Mary would become Asher
in the midst of a liturgy where Jesus was named ‘Son’ and ‘Beloved.’”37
 Queer church  39
For Bolz-Weber the naming rite signified God’s graceful recognition of all
of humanity. She writes, “Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we
do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and
claimed us as God’s own.”38 The naming rite represented the community’s
graceful recognition of Mary becoming Asher. In doing so, the community
also remains faithful to its own becoming as the body of Christ. Their faith-
fulness is in discernment of how as community they need to become plastic
again, questioning established habits and practices that insulate the com-
munity and protect power structures. Becoming plastic means reorienting
the community toward both others and God.

Becoming a plastic body

Individuals, communities, and denominations on both sides of the divide
lament how the “problem of sexuality” is tearing apart the church. How-
ever, queer Christians are already present in church. In their presence and
practice within the church, queer Christians ask the church to become plastic
again by holding open an account of who queer Christians are and who they
might become. This holding open of self is an invitation to a holding open
of the whole community as it continues to become the body of Christ. The
church community becomes plastic by recognizing itself as a body not with
one member, but with many. Church is a body of bodies, a body of ecclesial
persons gracefully recognizing one another, in continual becoming together.
Both queer Christians and church are evolving, becoming plastic again, by
being reoriented toward God. This reorientation is directive, by witnessing
to God both the individual and the church are becoming in response to God’s
revelation. As Wendy Farley writes, “The way we treat one another is the sign
of how we dwell in the divine presence. It is not a political or social issue; it is
the most visible fruit of faith.”39 A reorientation to God produces an orienta-
tion toward others in a way that offers mutual graceful recognition.

Prophetic performativity
Since queer people continue to be excluded from many church communi-
ties, graceful recognition remains an unfolding vision for church, yet not
the reality of every church. Therefore, it is important to describe how queer
Christians are prophetically engaged in transforming church communities.
This is captured in our second queer practice, prophetic performativity. Per-
formativity is how we embody social norms. However, when performativity
pushes the boundary of the norm, an expansion of the norm becomes pos-
sible. In ecclesiology, the performativity of non-normative bodies disrupts
the whole body and transforms it.
Butler’s embodied performativity ruptures a notion of communal unity
through uniformity. Prophetic performativity of queer Christians disorients
the whole body in a productive way. Christians gather around the table not
40  Sara Rosenau
in unity of shared agreement, but are disoriented by the difference of queer
Christians. This disorientation has the potential to reorient the whole to
discover new ways of being together, new configurations of community that
recognize the other.

Butler’s performativity and Ahmed’s orientation

In Butler’s thought, the performative transformation of norms is connected
to recognition. Butler writes, “It is only through the experience of recogni-
tion that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings.”40 However,
the viability of human life is not a power that is entirely in the hands of the
self or the other. Both are dependent upon norms that “exceed the dyadic
exchange that they condition.”41 These available norms, however, are not
static. Recognition is enabled by norms, but the process of recognition also
holds the possibility for transformation of the norm. Butler writes, “Certain
practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of
recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and
implicitly call for the institution of new norms.”42 This “opening” in norms,
or rupture, is an opening for critique.
Butler uses the term performativity to describe how norms are produced
through bodily performance. Butler initially theorized performativity in
order to critique the sex/gender distinction in feminist theory. Butler argues
that neither sex nor gender is as stable as it might seem, both are culturally
prescribed, embodied, and performed.43 “Acts, gestures, and desire produce
the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface
of the body.”44 Performativity is at work in all norms, but it is difficult to
recognize because dominant normativity masks its constructive or performa-
tive origins. Butler uses the example of drag as a performance that reveals the
performativity of all of gender. Through parody, drag performs gender nor-
mativity, revealing the constructed nature of the heterosexual norm, which
masks itself as a stable original.45 In fact, we are all performing gender, or
acting out the norms of gender as they are scripted to us.46
We should not, however, underestimate the power of dominant norms.
Sara Ahmed draws attention to this when she develops the term orienta-
tion and disorientation to express the queer experience of living in a het-
eronormative world. Sexual orientation refers to deviance. Heterosexuality
becomes normalized as an orientation that need not be named, it rather
becomes the background to which everyone is oriented. To be queer is to
have a “failed orientation,” as queer bodies are understood to be “out of
line.” Queer, then, according to Ahmed, might be expressed as a diagonal,
or living on the “slant.”47
There is a disorientation associated with the transgression of norms. This is
why the transformation of norms is prophetic and involves personal risk. The
risk of the human in transforming norms is exemplified in queer life. When
queer people embody non-normative gender expression or non-normative
 Queer church  41
sexual attraction, they risk their lives in a heteronormative and cisnorma-
tive society. However, many queer people know that to be otherwise is not
to be.48 “The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who
already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to
become possible, possibility is a necessity.”49

Practicing prophetic performativity in community: communion

In considering ecclesiology then, we consider how prophetic performativity
transforms not just the norm of gender or sexuality but also norms opera-
tive in an understanding of community itself. One norm of ecclesiology has
been to describe the Christian community in terms of its internal agreement,
whether unity of belief or practice. In applying the practice of prophetic
performativity to ecclesiology, I argue that queer performativity disrupts
notions of community as agreement, reorienting the community to com-
munal becoming.
One problem in a concept of community as agreement is that it eclipses
both fragmentation and disagreement in community. Tanner makes this
argument when describing modern understanding of culture as grounded in
agreement. This understanding of culture eclipses the constant negotiations,
dialogue, and disagreements within any one culture. Tanner argues that con-
ceiving of a church community as being formed through shared beliefs or
practices obscures both the partiality of practices and the multiplicity of
beliefs in any one community. Rather, she proposes that Christian practices
coalesce around common use and toward an orientation toward God. What
unifies the body of Christ is not shared agreements or similarities, but a com-
mon orientation toward God.50
Disorientation can be paralyzing and induce crisis, but it can also be a
moment that opens the possibility for reorientation.51 Returning to prophetic
performativity, we might understand prophetic performativity as an embodied
performance that disrupts the norm of community as shared agreement. Put
another way, prophetic performativity resists or refuses the dominant ground
or background, performing difference, performing by not turning around.
Thinking ecclesiologically, prophetic performativity transforms the prac-
tice of communion from a practice that confirms agreement to a practice that
awakens churches to their becoming as the body of Christ. Baptism trans-
forms individual Christians into “ecclesial persons” entering into a process
of further becoming with God and with the Christian community. The com-
munion table also invites the becoming of the community. This becoming,
however, is not a process of ease; rather it can be disturbing and disorienting.
The performative difference of queer Christians disrupts the presumed
unity around the communion table. The queer “slant” makes the table
“wobble.” Queer bodies at the communion table produce a disorienting
effect by simply being present in their difference. Difference disturbs the
“the table as a shared object.”52 The table is, in this way, both disorienting
42  Sara Rosenau
and orienting. This disturbance invites the church to perform a more faithful
humility around the table. It reveals that ability to gather at the table is not
the correctness of belief or the rightness of any action. Rather the unity of
church is the unity of absolute reliance on grace.
Gathering around the communion table, queer performativity exposes the
unfaithfulness of church when it refuses to recognize queer Christians. Those
that gather do not agree. However, the disagreement is less about permission
to be at the table and more about the fact of radical difference. Bodies gather
around the table with many intersectional differences, black, brown, white,
queer, trans, genderqueer, intersex, differently abled. The disorientation of
difference does not resolve, but is reformed into understanding unity in a
way that does not eclipse difference. Disorientation invites an orientation
toward the other. This orientation toward the other is only possible through
being reoriented to God. Communion thus is understood as gathering in
order to be reoriented God-ward.

Queer Christian story of prophetic performativity

The movement for queer recognition in the United Methodist Church is
a powerful example of disrupting the norm of community as agreement.
During the United Methodist general conference in 2016 Rev. Julie Todd, a
straight-identified ordained UM minister and an advocate of queer recogni-
tion, wrote a blog post reflecting on a decade of advocacy for queer inclusion
within the UMC. She expressed how the body of Christ is broken over this
issue, and how any effort to deny this brokenness through appeals to unity
is violence. She recounted a story of the pro-LGBTQ movement going to
communion services during General Conference in 2004 after an unfavor-
able vote for inclusion. She writes,

We did this as a means of re-asserting our presence in that Body. We did

this as a means of resistance against the false institutional proclamation
of one cup, one Body, and one baptism, when clearly the actions of
the General Conference actively sought to harm and exclude members
of that Body. All forms of our resistance and disruption are embodied
statements that the unity of the church cannot continue to come at
the cost of LGBTQ lives. These same acts of resistance are theological
affirmations that the resurrected Jesus lives on in our whole and beloved
queer bodies.53

Todd draws on the image of Christ’s body, broken in communion and bro-
ken over the conflict of inclusion of queer people. For Todd, the broken-
ness is denied when unity is proclaimed at the expense of queer bodies.
After communion concluded, Rev. James Preston, in a moment of prophetic
anger, smashed a communion chalice on the floor. It was, in Todd’s words
“a moment of the Spirit interceded to express anguish sighs too deep for
 Queer church  43
words. In the breaking of the cup, Christ spoke to the real brokenness of
the moment.”54
Queer Christians are oriented toward God. However, the church com-
munity, here in the example of the United Methodist Church, denies the
Christian witness of queer Christians through prohibitions on marriage,
ordination, and sometimes membership. The prophetic performativity of
queer bodies interrupts any claims of unity by means of exclusion. The act
of breaking the chalice interrupted an ecclesiology of agreement as expressed
through the practice of communion. The ruptured glass proclaimed the pro-
tester’s grief over the body of Christ already broken in the exclusion of queer
people from ordination and other church practices. This brokenness had
both a theological dimension and material impact, on the lives and bodies of
queer Christians. Rev. Julie Todd writes, “In the church there simply must be
some recognition that parts and pieces of the LGBTQ Body of Christ in the
United Methodist Church have been not only broken, but lost. Left. Dead.
Gone. Taken. Parts that aren’t coming back to be made part of the whole.
Irretrievable by choice or by force.”55
Queer Christians live in critical and transformative relation to the norms
of Christian community and in doing so the whole body is invited to dis-
orientation and reorientation. This invitation is to become faithful to God’s
gift of grace by reorienting the church community toward God, allowing
for a more plastic communal practice of recognizing and receiving the other.

Faithful failure
Both graceful recognition and prophetic performativity point to how the
presence of Queer Christians is transformative to the ecclesial body of Christ.
I would like to consider one more queer practice as transformative of how
the church as a body of Christ can be faithful to its own becoming. I suggest
that the church divest from models of success and view its own becoming
as a faithful practice of failure. Queer theorist Judith Halberstam argues
that stories of failure can be reconsidered as new stories of the possible. A
faithful practice of failure means understanding failure as opening the pos-
sibility for other ways of being community together. I specifically explore
how the church can repent of modes of perfection that do not also engender
humility. Recognizing failure as a possibility invites church to return to the
Protestant invitation to be always in a mode of reforming. Reforming is not
change simply for the sake of change, but in response to God’s call to become
plastic again.

Halberstam’s queer failure

In exploring faithful failure for the church, I draw from Halberstam’s
Queer Art of Failure. Here Halberstam explores the gifts, openings, and
possibilities that failure brings. Locating failure as a mode of queer life,
44  Sara Rosenau
Halberstam argues, “failing is something queers do and have always done
exceptionally well.”56 Failing at gender conformity and opposite sex-
attraction, queers have resisted the heteronormative lifestyle and “with
it all the rewards of advancement, capital accumulation, [and] family.”57
This queer failure “turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely,
and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other
goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”58 Certainly failure requires
an acknowledgment of painful histories and feelings of “emptiness,
loss . . . and modes of unbecoming.”59 But failure can also be a mode of
resistance, a political affect rooted in Foucault’s “subjugated knowledge”
which finds a countercultural desire “to live life otherwise.”60 This con-
nects to a larger body of work in queer studies that defines queer as an
alternative to both “hegemonic systems” and “dominant forms of com-
mon sense.”61 Halberstam writes that “heteronormative common sense
leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation,
family, ethical conduct, and hope.”62 While “other subordinate, queer,
or counterhegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of
failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life
styles, negativity, and critique.”63
For Halberstam, queer failure is different from heteronormative failure
which either acknowledges failure in order to eventually succeed, or col-
lapses into the rage of the “excluded white male, a rage that promises and
delivers punishments” for the marginalized.64 Here, Halberstam is stressing
that queers are comfortable with failure in a way that opens the possibil-
ity to for practices of resistance to a heteronormative regime. Halberstam’s
queer failure imagines the possibility of an alternative politics born of failure.
Ahmed has wondered, however, how far embracing the negative can go. She
writes, “To say ‘yes’ the ‘no’ is still a ‘yes.’”65 She worries that this isolates
queer as a useful term since not everyone can or will say yes to the no in the
same way, especially because of the intersectional lines of race, class, and
gender, in addition to sexuality.66 I will nuance this further when I turn to
church and failure and failure as a politics.

Practicing faithful failure in community: together in sin

There is an important connection between grace and failure, failure is a grace
in its invitation to be humbly transformed. Following Ahmed, we might
describe the failure of queer people in church as saying yes to the no, accept-
ing the label of failure as a gift that opens new possibilities. Faithful failure
for the church, however, would be quite different. Since it is churches that
say the ‘no’, becoming faithful is acknowledging the no and saying yes to
the not-yet of church. Queer failure for ecclesiology invites a transformed
understanding of sin, returning the church to humility. Queer failure is also
a call for church to reorient to the wisdom of the Protestant Reformation,
which itself was a call to the church to reform according to the truth of
 Queer church  45
God. Proclamations like “simultaneously sinner and saint” and “reformed
and always being reformed” become poignant in calling the contemporary
church to become in response to queer Christians.67
One invitation of queer Christians is to be together in sin. From the
standpoint of the heteronormative church, queer Christians are understood
as having failed church or failed at Christian life because of their sin of
deviant sexuality or gender identity. Queer Christians are only deemed
acceptable as Christians if they confess this sin and pledge to live a life that
rejects their queer identity. Queer failure might introduce a yes to this no, in
asserting that all Christians have failed at Christian life through universal
sin. This is to say that sin focused on specific individual acts obscures the
universality of sin. James Alison, speaking from a Catholic context, has
found the doctrine of original sin helpful as a way to speak theologically
about queer inclusion in the church. In his understanding, universal sin
binds us together, making “room for us all to be wrong together, and yet
all be rescued together, and all able to learn together.”68 The universality
of sin also means that none of us are equipped to judge the other, since no
one has a “position of neutral objectivity.”69 Rather, we are all together
in the middle of a dynamic becoming, God’s call to be a new creation.
Alison’s pointing to universal sin encourages both individual Christians
and churches to return to a place of humility in its judgment of the sin of
queer people. In Protestant context, Luther’s proclamation of “simul justus
et peccator” points to the paradox of being simultaneously “wrong and
rescued,” to use Alison’s phrase. In this way, queer Christians point to the
rich theological tradition for communal becoming in redirecting churches
from a focus on individual sin and instead inviting a more mutual vulner-
ability and humility in being together in sin.
If faithful failure invites a return to the universality of sin, it also asks
the church to be more publicly humble in confessing corporate sin. Eccle-
siologically, “simul justus et peccator” means that the church as a commu-
nity, in its practices, policies, and theologies, stands simultaneously in sin
and grace. Feminist ecclesiologist Letty M. Russell describes the tendency
of “the double sin of the church.”70 Churches encourage individuals to live
holy lives by emphasizing Paul’s message to the Corinthians to live with the
understanding that the “present form of the world is passing away.”71 Russell
finds, however, that in matters of justice churches are very much centered in
the world. “Their lives, structures, class divisions, sexual orientation, and
prejudices all reflect the culture of which they are a part rather than the New
Creation.”72 Faithful failure invites churches to more humbly recognize how
they participate in sinful structures of society in their fostering of practices
and beliefs that are bound up in the culture. “A little thought reminds us
of the power of sin within the church, of the way in which it has frequently
had to be dragged, almost as if it were against its collective will, into better
forms of witness by developments in those areas of society or culture that
were not specifically Christian.”73
46  Sara Rosenau
A political ecclesiology of failure
The presence of queer Christians in church can also be disorienting for het-
eronormative Christians in that it disrupts the presumed unity and unifor-
mity of the Christian community. Such an understanding of unity supports
the normativity of dominant groups while others, who are othered, push
against the norm through prophetic performativity. At the communion table,
the radical differences in community are revealed. In recognizing difference,
queer Christians invite church to reorient toward God and become more
plastic in orienting toward the other. Finally, faithful failure returns individu-
als and church to the reality of simultaneously sinner and saint and to the
need to be reformed and always reforming. In response to the neighbor and
the stranger, church can take a humble position, curious to find God in those
others who are presumed failures, rejected by society.
If a politics of failure means orienting toward those it has othered, church
needs to break open its self-understanding in relationship to the other. Eccle-
siologist Paul Lakeland has framed this as the church needing to reconceive
of its orientation to the world. A queer ecclesiology that reorients church to
the world is necessary because that anti-queer Christian rhetoric associates
queer people with the world, eclipsing queer Christians. Ecclesiologist Paul
Lakeland has suggested that to reconfigure relations between church and
world, church must emphasize humility.
Toward this end, Lakeland contrasts two readings of the parable of the
Good Samaritan. The first reading is the more conventional. The church
identifies with the Good Samaritan. The church aids the injured man, who
represents the world. Lakeland acknowledges the importance of this image
in clarifying the church’s mission as servant to the world, with the role of
alleviating suffering.74 Yet Lakeland cautions the church to remember the
religious figures in the parable, the priest and the Levite, who pass by the
injured man. “In the Gospel parable, Jesus is most definitely not reassuring
his listeners about their own role but rather encouraging them to use their
imaginations to discompose their own religious universe.”75 In this way,
Lakeland introduces disorientation into his first reading. “The parable of
the Good Samaritan is less a story about doing good than it is about break-
ing boundaries.”76 Claiming the role of the Good Samaritan, church risks
being too self-congratulatory, over identifying with the Good Samaritan’s
heroic qualities and missing that the Good Samaritan is an outcast himself,
aiding another outcast. Lakeland writes that this is “at worst triumphalist
and at best a sort of paternalistic vision in which the wisdom and the folly of
the world alike are both subsumed in the totalizing explanation of faith.”77
Church may believe itself to be a humble servant, but in doing so it risks not
learning anything from those it is serving.
In his second reading, Lakeland points out that there is no particular rea-
son that the church needs to be read as the Good Samaritan and the world
the wounded victim. In reversing church and world, the church becomes
 Queer church  47
the wounded victim “in need of a lesson of humanity provided by the out-
cast.”78 Here, church fails queerly in finding itself in need of visitation by
the stranger. Even further, the church as injured on the road is overlooked,
scorned by religious leaders, but saved by one who is outcast, associated
with “the world.” Lakeland emphasizes the lesson for the church is that “the
world itself has wisdom and grace that we do not possess in the Church.”79
Lakeland’s reading allows church to both be a servant and to be served.
Similarly, in Tanner’s gift giving ecclesiology, we can say that church gives
God’s gifts to the world, but church also receives God’s gifts from the other
“encountering the grace of God in unexpected places.”80 In being open to the
unexpected, the church decenters itself and its own self-assured understand-
ing of itself. In this way, the church must fail in order to recognize the gift of
queer grace, the gift of becoming plastic again.
Of course, a reading of church as victim on the road must be nuanced.
The intention is to illuminate a new understanding for church in relationship
with the world, or more specifically in relationship to those the church has
othered. The church as victim is too easily a position taken by Christians in
power to eclipse their own role in power over the other.81 The queer practices
of graceful recognition, prophetic performativity, and queer failure invite
churches to more deeply engage its own practices in response to the presence
of queer Christians. To say that queer life causes disorientation for churches
is to say that queer people are in churches, performing a livable life. “Dis-
orientation, then, would not be a politics of the will but an effect of how we
do politics, which in turn is shaped by the prior matter of how we live.”82 In
becoming disoriented, church is invited to follow queer people in a politics
of failure. In fact, heteronormative Christians should pray for such a disori-
entation, to be disturbed from complacently and love of power in the face of
injustice, especially those injustices perpetrated in and through the practices
of church. To be disoriented in such a way is to become plastic again. To
become plastic is to turn toward the bodies and the lives of those who have
been othered. To become plastic is to become reoriented in the life of God.

Notes
  1 Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic
Ecclesiology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36.
  2 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. I recast Ahmed’s phrase “to queer phenom-
enology is also to offer a queer phenomenology.”
  3 Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
39–41.
  4 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005).
 5 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 172.
  6 For another example of using the “texts” of lives in theology and ethics, see Traci
C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 144–79.
48  Sara Rosenau
  7 Michael Bush, “Calvin and the Reformanda Sayings,” in Calvinus Sacrarum Lit-
erarum Interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research (Göt-
tingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 285–99. The full reformed
phrase is interesting here: “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum
verbi dei” is translated as “The church reformed and always being reformed
according to the Word of God.”
 8 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, 5. Farley emphasizes that being oriented
towards lovers of Christ is much different then “some tepid obligation to be
inclusive,” 5.
  9 Philippians 1.6, NRSV.
10 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. Butler dispels the notion that a self that is
not “self-grounding” cannot be responsible for his or her actions. She argues the
opposite, that a self-dependent on others and norms for its constitution actually
creates the possibility for agency, an agency within certain boundaries.
11 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2009), 151.
12 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 27. Butler writes “I am, as it were, always
other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes
place.”
13 Butler, Undoing Gender, 150.
14 Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 39.
15 Tanner, Christ the Key, 39–53. See also Brandon Lee Morgan, “Gift, Grace, and
Ecclesial Time in the Theology of Kathryn Tanner,” Perspectives In Religious
Studies 41, no. 1 (2014): 49–64. Morgan gives an overview of how Tanner relates
to the philosophical and theological debate about the gift economy. For a critique
of Tanner’s use of gift, see Sarah Coakley, “Why Gift? Gift, Gender and Trinitar-
ian Relations in Milbank and Tanner,” Scottish Journal Of Theology 61, no. 2
(2008): 224.
16 Tanner, Christ the Key, 87.
17 Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 90–5.
18 Kathryn Tanner, “Shifts in Theology Over the Last Quarter Century,” Modern
Theology 26:1 (2010): 43–4.
19 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 33.
20 Ibid., 28.
21 Ibid., 41. Butler acknowledges that she goes beyond Hegel on this point.
22 Ibid., 27.
23 Ibid., 24. Neither does the exchange involve a collapsing of the you into the I.
The “I” does not annihilate the other in the exchange of recognition. For Butler
this would be impossible because, since the I is always outside itself, there is no
I for the you to collapse into. See also Undoing Gender, 149.
24 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 26.
25 Ibid., 36.
26 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso 2004), xv.
27 “‘My First Gay Bar’: Rachel Maddow, Andy Cohen, and Others Shared Their
Coming-Out Stories,” The New York Times, June 22, 2016, www.nytimes.
com/2016/06/23/fashion/my-first-gay-bar-rosie-odonnell-rachel-maddow-alexander-
wang-andy-cohen-share.html?_r=0
28 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 21 and 84–7. Ahmed develops Adrienne Rich’s
term here.
29 Ibid., 21.
30 Cheri DiNovo, Qu(e)erying Evangelism: Growing a Community from the Out-
side in (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2005). DiNovo develops a vision for her
 Queer church  49
local church using the image of the queer stranger who teaches the church the
truth of the gospel.
31 Elizabeth Stuart, “Sacramental Flesh,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the West-
ern Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 65–75.
32 Ibid., 68.
33 Marilyn Bennett Alexander and James Preston, We Were Baptized Too: Claim-
ing God’s Grace for Lesbians and Gays (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 1996). Pamela Lightsey writes about the connection between the denial of
baptism to enslaved Africans and the denial of Christian rituals to queer people.
See Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick
Publications, 2015), 87.
34 Stuart, “Sacramental Flesh,” 68.
35 Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint
(New York: Jericho Books, 2013), 136.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 134.
38 Ibid., 138–9.
39 Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away, 3.
40 Butler, Undoing Gender, 2.
41 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 24.
42 Ibid.
43 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 173.
44 Ibid., 185. Original emphasis.
45 Ibid., 41.
46 Butler, Undoing Gender, 3.
47 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 71, 87, 92. Ahmed also theorizes how whiteness
is a ground for race, becoming a background and a “straightening device,” 137.
48 Butler uses examples of gay, lesbian, transgender, and intersexed people in much
of her work, other norms include the categorization of people with physical and
mental disabilities as well as norms of race, ethnicity, and nationality to name
only a few.
49 Butler, Undoing Gender, 31.
50 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 82.
51 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 158.
52 Ibid., 170. Ahmed develops the table as a concept in her queer phenomenology,
although she is not talking about the communion table per se.
53 Julie Todd, “On the Body Being Broken,” Love Prevails, May 12, 2016, https://
loveprevailsumc.com/2016/05/12/on-the-body-being-broken.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3. See also Syndicate Theology’s sympo-
sium on how Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure intersects with Theology. Silas
Morgan, “Queer Art of Failure Symposium,” Syndicate, June 8, 2015, https://
syndicate.network/symposia/theology/the-queer-art-of-failure/.
57 Ibid., 89.
58 Ibid., 88.
59 Ibid., 23.
60 Ibid., 2. Halberstam is drawing on both Muñoz and Foucault here. See José
Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: New York University Press, 2009).
61 Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 89. Halberstam is drawing on Gramsci here.
50  Sara Rosenau
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Halberstam, 92.
65 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 175.
66 Ibid. “For queers of other colors, being ‘out’ already means something different,
given that what is ‘out and about’ is oriented around whiteness,” 175.
67 Bush, “Calvin and the Reformanda Sayings.” Luther uses this phrase in various
writings. These are reviewed in Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), 242–5. Althaus translates the phrase as
“at one and the same time a righteous man and a sinner,” 1. For how this phrase
applies to ecclesiology see Robert Kress, “Simul justus et peccator: Ecclesiological
and Ecumenical Perspectives,” Horizons 11, no. 2 (1984): 255–75.
68 James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in (New
York: Continuum, 2006), 173.
69 Ibid., 79.
70 Letty M. Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 124.
71 1 Cor. 7.29–31, NRSV.
72 Russel, Church in the Round, 124.
73 Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life, 12.
74 Paul Lakeland, “‘I Want to Be in That Number’: Desire, Inclusivity and the
Church,” in Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 66
(2011): 21.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 22.
78 Ibid., 27.
79 Ibid., 22.
80 Ibid., 27.
81 See, for example, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute which found
that 57 percent of white evangelicals see Christians as facing discrimination in
America. Only 44 percent of white evangelicals said the same about Muslims.
Emma Green, “White Evangelicals Believe They Face More Discrimination
Than Muslims,” The Atlantic, March 10, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/
archive/2017/03/perceptions-discrimination-muslims-christians/519135/.
82 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 177.
3 Songsang, confessions,
and theologizings of divine
lavishness
Joseph N. Goh

I value listening to confessions. Yet when I was younger, I could not muster
the courage to confess who I was to myself. Like many, I struggled deeply
as a gay teenager. I was terrified that people would discover what Roman
Catholicism refers to as my “intrinsic disorder” and “grave depravity.” At
the same time, I told confessions of God that were deliberately degenderized
and desexualized, like how an eye infection disappeared after I supplicated
the Sacred Heart, or how my daily recitation of the rosary was a committed
response to the request of Our Lady of Fatima for the (ambiguous outcome
of the) conversion of sinners. Safe, respectable, decent religiosity.
As a closeted male religious and clergyperson for two decades, I listened
to confessions in the box, at the bedside, at dining tables, in hospitals, in
buses, in numerous countries. I heard people admitting to having “sinful”
sexual relations with others of the same sex, or performing the “iniquity”
of “dressing up in women’s clothes.”1 The shame, guilt, and brokenness
in their voices haunted my own closeted heart, as I learned to my dismay
(and horror) that human confessions were measured by heteronormativity,
or “the everyday and mundane ways in which heterosexuality is privileged
and taken for granted . . . normalized and naturalized.”2 The meting out of
absolution to penitents in God’s name was a privilege that usually flooded
me with joy, but to utter “I absolve you” to the confessions of queer/trans,
or gender-variant and sexually diverse people who were sincerely trying to
be themselves was a struggle, a dilemma, a transgression of theological and
ecclesiastical justice that grew ever stronger within me.
As a Malaysian in Malaysia who is now an older out gay man and wid-
ower, and whose main struggles with gay shame are somewhat behind me, I
now consider myself an interfaith Christian, a queer/trans-affirming minister,
a theological activist, and a researcher in gender and sexuality issues for
whom there is no division between academia and spiritual practice. Aware
of my privilege, I wear these labels tentatively, as I am learning to listen to
myself in order to confess more deeply. I also feel inclined to narrate stories
through faith-inflected lenses in order to prayerfully disclose the godly con-
fessions of queer/trans people.
52  Joseph N. Goh
In steadfastly holding on to C. S. Song’s affirmation that “the totality of life
is the raw material of theology,”3 I am also convinced that “the human body
is the very embodiment and enfleshment of God’s presence”4 for one who
seeks what is good, just and holy, regardless of whether this body belongs to
someone who identifies as queer, trans, cis or straight. Admittedly, my bias is
to reveal the confessions of queer/trans bodies through God-glasses, notably
Malaysian bodies that have been accused of being songsang.5
Many Malaysian men would readily adopt global badges such as “gay” or
“bisexual” or “transgender,” and may even tolerate one or two local labels
when wielded in jest, but as yet, not songsang. As an adjectival catch-all cat-
egory, songsang means inverted, deviant, aberrant, abnormal, unintelligible,
unworthy. Songsang implies a state of disgust, wanton and irresponsible
sexual pursuits, mental instability, and flagrant flaunting of sexual ethics.
To be songsang is to interiorize a slur that implies human diminishment.
It is to be an actor in budaya binatang, or a culture of animals.6 It is to be
sub-human. Songsang echoes queer in many parts of the world, without the
political reappropriation that queer has undergone. As I write this chapter,
I am not aware of any Malaysian academic or activist who has upended
songsang with successful political traction. Yet, while bodies continue to
be branded as songsang, as culpable of unspeakable acts, and shunned by
mainstream Christian hierarchies, I claim them for the task of theologizing.
This chapter is as much inspired by gay men’s confessions of sexuality and
faith as it is by 1 John 3.1, which reads: “Think of the love that the Father
has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what
we are.” I suspect that my retention of “Father” as a name for God in the
first epigraph may provoke the ire of some, or at least raise an eyebrow. I am
aware that many readers have had negative experiences of their fathers that
cause them to dispense with any conceptualization of God as father. I am
familiar with feminist theological criticisms of androcentric and patriarchal
imaginings of God that have frequently served to oppress women within and
outside the theological realm.
My words come from my own experiences as someone who was theo-
logically nurtured in the United States, Singapore, and Malaysia, and who
believes that God is reflected in female, male, non-gender-specific, and
multiply-­gendered identities. I see God as both mother and father and “all the
in-between areas represented in the created universe.”7 I do not believe in rep-
resentations of God that are exclusively male or female, patriarchal or matri-
archal, cisgender or transgender, heterosexual or homosexual. In retaining
“Father” for God as the scriptural origin of loving lavishness in this chapter, I
look to my own pa’ (as I would my ma’) in his unconditional and unwavering
love and support he lavished on me throughout all my years of existence. It
is thus an exercise of joy when I speak of God’s lavishness by alluding to the
imagery of overwhelmingly loving divine fatherhood in scripture.
It is with this delight that I find myself eager and ready to listen to gay
men’s confessions of the lavishness of God. In Bahasa Malaysia, the verb
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  53
and adverb “lavish” translate as sungguh banyak (plenitude), suka mem-
berikan (likes giving, generous), mewah (extravagant), boros (wasteful), and
melimpah or mencurah (to pour out unreservedly). All these terms provide
multiple facets of the profusion of loving acceptance, the excessive strength
and support, and the overwhelming “wasteful” magnanimity of God – divine
traits which are preached from the pulpit of every church in Malaysia. I am
curious as to how lavishness can be a talking point, a provisional (and cur-
rently necessary for dialogue, not validation or approval) common ground
between queer/trans people and churches.
My focus in this chapter is on the lived experiences of gay men who strad-
dle their sexuality, gender, and faith, and who continue to be deeply affected
by Christian hierarchies who treat them as songsang. Despite antagonistic
attitudes from state, society, and church, these men continue to gaze upon
the loving face of God. They attribute their sexuality to an inclusive God,
and see themselves as conceived out of godly generosity.8
As I listen, I reflect. As I reflect, I pray, and I tell confessions of God’s
lavishness.

Doing theology in Malaysia

Theology, as Stephen Bevans expounds, is inexorably contextual, and “the
attempt to understand Christian faith in terms of a particular context –
is really a theological imperative [and] a process that is part of the very
nature of theology itself.”9 At the same time, “religious discourses,” as Hugo
Córdova Quero insists, “are intrinsically related to cultural and social con-
structs, and they shape the perception of gender, bodies, and sexuality.”10
Hence, Marcella Althaus-Reid says it well when she says that there is “no
such a thing as a neutral theology.”11 Grand claims of unadulterated, official
theology as “pure” Christianity, untainted by human interference, inspired
“solely” by scripture, or completely devoid of biases of gender and sexuality,
are mythical conjurings.
Theologies are born when gendered and sexual human beings, colored by
their particular contexts and circumstances, imagine God and the role that
God plays in human existence and relationships. Theological enterprises may
be guided by divine inspiration, but they are fundamentally human efforts to
explain God, as God can never be conceptualized outside of human experi-
ences, or be known “by an intellectual leap outside the human process of
discovery.”12
To do theology in Malaysia requires a critical perceptiveness of its politi-
cal, legal and socio-cultural embodiments. Religion continues to be a crucial
feature of identity formation for Malaysia’s 28.3 million inhabitants. I reside
in a country comprising 61.3 percent Muslims, 19.8 percent Buddhists,
9.2 percent Christians, 6.3 percent Hindus, and 3.4 percent of those who
constitute the other-religious, non-religious, unknown, and practitioners of
“traditional” beliefs.13
54  Joseph N. Goh
Consequently, many Malaysian Christian theologians and religion schol-
ars plunge energetically into inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations,14 incultura-
tion,15 Christian education,16 women’s concerns,17 and Malaysian indigenous
peoples such as the Orang Asli.18 Few tackle the delicate and contentious
intersectional topics of queer/trans and faith.19
Therefore, to do theology with and for queer/trans people in this pre-
dominantly Muslim country first requires an awareness of and negotia-
tion with a “conservative Islamic sensibility”20 in which issues of gender
and sexuality are extensively monitored by the state,21 especially those that
depart from heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Queer/trans Muslims,
who are often subjected to state-endorsed conversion therapy,22 are not the
only ones affected by this religiously driven conservatism. Many mainstream
Malaysian churches seem to collude with the state in this regard, spewing
calls for “counselling,” “repentance,” and “healing” for Christians that only
corroborate accusations of songsang. Two openly inclusive Christian com-
munities in Malaysia, Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur23 and Antioch Mis-
sion in Asia,24 are small, ignored or ostracized by mainstream churches, and
minimally influential in transforming mindsets.
To do theology with and for queer/trans people in Malaysia calls for
an acute recognition of a God whose love is unconditional, inclusive, all-
embracing, purposeful, and just. It requires all theologians to have the open-
ness, willingness, and courage to see this love reflected from, in and toward
queer/trans people. Specifically, to do so demands a sensitivity to the concrete
traumatic experiences of homophobia and transphobia as consequences of
legislation and religious proscriptions, in addition to everyday microaggres-
sions. It necessitates an undistracted attentiveness to the voices of mak nyah
or transgender women and pengkid or butch lesbians. It requires a deep
listening to the stories of lembut, sotong, patah, bapok, pondan, kedik, lal-
ang, kunyit, lala, potaipayeh, ombohthu, gēi lóu, sí fāt gwái, bō li, â qûa, ná
yǐng25 – all pejorative designations of men who are deemed oddly unmanly,
sexually aberrant, humanly lesser, and recalcitrantly sinful in their own eth-
nic groups. Some of these terms are occasionally used in jest between gay
men, but like songsang, they have not been appropriated for purposes of
political empowerment.

Deep storytelling, deep listening

Allow me to relate the confessions of a gay man I met many years back, and
how homophobic mainstream Christianity “robbed” him of his faith. On
one occasion, at the close of a workshop I had facilitated on gender, sexual-
ity, and technology for a group of young gay men in Kuala Lumpur, one of
the participants offered to give me a ride home. Seeing as I was bereft of my
own vehicle at the time, I gladly accepted. “Adaikalam,” a Malaysian Tamil-
Ceylonese Roman Catholic first used the hour-long journey to sheepishly
share his racy escapades with me.
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  55
I greatly appreciated his soul barings, for we were both aware of the
vulnerabilities that hung over our heads. The inextricability of gender and
sexuality in Malaysia meant that being gay also meant being failed men. We
also chatted about the Penal Code, a legacy of British colonization that we
have learned to use against each other as Malaysians. The criminalization
of oral and anal penetrative sex applies to all citizens,26 but bears particular
salience for sex between men.27 Although the increasing use of the acronym
“LGBT” “without parenthetical citation”28 in Malaysian media underscores
a growing recognition of self-identifying lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgen-
der Malaysians, this visibility also spells the escalating vulnerability of queer/
trans Malaysians. Soon, after Adaikalam and I found ourselves sufficiently
comfortable with each other to chat on all manner of past experience, risqué
revelations slowly evolved into more profound inquiries and intimations.
Adaikalam began to ask questions about my own journey as a gay man
and an ordained Christian clergyman, and what my strategies were in allow-
ing the seemingly irreconcilable concepts of sexual diversity and active faith
to share a common space. He disclosed that he was avoiding church services
because he dah tak boleh tahan or could no longer endure the gay-bashing
rhetoric therein. Adaikalam’s participation in church services had ceased to
provide any real nourishment for his spiritual life as a gay Malaysian Chris-
tian man despite his appreciation of it, leading him to abandon all forms of
his Christian faith.
Adaikalam was not alone in his struggles, and his experiences were not
unique. I saw his experiences reflected in those of 30 self-identifying gay and
bisexual Malaysian men of diverse faith persuasions and life philosophies
whom I subsequently met as part of a larger qualitative research project
that involved in-depth interviews on the meanings of their sexual identities,
sexual expressions, and sense of faith. Nevertheless, unlike Adaikalam, some
of these men found innovative strategies to allow their sexualities and faith
to converge in manageable and/or livable spaces. I draw on data from my
research project for this chapter, and feature four men who self-identify as
Malaysian, Christian, and gay: “Henri,” “Buck,” “Hosea,” and “Freddie.”
My theologizing of these four men’s narratives – intimate confessions from
men besmirched as songsang – unveils the interplay between their sense of
Christianity and their sexuality, and reveals their understanding of a God
who functions in the most intimate experiences of their lives.
While I do not look for theological generalizability or replicability, I sus-
pect that the confessions of these men will resound in similar ways around
the globe. These four men are well aware that the incontrovertible crite-
rion for an intelligible and valid Christian subjectivity in Malaysia is a life
that internalizes and exudes heteronormativity. Nevertheless, rather than
succumbing to the common coercion of churches to somehow cease being
LGBT and thus achieve intelligibility and validity in their faith, these men
articulate an understanding that it is possible to live as both Christian and
gay in life-giving ways.
56  Joseph N. Goh
Rose Wu,29 Marcella Althaus-Reid,30 Susannah Cornwall31 and Rebecca
Voelkel32 among others emphasize the importance of queer lives as depar-
ture points for theology. I accept, adopt, and deploy this strategy in my own
work, but I am also keenly aware of how Malaysian queer/trans Christians
are often cornered into a binary of being either “straight/cis-only Christians”
or “queer/trans non-Christians.”33
I am compelled to ask: How can our queer/trans lives in Malaysia be uti-
lized as loci theologici, as resources of theology, when our expressions have
well and truly been invalidated by mainstream Christianity – to which many
of us remain affiliated – and when these invalidations still impact many of
us in destructive ways? Do theological constructions that supportively take
queer/trans realities seriously into consideration require the inevitable relin-
quishment of every manner and operation of mainstream Christian theol-
ogy – do we throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water? Are queer/
trans and mainstream homophobic/transphobic Christianities doomed to an
eternal, mutual abhorrence and distancing? Perhaps not.
I attempt to respond to these questions through a threefold process. First, I
start from the ground by listening deeply to the heterogeneous lived realities
of Malaysian gay men, steeped as they are in their socio-cultural, religious,
political, and ethnic entanglements. I agree with Song that theologizing
“must begin with humanity and all that it means because it is in humanity
that God is theologically engaged.”34 I am convinced that my vocation to
construct queer/trans theologies begins from and relies on this grounded
approach as a necessary “contextual language”35 and an incarnational nexus
between theory and praxis in the process of theologizing.
Second, I choose to frame my theological discussion with the methodology
of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences’ (FABC), “a transnational
body comprising fifteen Asian Catholic bishops’ conferences [which] has
made a significant impact on the development, orientation, and growth of
the spiritual and theological life of the [Roman] Catholic Church in Asia.”36
The FABC’s document that allows me to speak from concomitant spaces
of mainstream tradition and transgression is entitled Methodology: Asian
Christian Theology. It encourages “new resources of cultures, religions, peo-
ples, their history, struggles, movements, their sufferings and hopes, as well
as economic and political realities” as loci theologici “[to see] in them the
action of the Spirit.” The aim of this theological methodology is to pursue
“ways to integrate the experiences of Asia, the experience of [Asian peo-
ples’] own forebears, and [Asian peoples’] own psyche, into their Christian
faith.”37 Through this means, I am attentive, although selectively, to Chen
Kuan-Hsing’s call for a greater circulation of “the diverse historical experi-
ences and rich social practices of Asia . . . to provide alternative horizons
and perspectives.”38
In this respect, the FABC is not excluding Asian non-Christians, nor is it
calling for uniformly universal experiences of Asian Catholics. Contrary to
romanticized thought, the idea of sensus fidelium is not a perfect consensus
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  57
from the highest to the lowest levels of the Catholic hierarchy. “Consensus”
is a utopic ideal that has never been, can never be, and need not be achieved
in order for the flesh-and-blood realities of Asian peoples to act as loci theo-
logici. The sheer number and diversity of global Catholics in terms of belief
and practice in every age points logically against a totalizing understand-
ing of sensus fidelium. Through the years, much of Christianity, and not
just Roman Catholicism, has been understood and practiced in innumerable
ways. I argue that the FABC’s main intention is to link theology and lived
experiences in order to ensure an ongoing, mutual relevance of the faith in
the lives of Asian peoples.
While the efforts of the FABC are noble, one limitation of this theologi-
cal methodology lies in its unspoken assumption that the lived experiences
of Asian peoples are unquestionably heteronormative and cisnormative
experiences. The (obvious) upshot is that non-heteronormative and non-­
cisnormative lived experiences are overlooked, dismissed, and excluded from
any theological significance. The FABC is a Roman Catholic entity that does
not make any particular reference to queer/trans people, but I argue for a
more inclusive expansion of its theological methodology that can enfold
the lived experiences of Asian queer/trans peoples. Through this process, I
engage in an unlocking of the FABC’s theological implements to release sto-
ries of the lavishness of God in queer/trans lives. I do so provisionally rather
than absolutely, as all forms of theologizing are but tentative endeavors that
demand constant reflection, critique, and transformation.
Third, I extract and deploy frameworks from numerous theologies –
­conglomerations of diverse scriptural, traditional, rational, and experiential
insights – to analyze these narratives. In so doing, I do two things. First,
I “draw on both Western and Eastern experiences for theological reflec-
tions as the differences are all shared within the same global ecumenical
community.”39 Second, I turn heteronormative assumptions embedded in
mainstream theology on their heads and use some key thoughts which have
long elided queer/trans people for the benefit of doing theology with and for
queer/trans people. This, I contend, is doing theology that avoids “look[ing]
at humanity from a glass castle” and inhales instead “the odour of the people
and of the street.”40 It is a form of theologizing that serves “as a means of
social transformation in concrete forms of multisystemic oppression.”41

Unlocking divine lavishness: theologizing from

the ground up
I plan to pursue theological expositions of divine lavishness by moving from
one gay man’s confession to another. In this way, this chapter preserves
through its pages the conversations I had at several points in time with the
four men who spoke liberally (in English) on their sexuality and faith in
this chapter. My conversations serve the purpose of unpacking the nuances
of divine lavishness in human lives – how do these gay men imagine the
58  Joseph N. Goh
identities and performances of God in their everyday experiences? How do
their beliefs assist them as Malaysian Christians who are interpellated as
songsang, and in turn, what can men who are considered songsang yet reject
this term offer to theological thought?
I begin with Henri, a “liberal Anglican” and Tamil-Indian Malaysian who
works in a non-governmental organization. A well-educated and eloquent
man, he grew up in the faith, and was often subjected to the pressures of
a heterosexual marriage and childbearing from his family. He has stopped
attending services at his local church, weary of the many missives of “sancti-
fied homophobia”42 that are constantly delivered from the pulpit. Neverthe-
less, Henri maintains a close relationship with God within the space of a
personal spirituality. He shares his thoughts in response to my question on
what “God is saying to [him]” as a Christian gay man:

Goh: And what do you think God is saying to you in terms of your
sexuality?
Henri: I don’t know . . . yeah, I don’t know (laughs) . . . before in this
sort of my coming out journey, you know I used to pray, I said
God this is wrong, I shouldn’t be this, please change me, and guess
what, nothing happened, that miracle of changing didn’t . . . hap-
pen, and even now I say, God if this is wrong, if I am going against
your will, then show me, give me a very clear sign, because clearly
I don’t respond well to hints and subtleties, if you have to strike
me by lightning then please do it because that’s . . . I’m not gonna
see it any other way . . . knock on wood I haven’t been struck by
lightning yet (chuckles) so, suppose if there was a message in that,
it would be, yeah, you are what you are.

In his repeated claims of “I don’t know,” Henri reveals that the connection
between his sexuality and sense of faith does not lend itself to him with
either absolute clarity. In the process of learning to understand his sexuality
in his “coming out journey,” or the process of sexual self-disclosure, Henri’s
initial belief – which was reflected in his prayer – was that that being gay “is
wrong” and merited divine disapproval. Undeniably, he saw a dissonance
between his sexuality and his faith, which led him to implore God to “change
[him]” because he felt that he “shouldn’t be this.” These feelings of guilt and
sinfulness due to being gay initially prompt Henri, like many other queer/
trans Christians, to pray the gay away.43
Specifically, Henri’s conflicted feelings reflect the stand of Malaysian Angli-
can Bishop Ng Moon Hing on the inadmissibility of homosexual expressions,
and that “the Bible teaches the sanctity of marriage of one man-one woman
as husband and wife in a family.”44 Traditional Christian thought which
valorizes heteronormativity through popular axioms such as “the bible says
that homosexuality is a sin” and “the bible says that marriage is between a
man and a woman” rattles Henri’s self-belief as a “valid” Christian. Yong
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  59
Ting Jun denounces such sentiments as scriptural apotheosis which prompt
Christians leaders and educators to “read the bible through the socialized
eyes of their cultures and religions [and] look upon and treat wo/men and
LGBTQ people with contempt.”45
The disapproval of the Anglican Church, as is the case with many other
mainstream Malaysian churches, is predicated on the belief that homosexual
expressions contradict what is often indexed as divinely ordered sexuality
and gender. Donald L. Boisvert remarks that “it is not just the fact of male-
on-male bodies doing unholy things that is problematic; it’s also male-on-
male bodies doing suspiciously supposedly un-masculine things, or behaving
in decidedly unmanly ways.”46 Therefore, ecclesiastical disapproval pertains
to the transgression of socially sanctioned sexual and gender roles, inasmuch
as it relates to the notion of divine disapprobation. Godly men, as such, do
not have sex with other men if they are to remain as men approved by God.
Henri finds that he has never really discarded such intuitions of being
“wrong.” He continues to beseech God for “a very clear sign” as an approval
of his sexuality. Interestingly, Henri tests God for his validity as a gay man.
He does this in two ways: First, he implores the divine for a “change.”
Second, he asks to be “struck by lightning” if being gay is something that
“[goes] against [God’s] will.” That Henri has neither experienced a purported
conversion from being gay to straight (or even somewhere in between!), nor
struck down by the natural elements becomes for him the ultimate revelation
of divine endorsement: that “[he is] what [he is],” and it is pleasing to God.
He experiences divine acceptance and approval through the absence of a
successful conversion to heterosexuality and penalty by lightning.
Absence of change or penalty become indicators of the presence of God
in Henri’s life as a gay man. This knowledge, in turn, acts as evidence for
him that he is the consequence of divine omnificence, and that God is totally
cognizant of his sexuality. God, as such, is imagined as the Profound Knower
and Endorser of Queer Sexuality.
Henri becomes astutely aware that by accepting and living his life as a gay
man, he is also accepting and living a godly life. Interestingly, while Henri
conscripts God as a steady presence in his life, the image of the divine is
transformed from a Potential Punisher to an unconditionally accepting Pro-
found Knower. For Henri, divine lavishness comes by way of an experience
of God’s total understanding and embrace of the gay man that he is.
I move from Henri to Freddie, a Hokkien-Chinese Malaysian educator and
activist in his early 30s who calls himself a “liberal Christian” and talks about
a sense of God that is similar to Henri. Akin to Henri, he is no stranger to
ecclesiastical homophobia. When we spoke, Freddie still identified as a Chris-
tian, albeit an angry one. Nevertheless, in recent years, he has distanced him-
self from Christianity. The following excerpt is a glimpse into Freddie’s faith:

God is love, and that is what God is all about. . . . I hang on to that
because God is not going to judge me for who I am, because he will still
60  Joseph N. Goh
love me for who I am, who he has made me to be. And with that, it gives
me the confidence to say that, you know, God loves, he even loves the
most homophobic person ever. Um, because that is . . . his nature, it’s
written there that God is love. You know, he cannot be anything else.
It’s just mind-boggling for me how some homophobic people can’t see
that in their own religion, where they can distort the fact that they can
turn into God hate this, God hate that, when actually it is impossible for
him to feel anything other than love. And love towards his own creation,
his own people . . . that’s what I hold on to, and that’s what I believe.

Fundamental to Freddie’s Christian beliefs is the notion that “God is love.”

This notion translates into an acute awareness of a non-judgmental God
who “will still love [him] for who [he is],” not unlike Henri’s awareness that
God approves of him for “what [he is].” I argue that Freddie’s understanding
of divine love echoes Patrick S. Cheng’s statement that “God’s love is . . .
extreme because it breaks down all kinds of human boundaries [and that]
both God and LGBT people send forth a radical love that breaks down fixed
categories and boundaries.”47
Cheng’s argument is that God in Jesus Christ deconstructs the binaries of
sacred/profane, human/divine, and life/death, and acts as an Unconditional
Lover who breaks through the barricades of human convention and assump-
tion to reveal God’s radically embracing, inclusive, and unconditional love
through queer/trans people. In a parallel manner, through their identities
and expressions, queer/trans people dissolve strict binaries and classifica-
tions of man/woman and straight/gay, and allow for more fluid forms of
human identities and relationships. It is this divine inclusive love that Freddie
understands within himself and for himself. In other words, he experiences
God as one who loves him fully, and who allows him the freedom to love
beyond heteronormative constraints. He concludes that who he is as a gay
man is precisely as God “has made [him] to be,” and that he is loved as he is.
Freddie buttresses his “confidence” in the loving acceptance and approval
of God by providing several contrasting realities. First, he exposes how
“some homophobic people,” which may be individual, communal and/
or hierarchical adherents to a religion which professes a God who is inca-
pable of “feel[ing] anything other than love” are themselves the culprits
who manipulate and “distort” images of God for hateful homophobic agen-
das within a “stigmatizing climate.”48 These adherents, I suggest, become
ungodly for Freddie because they are unwelcomed – using Andrew K.T. Yip’s
term – “moral arbiter[s]”49 who skew the image of an all-loving God and are
“viewed as being beset with prejudice and a lack of understanding.”
Second, Freddie does not only concentrate on his conviction in God’s love
for him as a gay man. He sees the breadth of God’s love as including even
ungodly, “homophobic people” that misrepresent a God who loves uncondi-
tionally. By exposing this misrepresentation of the divine, Freddie effectively
reveals the biblically inspired belief – “it’s written there” – that unconditional
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  61
love is the core trait and “nature” of Allah Pemboros, a Wasteful God who
unreservedly loves both gay men and their antagonists. God’s extravagant
love does not contain any element of discriminatory bifurcation between gay
men and those who oppose them.
In other words, Freddie avers that the acceptance, approval, and love
of God is not just for gay men, but also for those who project an image of
the divine that is contrary to the actual person of God who bestows love
“towards [God’s] own creation, [God’s] own people” with neither preju-
dice nor discrimination. This is an important strategy, as “the concept of
a non-judgmental deity . . . lies in stark contrast with his own experiences
of church hierarchy and fellow Christians who are discriminatory towards
[gay] men.”50 Hence I argue that what constitutes the lavishness of God for
Freddie is the absence of a discriminatory bifurcation in God’s love.
I suggest that Freddie also languishes over the fact that while a loving God
accepts and approves of him “for who [he is],” those who reject gay men and
hold allegiance to this same God are unable to find it within themselves to
mirror God in God’s all-embracing love. Their positionality contradicts what
George Zachariah envisions as the Christian vocation “to practice the spirit
of reconciliation for unity in the bond of love and peace”51 rather than an
unmitigated exclusion of the different. The tragedy of the situation is that the
gay-affirming God of love whom Freddie knows appears to be dissimilar to
the God of “some homophobic people.” His experiences demonstrate that,
in Margaret Robinson’s words, “to discover the divine . . . apart from the
sexualized violence of heteronormativity is in effect to discover a different
God than the one most Christians would recognize.”52
A strong sense of faith in an all-loving God for Freddie is reflected in the
idea of a purposeful divine creation for Buck, to whom I now turn. Recently
baptized, Buck is a 56-year-old Chinese-Malaysian Pentecostal Christian
who works in the entertainment industry. Amidst swirls of cigarette smoke
and sips of strong coffee, Buck spoke with undisguised zeal about a “mis-
sion” that he had received from God to share with fellow gay men that it
was possible to be simultaneously gay and Christian. Interested in this claim,
I asked him to share his ideas of God:

Goh: Who is God to [you]?

Buck: God is the creator of this world! Created me, created the world,
created everybody. . . . God has wonderful teachings for all of us,
for mankind . . . Everything I do belongs to God! God has given
me everything I have! So I have to give thanks.
Goh: And . . . do you see any connection, or conflict, or both, between
your beliefs in God, your religious beliefs, and your sexuality?
Buck: No, there’s no conflict. God made me the way I am. (Raises voice.)
So if God made me gay, so I’m gay! I believe that God made me
gay. Because there was never a time in my life where I had to
choose. It’s not a choice.
62  Joseph N. Goh
The primary image of God for Buck is as the “Creator of this world”
and of all human beings, including himself. His conceptualization of God
evokes the reality that “all sexed beings, whether queer or conforming,
have their origin in God.”53 Hence, as Lai-shan Yip contends, “diverse
sexual expression is affirmed as reflecting the Triune God.”54 In these
realities, Buck firmly situates himself as a gay man. Emanating from this
image for him is the idea of God as the Instructor of “wonderful teach-
ings . . . for [hu]mankind” and the Generous Provider of “everything [he
has].” God, as such, becomes the progenitor of all that Buck is, knows,
and has.
In responding to my inquiry on the relationship between his faith and
sexuality, Buck adamantly and repeatedly insists that “God made [him]
the way [he is]” as a gay man. His “being-himself-ness” – a term I used
earlier – and the resoluteness in the belief that he is gay not by choice but
by creation contradicts the claims of many who propose that a conver-
sion from lust and misguided ideas is crucial to divine approval. Pauline
Ong laments how LGBTI people are often schooled in destructive rhetoric
“that attacks their inherent worth and dignity, diminishing their value as
sacred beings created in the image of God.”55 Buck’s retort that “if God
made [him] gay, so [he’s] gay” takes on a tone of receptiveness to, and
continuing exercise of divine purposeful createdness that nullifies homo-
phobic attacks.
Nevertheless, his experiences do not merely indicate the ascription of a
gay identity to divine creation. There is something here that is more than
simply “if God made me gay, so I’m gay,” and resting on these theological
laurels. The mounting excitement in his voice as we continue our conver-
sation suggests an intimate encounter with God on his part, in which he
becomes powerfully aware that his createdness as a gay man is to be “liked
spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfilment, fruition to, to
share in just being”56 by God.
In other words, Buck shows that God has not only created him gay –
an Unconditionally Accepting God revels in him, not unlike Freddie who
understands that God loves him as he is. I suggest that this cognizance of
divine reveling is also a recognition of divine lavishness, for which he “give
thanks” to the Provider who has deliberately and generously gifted him with
his sexuality, and actually likes him for it!
While Buck focuses on his createdness as God’s munificence, Hosea
talks about divine intention. When I met this eloquent 44-year-old Hakka-
Chinese Pentecostal Christian Malaysian who works – in his own words –
“in language,” he was keen to share his journey from being a self-loathing
gay man to one who continues to rejoice in the nexus of queer sexuality
and faith. Hosea, whose narrative is the last to appear in this chapter, was
especially proud of the initiative taken by some members of his church
to form an unofficial support group for queer/trans Christians. We spoke
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  63
at length about his experiences, and I asked him about his feelings as a
gay man:

Um . . . most of the time I’m . . . comfortable with myself, I think because
of the last few years so I have to . . . know people who are gay, and seen
how comfortable they are, and then have also been reading up on . . .
Christian books that are affirming of homosexuality, and so I am becom-
ing comfortable and, because I now know that, you know, being gay is
not wrong . . . it’s just a part of . . . human expression, natural human
expression . . . it is intended by God for some reasons that he, we may
not know.

For Hosea, what is central to his sense of being a man who straddles his
sexuality and faith is the belief that being gay “is intended by God,” although
the actual reason and purpose of his sexuality lies beyond his immediate and
complete comprehension and knowledge. He acknowledges that a large part
of being “comfortable with [him]self” is due to the inspiration that he draws
from other “people who are gay” who are self-assured. I am convinced that
the presence of “comfortable” gay people is crucial for Hosea, because it
becomes a sign for him that “God is present in [queer] communities, creating
the hope and reality of at-home-ment.”57 For Nancy L. Wilson, the idea of
“at-home-ment” means that queer people “create environments of beauty,
safety, and home”58 for themselves and others in deference to God. Rather
than being rejected by God, queer people become the implements and vessels
that incarnate the presence of God to others. God, according to Rose Wu
“is not a solitude divine being but a God of communion and solidarity”59 in
human–divine and human–human relationships.
I suggest that it is God as the Plenitude of At-Home-Ness who is present
in self-confident gay people whom Hosea experiences. In deriving strength
and support from such people, he derives strength and support from God.
This situation, in turn, fuels his sense of being “at home” with himself as
a gay man. Hosea’s self-acceptance also ensues from his reading of gay-
affirming “Christian books” that provide him with constructive views on
being both gay and Christian. As Daryl White and Kendall O. White Jr
point out, the writings of queer Christians are infused with themes in which
“lonely self-hate is transcended by loving embrace, and painful rejection is
replaced by graceful assurance.”60 Through a sort of anonymous but pal-
pable queer solidarity, confessions of other gay men inspire and embolden
his own confessions.
Hosea’s association with other gay men and personal accumulation of
knowledge on sexuality and faith serve to dispel a notion of “wrongness”
and incompatibility in being both gay and Christian. Instead, he discerns his
sexuality from a perspective of faith by injecting it with the idea of divine
knowledge and purposefulness. Not unlike Henri, Hosea understands that
64  Joseph N. Goh
he is somehow meant to live as a gay man, that his sexuality is integral to
his existence as “natural human expression.” To embrace his “being-himself-
ness” is to embrace and live out his sexuality as a gay man as intended by
God. To live life as intended by God, in turn, is ultimately to participate in
divine lavishness.

Divine lavishness as a talking point:

songsang stories and beyond
Henri, Freddie, Buck, and Hosea are gay Malaysian men who cherish their
Christian faith and move beyond heterosexist and cissexist notions of repen-
tance, counselling, and reparative therapy in order to secure their own meth-
ods of validation as Christians. Their various strategies to live out their
sexualities and beliefs in positive and beneficial ways as songsang men tap
into notions of divine lavishness, which affirm the reality of “sexual persons
reflected in God, and God reflected in sexual persons.”61
God is the Profound Knower who approves of gay men, and the Uncondi-
tional Lover who bestows love in an inclusive and non-discriminatory way
toward both gay men and those who oppose them. Furthermore, this divine
lavishness is encountered in their experiences of a creator God who purpose-
fully and lovingly creates gay men. In this regard, God is also the Instructor
and Generous Provider who pours out wonderful teachings and gifts to all
people, including gay men. God is the Plenitude of At-Home-Ness, or the
One whose comforting presence is learned from and experienced in the lives
of (other) gay men who embody self-confidence.
I am curious as to the extent to which the confessions of these four men
on the workings of divine lavishness in their lives can and will reach the
ears of Malaysian mainstream ecclesiastical leaders – if individuals, com-
munities, and hierarchies are willing to listen without prior discrimination,
judgment, and accusations of sinfulness. I contend that a careful listening to
tales of God’s lavishness among these men – and of all people – can spur the
aforementioned leaders to repent, to confess, to convert. They may be, from
their perspectives, acting out of the best of intentions, but their actions have
far-reaching destructive consequences on those who interiorize the execution
of these intentions.
They need to repent of their unwillingness to accept the reality that queer/
trans Malaysians can exercise agency “as spiritual beings in and of them-
selves.”62 They need to confess that they choose to remain insensitive to
the fact that literal interpretations of scripture and unproblematic subscrip-
tions to official pronouncements against gender variance and sexual diversity
only serve to paint a homophobic and transphobic portrait of God, and
drive queer/trans Christians away from communities in which they rightfully
belong. Leaders need to confess that they have not listened from the heart to
the confessions of queer/trans Malaysians – not only the joyful fulfilments
of gender and sexual “transgressions,” but also confessions of love for life
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  65
and God as who they are. Leaders need to confess that they have been and
continue to be complicit with the state in perpetuating a negative image of
the songsang Malaysian, thus colluding with the evil of destroying human
lives. Church leaders cannot continue to ostracize queer/trans people by
insisting that they either conform to ecclesiastical dictates or be left outside
the gates of theological acceptability.
Queer/trans people may be “outsiders,” but “outsiders” matter. Their
pleasures and pain, their ideas and experiences of God, matter. I concur
with Michael Bernard Kelly that “the witness of the ‘outsiders,’ proclaimed
with courage and love, is essential if the Church is to become what [it] is
called to be – a light to the nations, a sacrament of liberating love of Christ
for all people.”63
At the same time, as queer/trans Christians who have a stake in ecclesias-
tical teachings, we also need to listen to constructive perspectives of divine
lavishness that churches have to offer. We need to confess that we have often
thought, spoken, and acted in a myopic fashion. We are called “to a deeper
understanding of how . . . so-called adversaries have come to their beliefs, how
their own suffering might prompt such judgmental attitudes and beliefs.”64
Very often, the homophobia and transphobia exhibited by church leadership
stem from a place that births the noblest of intentions, buoyed by a vision that
seeks integrity and fidelity to the faith, and a desire for none to be “lost.” Not
all leaders act out of malice. We need to acknowledge this reality.
We also need to confess that we have engaged in self-destructive behaviors
that cause harm to ourselves and others, sometimes as part of our retalia-
tion to ecclesiastical censures. We need to admit that condemnation from
mainstream churches does not entitle us to a self-pitying, self-victimizing,
justifiable carte blanche of “anything goes” in relation to sexual ethics.65 In
this sense, we also need to repent. If we are to proudly and boldly confess
and reclaim our right as queer/trans followers of Christ whose lives can be
valuable loci theologici, we must do so as people who constantly reorien-
tate ourselves to the flourishing of human life. Our lives need to reflect an
unrelenting cooperation with God as persons who are continuously created
in God’s loving image.
Yes, I believe that both queer/trans people and Malaysian mainstream
church leaders of the twenty-first century are called to humble themselves
and undergo conversion in any and all areas that are not life-giving, to
embrace a “radical reorientation”66 of perception and vision toward genuine
love. Might this belief not amplify S. Batumalai’s comment that “the God of
love related to us lovingly and expects us to be a loving people”?67
I also believe that this reorientation cannot and will not materialize until
both parties learn to set aside the metanarratives of truth with which they
have already invalidated each other, and replace arrogance with wasteful
extravagance. Confession and conversion are processes marked by hesi-
tation, fear, and expectation, but also by honest, mutually constructive
exchanges shared between two parties in a spirit of loving lavishness. Insya
66  Joseph N. Goh
Allah, heartfelt dialogues of life and faith can catalyze and facilitate the
understanding and celebration of divine lavishness which operates without
discrimination.

Notes
  1 This is a de-identified collage of numerous accounts that in no way betrays the
confessional seal which I hold dearly to this day.
  2 Thomas Johansson and Jesper Anasson, Fatherhood in Transition: Masculinity,
Identity and Everyday Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 161.
  3 C. S. Song, “New Frontiers of Theology in Asia: Ten Theological Theses,” The
Southeast Asia Journal of Theology 20, no. 1 (1979): 15.
  4 D. J. Louw, “Beyond ‘Gayism’? Towards a Theology of Sensual, Erotic Embodi-
ment within an Eschatological Approach to Human Sexuality,” Journal of Theol-
ogy for Southern Africa 132 (2008): 113.
  5 Utusan Online, “Seks Songsang Terdedah Penyakit Berjangkit,” Utusan Online,
December 30, 2010, www.utusan.com.my/utusan/info.asp?y=2010&dt=
1230&pub=Utusan_Malaysia&sec=Dalam_Negeri&pg=dn_14.htm.
  6 Utusan Online, “Seksualiti Merdeka 2011 Cuba Promosi Budaya ‘Binatang’:
Ibrahim Ali,” Utusan Online, November 3, 2011, www.utusan.com.my/utusan/
info.asp?y=2011&dt=1103&pub=Utusan_Malaysia&sec=Muka_Hadapan&
pg=mh_04.htm.
  7 Virginia R. Mollenkott, “We Come Bearing Gifts: Seven Lessons Religious Con-
gregations Can Learn from Transpeople,” in Trans/Formations, ed. Lisa Isher-
wood and Marcella Althaus-Reid (London: SCM Press, 2009), 48.
  8 In some ways, theologizing on gay men and their vicissitudes hints at apologetics,
but this strategy remains a necessary task in countries like Malaysia that continue
to criminalize sexual activities between men in the name of religion.
  9 Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology, Rev. and expanded (Maryk-
noll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 3.
10 Hugo Córdova Quero, “Embodied (Dis)Placements: The Intersections of Gender,
Sexuality, and Religion in Migration Studies,” in Intersections of Religion and
Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, ed. Jennifer B. Saunders, Elena Fid-
dian-Qasmiyeh, and Susanna Snyder (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 156.
11 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 5.
12 James Alison, On Being Liked (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 58.
13 Department of Statistics, Malaysia, “Population Distribution and Basic
Demographic Characteristics 2010,” 2010, www.dosm.gov.my/v1/index.
php?r=column/ctheme&menu_id=L0pheU43NWJwRWVSZklWdzQ4TlhUUT
09&bul_id=MDMxdHZjWTk1SjFzTzNkRXYzcVZjdz09.
14 S. Batumalai, “Goodwill and God’s Will in Malaysia,” CTC Bulletin (Bulletin
of the Commission on Theological Concerns), Christian Conference of Asia, XI,
no. 1 (1992): 24–31.
15 Jojo M. Fung, Shoes-Off Barefoot We Walk: A Theology of Shoes-Off (Theologi
Buka Kasut) (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Longman Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., 1992).
16 John Cheong, “Christian Education as Mission in Islamic Malaysia: A Survey of
Contextual Approaches,” Asia Journal of Theology 25, no. 1 (2011): 59–81.
17 Dulcie Abraham, “Feminine Images of God and the Search for a Spirituality of
Wholeness,” Faith Renewed: A Report on the First Asian Women’s Consultation
on Interfaith Dialogue, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Asia
Women’s Resource Centre for Culture and Theology (AWRC), November 1, 1989).
18 Jojo M. Fung, Ripples on the Water (Johor, Malaysia: Diocesan Office for Social
Communication, 2003).
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  67
19 Sharon A. Bong, “Sexualising Faith and Spiritualising Sexuality in Postco-
lonial Narratives of Same-Sex Intimacy,” in Persons and Sexuality: Probing
the Boundaries, ed. Carlo Zuccarini and Alison Moore (Oxford, UK: Inter-­
Disciplinary Press, 2009), 33–44 and Becoming Queer and Religious in Malay-
sia and Singapore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Goh, Living Out
Sexuality and Faith.
20 Julian C. H. Lee, Policing Sexuality: Sex, Society and the State (London: Zed
Books, 2011), 56.
21 See Lee, 97–108.
22 Jade See, “What It Means to Suffer in Silence: Challenges to Mental Health
Access among LGBT People (Policy for Action No. 2/ 2019),” (Galen Centre
for Health and Social Policy, April 2019), https://galencentre.org/2019/04/22/
conversion-therapy-is-a-form-of-violence/.
23 Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur, “Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur,” Facebook,
accessed July 7, 2017, www.facebook.com/gskualalumpur/.
24 Carrey Yubong, “Antioch Mission in Asia: Autocephalous (Independent) Church
in Catholic Apostolic Tradition,” accessed July 18, 2017, www.australian
churchofantioch.com/antioch-mission-in-asia.html.
25 Dayalan Danabalan, Hazri Haili, Tham Jia Vern, and Amelinder Bhullar con-
tributed suggestions to this woeful list in Malay, Chinese, and Indian languages.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to critically analyze all these terms.
26 The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia, “Malaysian Penal Code”
(1997), secs. 377 A – C, www.agc.gov.my/agcportal/index.php?r=portal2/
lom2&id=1687.
27 Free Malaysia Today, “Seks Dalam Penjara, Hukuman Ditambah 9 Tahun,”
Free Malaysia Today, January 26, 2017, www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/
bahasa/2017/01/26/seks-dalam-penjara-hukuman-ditambah-9-tahun/.
28 Marco Ferrarese et al., “Identity Formations in Contemporary Malaysia: Traversing
and Transcending Ethnicity,” in Malaysia Post-Mahathir: A Decade of Change?, ed.
James Chin and Joern Dosch (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2015), 54.
29 Rose Wu, Liberating the Church from Fear: The Story of Hong Kong’s Sexual
Minorities (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Women Christian Council, 2000).
30 Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Queer I Stand: Lifting the Skirts of God,” in The Sexual
Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa
Isherwood (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 99–109.
31 Susannah Cornwall, Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Condi-
tions and Christian Theology (London: Equinox, 2010).
32 Rebecca M. M. Voelkel, Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the
Movement for Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017).
33 See Adeline Lum, “Celebrating Manhood in Christ,” Christianity Malaysia,
March 5, 2014, http://christianitymalaysia.com/wp/celebrating-manhood-
christ/; Adeline Lum, “Freedom in Christ for Sexually Broken People,”
Christianity Malaysia, April 12, 2013, http://christianitymalaysia.com/wp/
freedom-christ-sexually-broken-people/.
34 Song, “New Frontiers of Theology in Asia: Ten Theological Theses,” 20.
35 Lai-shan Yip, “Listening to the Passion of Catholic Nu-Tongzhi: Developing
a Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology in Hong Kong,” in Queer Religion, ed.
Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2012), 74.
36 Jonathan Y. Tan, Christian Mission among the Peoples of Asia (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 2014), 95–6.
37 Office of Theological Concerns, “Methodology: Asian Christian Theology,” in
For All Peoples of Asia: Documents from 1997 to 2001, ed. Franz-Josef Eilers,
vol. 3 (Quezon City, Philippines: Claretian Publications, 2000), 331.
68  Joseph N. Goh
38 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 212.
39 Yip, “Listening to the Passion of Catholic Nu-Tongzhi,” 64.
40 Francis, “Letter of the Holy Father to the Grand Chancellor of the ‘Pontifi-
cal Universidad Católica Argentina’ on the 100th Anniversary of the Found-
ing of the Faculty of Theology,” Libreria Editrice Vaticana, March 3, 2015,
https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2015/documents/papa-francesco_
20150303_lettera-universita-cattolica-argentina.html.
41 Wu, Liberating the Church from Fear, 98.
42 Michael Bernard Kelly, Seduced by Grace: Contemporary Spirituality, Gay Expe-
rience and Christian Faith (Melbourne, Australia: Clouds of Magellan, 2007),
196.
43 Denise L. Levy and Patricia Reeves, “Resolving Identity Conflict: Gay, Lesbian,
and Queer Individuals with a Christian Upbringing,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian
Social Services 23, no. 1 (2011): 53–68.
44 Cited in Elizabeth Yuan, “Malaysia’s First Openly Gay Pastor to Marry,” CNN,
August 31, 2011, www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/31/malaysian.pastor.gay.wedding/
index.html.
45 Yong Ting Jin, “The Bible and Critical Feminist Hermeneutics,” in God’s image
33, no. 1 (2014): 7.
46 Donald L. Boisvert, “What Kind of Man Are You? Same-Sex Relations, Mascu-
linity and Anglican Queer Malaise,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 42,
no. 2 (2013): 233.
47 Cheng, Radical Love, 51.
48 Andrew K. T. Yip, “Attacking the Attacker: Gay Christians Talk Back,” The
British Journal of Sociology 48, no. 1 (1997): 116.
49 Yip, 121.
50 Joseph N. Goh, “Survivalist Sexuality-Faith Strategies in Biblical Meaning-Mak-
ings: Non-Heteronormative Malaysian Christian Men and Negotiations of Sex-
ual Self-Affirmation,” QUEST: Studies on Religion & Culture in Asia 1 (2016):
44.
51 George Zachariah, “Church and Homophobia: Envisioning an Inclusive Church,”
in Christian Responses to Issues of Human Sexuality and Gender Diversity: A
Guide to the Churches in India, ed. Philip Kuruvilla (New Delhi and Nagpur,
India: ISPCK/NCCI, 2017), 14.
52 Margaret Robinson, “Reading Althaus-Reid: As a Bi Feminist Theo/Method-
ological Resource,” Journal of Bisexuality 10, nos. 1–2 (2010): 117.
53 Jane M. Grovijahn, “Godly Sex, a Queer Quest of Holiness,” Theology & Sexu-
ality 14, no. 2 (2008): 122.
54 Yip, “Listening to the Passion of Catholic Nu-Tongzhi,” 76.
55 Ong, “Towards a Responsible and Life-Giving Ministry with and among Sexual
and Gender Minorities,” 339.
56 Alison, On Being Liked, 15.
57 Nancy L. Wilson, “Queer Culture and Sexuality as a Virtue of Hospitality,” in
Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship, ed. Robert E. Shore-Goss
and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997),
27.
58 Ibid.
59 Wu, Liberating the Church from Fear, 85.
60 Daryl White and Kendall O. White, Jr, “Queer Christian Confessions: Spiritual
Autobiographies of Gay Christians,” Culture and Religion 5, no. 2 (2004): 209.
61 Goh, Living Out Sexuality and Faith, 87.
62 Eric M. Rodriguez, “At the Intersection of Church and Gay: A Review of the
Psychological Research on Gay and Lesbian Christians,” Journal of Homosexual-
ity 57, no. 1 (2010): 8.
 Songsang, confessions, and theologizings  69
63 Kelly, Seduced by Grace, 48.
64 Jonathan Alexander and Karen Yescavage, “Bi, Buddhist, Activist: Refusing
Intolerance, But Not Refusing Each Other,” Journal of Bisexuality 10, no. 1–2
(2010): 156.
65 See Joseph N. Goh, “‘Why Is It Wrong?’: Conceptualisations of Sexual Wrongdo-
ing and Sexual Ethics among Gay-Identifying Malaysian Men,” in Doing Asian
Theological Ethics in a Cross-Cultural and an Interreligious Context, ed. Yiu
Sing Lúcás Chan, James F. Keenan, and Shaji George Kochuthara (Bengaluru,
India: Dharmaram Publications, 2016), 347–60.
66 John Paul II, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (E-Book) (Libreria Edi-
trice Vaticana, 1997), para. 1431, www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-
we-believe/catechism/catechism-of-the-catholic-church/epub/index.cfm.
67 S. Batumalai, “An Understanding of Malaysian Theology,” Asia Journal of The-
ology 4, no. 1 (1990): 45.
Part II

Repainting saints
4 Nahum Zenil
“The Virgin Mary became
my mother”
Justin Sabia-Tanis

Artist Nahum B. Zenil employed a unique strategy to survive as a gay

youth in rural Mexico: he envisioned the Virgin Mary and Jesus as his
immediate family, closer to him than his own relatives. The presence and
love of the Holy Family sustained him both throughout childhood and
his adult life. His art reflects this profound connection, particularly to
the Virgin of Guadalupe, often utilizing traditional forms to testify to her
significant influence in his life. What is radical, however, are his depictions
of her in his unabashedly gay and sexual art. Zenil’s art witnesses to her
abiding presence and her passionate love for all Mexicans, including those
who are gay.
Zenil’s art includes the image of the Virgin and his own self-portrait to
illustrate both the integration of sexuality – both physically and in terms
of his identity – and his deeply personal spirituality. Through his self-
portraits, he depicts a wide range of theological images, connecting both
radical sexuality and traditional iconography, and challenging cultural
and religious homophobia. His work illustrates his views that sexuality
is natural and joyful. The bodies he paints are organic and often combine
elements of the natural world with and within the human form, while
his use of self-portraiture puts himself in direct contact with the sacred
subject matter. Through his art, he makes a clear claim for the inclusion
of queer and sexualized images within traditional sacred art motifs and
shows the redemptive power of religious iconography and devotion for
queer people.
Zenil’s paintings are revolutionary, too, in their sense of profound embodi-
ment. The artist uses his own image as the body of Christ, the Virgin of Gua-
dalupe, Juan Diego, countless protesters, an angel, and so on, thus taking
into his body the narratives themselves and then re-revealing them through
his own body to the viewer. It is an invitation not to see Zenil as a new
revelation of Christ or other holy figures but to see that all humanity can be
embodied in this way. By portraying himself as a holy figure, Zenil extends
that invitation to others to see themselves as holy. The long honored stories
of faith become the stories of our own bodies; the incarnation of faith is
re-lived, re-energized through Zenil’s queer bodies.
74  Justin Sabia-Tanis
Background
Born in 1947 in Chicontepec, a village in a rural area of the Mexican state
of Veracruz, Zenil was raised in a Spanish-speaking family, in an area where
the native language of Nahautl remained in use in the surrounding country-
side. He was raised in the Mexican Roman Catholic Church. He describes
his childhood home as extremely isolated with no roads to the house in the
1940s and 1950s, and no sounds of machinery of any kind, just nature. He
was raised primarily by his mother and grandmother, while his father, a
schoolteacher, lived in town. Zenil came early to an awareness of his homo-
sexuality and to a sense of difference, outside of the macho standards of his
culture and family. When asked in an interview about whether his search for
God was a conscious one, the artist answered,

I believe so. It was a response to a need I had from the time I was very
young and it became stronger as I felt more isolated, more alone. This
feeling was very strong, and horrible also, precisely because I was sur-
rounded by my family. I shared their language, their acts, their daily
rituals, but I always felt apart, foreign, alone. Maybe that is why I had
to make myself another family. The Virgin Mary became my mother.
Christ took the place of my father.1

This familial identification with the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus mitigated
the extreme isolation he experienced daily.
In his childhood home, as in almost all Mexican houses of the time and
many today, stood an altar to the Virgin, which was a source of comfort and
fascination for him, and from which he drew inspiration. Eve Kosofksy Sedg-
wick writes of a strong connection with specific items as a common survival
strategy for queer youth, “I think that for many of us in childhood the ability
to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture
or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in
relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource
for survival. . . . This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural texts
and objects.”2 For Zenil, this connection was with first the items on his fam-
ily’s altar dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and then subsequently and
by extension, to the Virgin herself.
As a child, in the midst of an environment unlike himself, surrounded on
all sides by those whose ways of speaking and being in the world were so
familiar yet so alien, Zenil felt a deeper connection with Mary and Jesus,
accessible first through their altars, than with those around him. This strat-
egy of making a place for himself in the midst of isolation, finding affirma-
tion from the spiritual realm when it was not to be found elsewhere, can be
seen over and over again in his work as a mature artist. It is a profoundly
revolutionary act for a gay man. Instead of seeing the Virgin and Jesus
as symbols or part of the largely anti-sexual, anti-gay Mexican Catholic
 Nahum Zenil  75
Church, he instead sees them as his salvation from isolation, societal and
religious condemnation, and conservatism. The clarity of his childhood faith
and connection with the Virgin and Jesus matured into a deep understand-
ing of profound blessing, with critical political and spiritual implications
expressed through art and writing.
Leaving Veracruz in his teens, Zenil went on to complete his schooling in
Mexico City, following in his father’s footsteps to gain his certification as
a teacher, a career that he pursued for 20 years until the mid-1980s, while
studying art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura [National School of Paint-
ing], known as The Esmerelda, from which he graduated in 1964.

Zenil’s role in contemporary Mexican art

Zenil is considered as part of the Neo-Mexicanist movement, a group of
artists who utilized the colors and symbols of Mexico – indigenous, popular,
and colonial – to explore a modern reality.3 The concept of Neo-Mexicanism,
and the movement it represents, is a controversial one. For some critics, Neo-
Mexicanism is simply kitsch, attempting to elevate the sights of everyday
Mexico as art, particularly to motivate sales to American and European col-
lectors.4 Others see this movement as using common symbols, but recreating
and re-conceptualizing them to offer commentary on individual emotion,
identity, and Mexican society.
Alejandro Navarrete Cortés, in an essay on symbolic production in Mex-
ico, critiques the standard definitions and views of this period. He comments
that neo-Mexicanism is, “an inventive term that radically distorted the inten-
tions of artists and the meanings of their works.”5 He goes on to say,

“Neo-Mexicanism” as a concept displaced these artists’ original moti-

vations, especially their extremely personal search for identity (at once
sexual, emotional and cultural), rooted – as I tried to explain at the time – in
a general malaise caused by the nation’s economic, moral, and politi-
cal decomposition, appearing visually in the disintegration of pictorial
space, the superimposition of contradictory discourses, and the repeated
use of fragmented bodies. But there was something else: marginal trends
were then being drawn into the mainstream, responding to the need of
the regime of Carlos Salinas to soften its neo-liberal program with “signs
of identity,” which strangely mirrored the identity politics of various
groups in the US and that had resulted in the boom in Latino studies,
Native American studies, feminist theory, and what would soon emerge
as queer theory.6

Cortés points here to the use of images from Mexican culture as a way to
explore personal identity and the inner emotional landscape, rather than as
the literal depiction of an object or straightforward expression of Mexican
heritage. This description fits very accurately with Zenil’s art. Rather than
76  Justin Sabia-Tanis
simply mimesis, Mexican symbol sets are reworked in his art, and that of
other artists, to reflect a deep level of individuation through the alteration
of common cultural icons. These images reflect Mexicanidad [Mexicanness]
expressed through and within a person, which then offers a springboard for
greater individualization as well as affirmation of a collective experience.
As Cortés points out, this mirrors the emergence of queer theory and its
emphasis on identity.
Cortés goes on to reflect, “one could say that neo-Mexicanism also pro-
poses itself as visualizing a culture exiled in its own country.”7 This is note-
worthy in light of Zenil’s strategy of creating an alternative family for himself
and building an interior home as a way to live within the surrounding repres-
sive society. I would argue that Zenil’s art both reflects his sense of separa-
tion from family and society while asserting a refusal to be exiled from his
country and his heritage. His paintings and collages emphasize his identity
as both gay and Mexican, insisting that he is an intrinsic part of Mexican
society, rather than divergent from it. His use of Mexican cultural icons
places him squarely within his national context, while his use of homoerotic
imagery simultaneously situates him outside of societal norms. The power
of Zenil’s work lies precisely in the juxtaposition-made-unity of these ideas
held in tandem. Yet at the same time, Cortés’ analysis applies to Zenil, who
is most certainly responding to societal forces of homophobia that wish to
exile him and others like him, at least from public view, while exploring in
depth the interior landscape.
Queer cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz describes the work of artists
from marginalized communities as disidentification, a process that takes
apart and restructures elements of the dominant culture thus showing that
it is exclusionary but can be remade. He writes,

I refer to disidentification as a hermeneutic, a process of production,

and a mode of performance. Disidentification can be understood as a
way of shuffling back and forth between reception and production.
For the critic, disidentification is the hermeneutical performance of
decoding mass, high, or any other cultural field from the perspective
of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a representational
hierarchy.8

In this light, we can see Neo-Mexicanism, especially as represented in the

work of gay artists like Zenil, as a restructuring of Mexican iconography to
move from disempowerment to the articulation of the self and the need for
liberation from cultural narratives which diminish and stigmatize the queer
subject. As we will see, Zenil takes the symbols of Mexican culture, and,
in particular, Mexican religious culture, and recodes them through a queer
lens; this has the effect of separating them from an oppressive narrative and
reconfiguring them as a source of liberation.
 Nahum Zenil  77
Use of self-portraiture
One of the primary ways in which Zenil disassembles traditional imagery
and reformulates it as an individual expression is through self-portraiture.
In almost every one of his paintings, Zenil uses his own face, both on his
own body or to depict other bodies, such as Christ or the saints. In some
of his paintings, as we will see, he also uses the face of his longtime part-
ner, Gerardo Vilchis. Zenil’s use of portraiture is distinct. Olivier Debroise
describes his image:

Solemn, austere, the face of Nahum remains imperturbable. In reality,

the mask of Nahum doesn’t have the usual qualities of a self-portrait –
reflecting a personality, being an eloquent representation of an identity.
The oppressive repetition is presented here as an element of recognition,
his face is converted into an archetype, a personal stamp that signs the
painting, as if the signature occupied the center for the painting and
served as a reference point.9

The image of Zenil’s face is essentially unchanging image to image, as

Debroise points out. Just as the symbols from Mexican popular culture are
used allegorically in Neo-Mexicanism, so too is Zenil’s face meant to be a
representation of something more than a self-portrait; he himself becomes a
symbol of queer Mexican identity. There is a wide range of critical perspec-
tives on his self-referential art. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter
writes,

Certainly there is something insistent, even aggressive, about the qual-

ity of defenselessness in Mr. Zenil’s self-portraits. With his unwavering
but unanswering gaze, his body repeatedly exposed but determinedly
unseductive, the artist looks calm and defiantly unembarrassed but tense
and vigilant, as if holding his breath. This impression is compounded
by a graphic style so minutely controlled that its beauties arrive as little
painful shocks and its awkwardnesses can’t be fudged or avoided.10

At the same time, Antonio Viego argues, “Zenil’s compulsive use of self-
portraiture is not read as an expressive practice of homosexual narcissism,
but rather as a critical form of self-reflection, as an existential questioning, if
you will, which serves as an indictment to all Mexicans to be more critical of
themselves and the society in which they live.”11 Zenil’s self-portraits thus are
able to represent not only an individual countenance but to challenge others
to engage in the same thoughtful, intense self-reflection by projecting their
own faces and identities in a similar way into the subject matter.
In considering the question of his self-portraiture, it is important to
remember that Zenil is inspired by the interior landscape. His art works are
78  Justin Sabia-Tanis
images of his emotions, not simply his face and body. Artists can always be
seen within their own works in some way; Zenil chooses to make that pres-
ence profoundly visible by using his own image. He describes other people
as “very strange, very full of mystery,”12 and thus he paints what he is able
to know more accurately and completely – himself, his own emotions, and
his intimate partner and lover. These self-portraits should not be seen as an
example of hubris but of humility because, it seems, in his way of thinking,
one should reverently, cautiously, and rarely attempt to depict that which
others experience and which we cannot adequately comprehend. In an inter-
view, he comments about his use of self-portraiture:

My work is completely autobiographical, a narrative, in which I am the

main actor, and wraps in a series of scenes from the theater. I am a keen
observer of my existence, as if I caught with the camera moments that
must be seen. It so happens that my self-portraits have no end, because
the possibilities are endless.13

Thus, Zenil uses his image endlessly precisely because the possibilities of
subject matter for his art are infinite. These works are a glimpse of a lim-
itless interior vision, identified and represented by Zenil’s own face and
body.
Zenil is not, however, simply interjecting himself into sacred scenes but
rather engaging a cultural tradition of embodying the holy figures of Chris-
tianity’s narratives. Feast days in Mexico are often accompanied by proces-
sions through the streets in which members of the community embody the
saints. Zenil writes of his experiences as a boy,

One day I was St. Joseph. We left as a procession from the Village Casino,
leading with my right hand the donkey that carried the “Virgin.” It had
nothing to do with mysticism; it was all about the joy of living. It was
on the Paisano Day. . . . I was chosen because even though I was still
very young I already had a beard. I wore a green robe and held a lily in
my left hand. Infused with a certain holiness I lead the walk down the
street. We reached the cemetery, paused to remember the dead, sung and
discoursed about the exalted qualities of the departed . . .; we returned
with the merriment and continuous music to the Casino, which was
already decorated with all the Christmas motives, and the little tree in
the middle.14

Note that Zenil does not say that he portrayed St. Joseph, but rather that one
day he was St. Joseph. This was not taking on the role of a saint but rather
the enfleshment of Joseph on a particular day to mark a specific feast. At the
same time, Zenil puts the word “Virgen” in quotes because the young girl
seated upon the donkey was not the embodiment of the Virgin for the painter
since he had/has a direct and distinct relationship with the Holy Mother
 Nahum Zenil  79
herself, rather than with this girl from his village. Jaime Moreno Villarreal
comments on this passage, noting:

Even though the painter states this pilgrimage “had nothing to do with
mysticism”, it does show how this local celebration was deeply immersed
in a religious spirit, which allows us to picture his world originally. The
remembrance of the fellow dead at the cemetery seems to transform into
a secular office of communion with the saints. Thus, and in many other
ways, moral flesh reunited with Christ’s mystic body consecrates also in
Nahum B. Zenil’s imagery.15

I agree wholeheartedly with Villarreal that while the text states that it
was not a mystical experience, it nevertheless describes the way in which
the villagers’ embodiment of these saints, combined with the time in the
cemetery connecting with those who had died, offered a way to reach
through this world into one beyond physical manifestation. It certainly
has a mystical quality.
Zenil’s use of self-portraiture functions in a way that builds on this child-
hood experience of “being” St. Joseph. His depictions of his own body
within a sacred context constitute a vision of the living flesh as a site through
which holy realities and realms can be understood and known, in physical,
spiritual, and emotional ways. Each of the sacred images in which we see
Zenil’s body should be considered in light of his “being” St. Joseph; in each
work of art, Zenil is that figure. His body thus makes a theological claim
about the ability of human beings to enflesh sacred bodies, as Mexican popu-
lar religious culture does. Zenil’s work, however, radically adds to this – by
disidentifying and reconfiguring it – by using the face and flesh of a Mexican
gay man as the vehicle for sacred embodiment.

Gracias Virgencita de Guadalupe

In Gracias Virgencita de Guadalupe16 [Thank you, Little Virgin of Gua-
dalupe], a 1984 mixed media image, Zenil presents a novel version of the
Virgin – her apparition appears to Zenil and his partner of many decades
Gerardo Vilchis who are in bed – blending sexuality and spirituality in a
single frame. The Virgin is seen hovering nearby; not depicted as an image
of the Virgin but Mary herself identifiable by her traditional iconography.
Her presence sanctifies their bedroom. Perhaps she was even drawn there
through the vitality of their love/lovemaking.
The two men are naked, lying in separate beds so close that they appear
to be touching. The sheets are folded back to the men’s groins, baring their
chests and confirming their nudity, although we do not see their genitals.
The separate beds are unusual and may show some ambiguity toward inti-
macy, perhaps reflecting Zenil’s reluctance to speak on behalf of other’s
experiences, thus showing their bodies and sexuality as parallels but not as
80  Justin Sabia-Tanis
a singular being. On the other hand, they may be expressing the impact of
sexual repression felt by gay men within a homophobic culture.
In an arched window in the upper left, two hobby horses look down upon
the view, adding an air of lightness and play to the scene, but also speaking
to performative aspects of childhood. Horses often play a role as symbols of
Mexican machismo, referring to the hyper masculine cowboy, but here they
are queered and transformed into children’s toys, adding an air of innocence
and make-believe to this adult scene.
This painting reflects important aspects of Zenil’s attitudes toward sexual-
ity. In an interview with Cristina Pacheca, he says:

Society tries to deform and impede the natural development of some-

thing as marvelous as sexuality. There are laws that punish it. But not
only does civil society try to repress it, the ecclesiastical authorities do,
too. All of this makes sexuality a conflict when it should be seen as some-
thing fresh, natural, agreeable, as enjoyable as a game. . . . My desire, my
intention, is that there comes a time when sexuality can be lived without
guilt and without pain.17

The presence of the two toy horses peering through the window points to
the playful nature of sexuality in Zenil’s sensual cosmology. Nor is this a
repressed sexuality that hides behind a macho cowboy exterior, but rather is
comfortable with the presence of a plaything as witness to the action through
a window.
Mark Jordan, in his essay entitled “God’s Body,” describes the interac-
tions between portraits of religious figures and their viewers. In particular,
he addresses the intimate connection between Christ and those who gaze
upon him, especially gay men:

His portraits are meant to attract and direct devotion. They are portraits
of someone loved ardently by members of both sexes. Jesus is our Lord,
but also our friend. We go to him with our cares and our concerns. We
suppose that he knows all of our shameful secrets, including our hid-
den sexual desires and acts. He even sees us performing them. So Jesus
knows things about my body and what I do with it that an erotic partner
of many years may not know, that the sum of my lovers may not have
seen. Jesus knows me inside out. He loves me and I love him. He wants
to help me in my daily struggle to live rightly, including with regard to
sexual desires and acts. How does his gaze on my body affect my gaze
on his?18

Like Jordan, Zenil is impacted by his gaze upon sacred images as well
as a holy presence in his life. While we are considering Zenil’s image of the
Virgin, rather than of Christ, Jordan describes an intimacy with Jesus which
parallels that expressed by Zenil in his feelings for the Virgin of Guadalupe,
 Nahum Zenil  81
and which stems from observing and interacting with devotional art. Like
Jordan’s understanding of Christ, which is developed through his engage-
ment with images of Jesus, we may consider that Zenil sees the Virgin as a
witness to his intimacy, knowing him and his body more closely and accu-
rately than another human being could, even Vilchis. Here we see, too, the
possibilities of art to expand our understanding of queer theology because,
while Jordan’s words are radical, Zenil’s vision engages our senses by show-
ing us the Virgin present in his bedroom. He makes literally apparent that
which is spiritual and invisible, yet tangible to him.
In a cyclical dynamic, the Virgin’s awareness of the totality of the artist’s
life through her gaze on him consequently continues to shape and inform his
view of her. Through this work, Zenil advances his understanding of sexual-
ity as natural and positive, as something known to holy figures as well as
humans, and embraced by them. At the same time, he decodes the image of
the Virgin of Guadalupe, restructuring her popular image – associated with
traditional, conservative Mexican culture and a homophobic church – and
returning her to her radical origins of appearing to those whom society has
devalued and then extending that into the modern world by showing her
blessing those marginalized today. This Virgin is no prude but rather a holy
figure who embraces all of life, including its most private intimate moments
enacted by men who love her and who love other men.
The artist placed his artwork within a traditional frame with small painted
scenes on porcelain depicting the encounters between the Virgin of Gua-
dalupe and Juan Diego,19 with folkloric versions of the Virgin’s rose motif
carved into the wood between them. The frame tells the story of the first
sighting of the Holy Mother in Mexico. According to tradition, in Decem-
ber of 1531 a maiden appeared to an indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, on
Tepeyac Hill, now a part of Mexico City and probably the site where the
goddess Tonantzin was worshipped in the pre-Hispanic times. This appari-
tion revealed herself to be the Mother of God, speaking to Juan Diego in
Nahautl, the indigenous language of that area of Mexico, which was also the
language used in the area surrounding Zenil’s childhood home.
The legend goes on to say that when the peasant reported his sighting of
Mary to the Spanish Archbishop, the episcopate did not initially believe the
claims, and asked for a sign, which the Virgin consented to give. While Juan
Diego tried to evade this responsibility, the Virgin was persistent. Eventually,
she led him to a bed of roses, which did not grow in that location at that
time of year; he placed them in his tilma, or cloak to transport them back
to the city as a sign of the veracity of the Virgin’s presence. When he opened
his tilma to reveal the roses to the Archbishop, the Virgin’s image had been
miraculously imposed upon the garment. This simulacrum, a supernatural
occurrence beyond human making, provided additional proof of her revela-
tion. A tilma with her image appears in the Basilica built in her honor on the
site of her revelation. While historical records from 1531 do not corroborate
this account, it is clearly accepted as historical fact by many of the modern
82  Justin Sabia-Tanis
Mexican faithful. In the four rondels of the frame that Zenil uses around
his art, we see the peasant first encountering the Virgin, worshipping her,
leaving her to head for the city, and then presenting his evidence before the
Archbishop, completing the circuit of the story.
Zenil deconstructs and then reconstructs the meaning of these colonial
era images and ideas by demonstrating the Virgin’s ongoing revelation to
the marginalized of modern Mexican society in the work that he creates.
The frame itself, and the stories it tells, are repurposed in both structure
and meaning. The artist literally situates himself and his lover within
Mexican traditional religion demonstrating that his story fits within the
narrative structure of the Virgin’s appearances to the marginalized of
Mexico. The frame also reinforces the connection with the legacy of Mexi-
can ex-voto art, devotional images that express gratitude and connection
between a sacred figure and a worshipper.20 Her intention of demonstrat-
ing her love for the outcast indigenous Mexican in her appearance to Juan
Diego remains her intention in appearing to Zenil, the outcast mestizo
gay Mexican.
Mexican ex-votos are narrative images,21 almost always created along
a formula in which the subject is usually painted on her/his knees facing
and beseeching Christ, the Virgin, or a saint for intervention or expressing
gratitude. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century ex-votos address contempo-
rary themes such as political unrest, drug use, domestic violence, gangs,
incarceration, and so on as well as more traditional themes of illness and
suffering. Here, in a departure from the formula, however, Zenil demon-
strates that one does not have to be kneeling to be faithful; one can be
devout even in bed.
Ex-votos, however, are not solely narrative paintings; the physical art-
works themselves are understood to have spiritual impact and agency. Mar-
garita de Orellana, editor of the magazine Artes de Mexico and a book series
of the same name, writes of the art form,

More than an expressive painting, the ex-voto is an effective object,

a kind of agent that both modifies and carries out an action. The ex-
voto establishes a sort of interchange and a certain complicity between
humanity and divinity. Though it may appear naïve to our eyes, it is a
pragmatic act. It could even be considered a kind of currency with which
one pays for favors received. Without it, there’s no deal. The ex-voto is
charged with power – religious power. It is like the relics or holy water
which are endowed with some force. Even the words chosen to express
love and gratitude toward the divine being are effective. They reaffirm
the love story involving a human being and his or her benefactor, and
reinforce the gratitude felt by the former. But once this love story and
this gratitude are rendered in paint on wood or metal, they become not
only permanent, but public. The world where this kind of worship is
carried out is one where people live as a community.22
 Nahum Zenil  83
While de Orellana is speaking of ex-votos in general, rather than of this
specific work, her words are most certainly applicable to Gracias, Virgencita
de Guadalupe and its meanings. This work is a reflection of the love story
between the artist and the Virgin, expressing his gratitude for her ongoing
presence in his life. The love here reaches beyond that, however, to include
Zenil’s love and passion for Vilchis captured in an intimate moment. Love,
sexual desire, companionship, and the spiritual power of the Virgin are all
powerful elements of the composition. Zenil’s ex-voto both expresses his
gratefulness to the Virgin and demonstrates the role that she plays in his life. It
also, as de Orellana describes, takes a private moment and transforms it into
an object for public space; in this case, sexual intimacy behind closed doors is
revealed in a public art form with its own spiritual power and efficacy.
Ex-votos traditionally depict a moment in which the Virgin or a saint
miraculously interceded in the life of the depicted believer to restore health
or well-being. In that context, we might consider what the Virgin here is
healing. Perhaps it is the pain of living in a homophobic world, with its
emotionally draining experiences of stigmatization, or the healing of sexual
shame within a repressive culture. These interpretations would be a logical
extension of Zenil’s childhood strategy of seeing the Virgin as an intermedi-
ary who protected him from loneliness and bullying in a hostile world. Or
perhaps it is a more personal moment of division between the couple that
has been healed to restore them to their devoted state.
In addition, while the Virgin of Guadalupe is often associated with more
conservative religious and social beliefs in contemporary Mexico, here,
rather than supporting a homophobic world view, she appears within the
bedroom of two gay men. This constitutes a daring expansion of her realm.
Here she is not a symbol of chastity but of blessing for sexual activity
between the two men. But this profound embrace goes both ways – the
Virgin appears to Zenil and Vilchis but they also include her in their bed-
room. This forms the communication between humanity and divinity that
de Orellana describes. The two men, Vilchis and Zenil, are not shunning the
religious any more than the Virgin is denying the sexual; both are revealed
to and embrace the other.
Michele Beltran goes on to further describe the interactive nature of the
exchange in traditional ex-votos, noting,

An exvoto is an act of personal devotion, made to be seen by others. It

aims to inform the other faithful how supernatural intervention favored
one person; it represents the privileged relationship that unites the per-
son with Christ, the Virgin or a saint. In a moment of danger, the believer
begs the holy image for help, promising a votive offering if the holy fig-
ure intervenes. This may seem at first glance a simple pact between the
[person] and the supernatural figure. However, the relationship is not
only physical, because the one who is favored by the miracle also has a
moral commitment.23
84  Justin Sabia-Tanis
Zenil expresses his gratitude for her salvific presence in his childhood and in
the context of his deep love for Vilchis. In Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe,
therefore, we see both the intervention of the Virgin in Zenil and Vilchis’
lives, offering protection and affirmation, but also their resulting responsi-
bility to her. Moreover, it is critical to recognize the public character of the
ex-voto as both de Orellana and Beltran discuss. Ex-votos are images of
personal devotion reflecting a singular event but they also serve as a public
record of the actions of a holy figure in the life of an individual Mexican and
thus were meant to become a part of a community narrative. The placement
of this painting within the frame that tells the story of Juan Diego’s witness to
the Virgin’s appearance to the unlikely peasant and its reference to the initial
disbelief of the Archbishop makes explicit this connection between public
witness and personal experience and provides a visual parallel between San
Diego’s experiences and that of the couple.
Thus, part of Zenil’s moral responsibility to the Virgin in exchange for
her care may be to tell the story of her affirmation of him as a gay man.
This includes the radical implications of her presence within the confines of
his bedroom where he lays with his partner. The Virgin is an intrinsic part
of his life, blessing his sexual identity, love, and sensual desires, which are
inextricably linked to his devotion to her. This is not simply a statement of
belief but also one which includes the obligation to bear witness to the truth
of her appearances to him, whether or not it is easily received by religious
authorities or Mexican society. This work thus makes a radical statement
about the expansive and inclusive love that the Virgin has, even when it runs
contrary to conventional understandings of her. The Virgin, Zenil is saying,
loves whomever she will, independent of social strictures.
As de Orellana points out, the witness of the ex-voto is both individual
and communal. It tells the story of a miraculous or spiritual intercession
by a holy figure to the member of a particular group of people who share a
common faith and heritage. Within Mexican culture the ex-voto is the story
of the village or parish, not simply an individual, because the event occurred
and is commemorated in the life of one of its members and thus becomes
part of the collective understanding. Seen in this way, Gracias, Virgencita
de Guadalupe stakes a profound claim about the nature of the community
through its unexpected subject matter. Through this image, Zenil adds to
the communal narrative the story of the blessing of two gay men who are
unashamed of their nakedness and sexuality to whom the Virgin appears,
and inscribes himself within the collective circle of the faithful, reflecting his
refusal to exile himself from Mexican society.
The efficaciousness of this ex-voto includes its function to expand the
circle of holiness to include Zenil and, by extension, those like him. It is a
statement that this kind of appearance of the Virgin to members of the mar-
ginalized gay community is part of the story of what it means to be Mexican
and the communal experience of Mexicanidad. It also means that the story
of LGBTQ people in Mexico includes appearances of the Virgin and her love
 Nahum Zenil  85
and blessing for them. This speaks both to the wider body of the Mexican
faithful of the need to embrace and include Mexicans of all sexual orienta-
tions, as well as to Mexico’s LGBTQ community by validating their experi-
ences of spirituality reflected in and expressed by Zenil’s vision.

Bendiciones
In 1990, Zenil revisited this theme of radical inclusion and blessing in Ben-
diciones, where we again see Zenil and Vilchis in the foreground, with the
Virgin of Guadalupe behind them. The Virgin is seen on a tilma hanging
against a greyish brown wall that appears to be made of bricks or cinder-
blocks. Roses pour from the bottom of the tilma – more from the cloth
itself than from the figure, since they also come from the marginal areas
of the fabric, as when Juan Diego was displaying them for the Archbishop.
The roses appear to flow in a steady stream down upon Zenil and his lover.
The men are standing shoulder to shoulder, with their arms around each
other. Their fingertips can be seen just above the other’s waist. The men are
dressed identically in gauzy black button up shirts that are open at the col-
lar and are slightly translucent. They wear white belts and black trousers.
The image ends at about upper thigh/groin level on the men. At the bottom
frame of the picture, the flowers are piling up against the lower edge of the
image. Roses stream behind and in front of them. If this continues, they will
be engulfed in the blossoms piling up around them. The frame of the picture
seems to form a container in which the roses flow – otherwise, they would
fill the room, spreading out horizontally.
Here the Virgin of Guadalupe is in her traditional pose as seen on the
tilma, or cloak, of Juan Diego. Zenil depicts himself standing before her
image with his partner, Vilchis. This time the Virgin more explicitly partici-
pates in the scene, showering her blessings upon them in form of the roses
that proved to the Archbishop the veracity of Juan Diego’s claims to have
seen her. The roses were the validation of her existence, her demonstra-
tion of love for an indigenous Mexican peasant scorned and ignored by the
church’s powers that be. The roses function as proof in the same way in this
image, demonstrating the reality of the Virgin’s role in Zenil’s life and her
affirmative presence in the lives of those who are marginalized by ecclesial
authorities. Here again Zenil extends her blessing, showing that it applies
to a gay couple. In the ex-voto Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe, we saw
the Virgin’s passive presence in his bedroom; here she goes a step further by
actively offering the blessings of her roses upon the couple.
This is in some sense a more serious, mature portrait of the couple. Instead
of lying naked in bed observed by playthings, they stand side by side, shoul-
der to shoulder. But, unlike the previous image where they were in parallel
beds not touching, here their arms are now interlinked and they form a
solid, unified presence. It is a portrait of two men who have spent many
years together and who experience – in the past, present, and presumably
86  Justin Sabia-Tanis
the future – the timeless blessings of the Virgin. Her abundant roses here
bestow an extravagant benediction on the couple, pouring down and filling
up the bottom frame of the painting. The Virgin is on the upper half of the
diptych, while Vilchis and Zenil are on the lower portion; the separation of
the paintings may express the distinction between the natural and super-
natural worlds, but the motion of the flowers as they pour forth from above
unifies the composition. The roses draw the viewers’ eyes from the top, the
heavenly world, to the bottom, the earthly love shared by two men and link
the two thematically.
Vilchis and Zenil have been together for more than 40 years now and
share an extremely strong bond. In a book about Mexican gay couples,
David Gonzales writes, “In Gerardo [Vilchis], Nahum [Zenil] has found the
companionship and strength which he needed. Even his mother accepted
it ‘because she felt that Gerardo protected me’.”24 The two men identify
spirituality as central to their life-long commitment. In the same interview,

They admit that living together is not easy, but together they seek solu-
tions to the problems, “we want to continue living together until our
deaths and so the adversities become minimized because we have a more
important objective.” For them, “Seeking spiritual enrichment to be bet-
ter is one of the bases which has kept us together for so long.” In this
permanent and continual search, they have learned to “avoid jealousy,
dislikes and problems,” and to focus their energies on the positive. They
say that they know each other so well that they discover themselves
thinking the same thing.25

It is this depth of life-long commitment, grounded and enhanced by their

spiritual seeking that is reflected in Bendiciones. Their mutual search for spir-
itual connection, supported and enhanced by the other, is rewarded through
the blessings of the Virgin.
This is a deeply personal and devotional image but it is also a revolution-
ary one with strong socio-political content. In a country that, it can be eas-
ily argued, is centered on the Virgin of Guadalupe – her image, her altars,
and her devotees permeate the landscape – Zenil has placed himself and his
lover in that center. Rather than depicting himself as one exiled from society
by Mexican norms or isolated by virtue of his sexuality, he instead moves
the cultural icon and center, the Virgin, to his location, blessing him and his
love for Vilchis. We see his interior devotion and her reciprocal love for him.
Zenil was actively creating sexually explicit works of art during the same
period, so this is not a repudiation of the themes of sexuality and spirituality.
Rather, it is an expansive expression of the Virgin’s love for intimacy and
relationships between men.
This work of art continues Zenil’s theme of refusing to be separated from
Mexican culture, and insists instead on making visible an aspect of it which
has often remained invisible, and has been deliberately rendered unseen by
 Nahum Zenil  87
the church. Zenil asserts his presence – as a gay man and as part of a couple –
and that that presence is inherently Mexican. That syncretic element of gay
identity and Mexicanidad functions here as well. The Virgin’s roses and her
blessings show that she is real and that Zenil is her child.

Conclusion
Pilar Turo writes about Zenil, “For him, to be gay is to be Mexican. Which is
to say, to be between worlds and in a way, in none; which is to be mestizo.”26
This profound hybridity of his nature, a mixed-race mestizo identity, through
his art, stakes a simultaneous claim of the right to freedom for himself as a
gay man and for all Mexicans of all sexual orientations, genders, and races.
For him, to be liberated, to be whole, to seek justice, to express a belief in
God, to find salvation, to be gay – these are all inextricably part of what it
means to be human, to be Mexican, to be Nahum Zenil.
Zenil depicts a wide range of theologically infused images in his art, fus-
ing sexual identity and faith within traditional iconography, and challenging
culturally and religiously based homophobia. His use of self-portraiture puts
himself in direct contact with the sacred subject matter, which at the same
time proclaims the intensity of his need for justice both as a gay man and as a
Mexican. He makes a clear claim for the inclusion of LGBTQ people within
sacred art and shows the redemptive power of religious iconography and
devotion for queer people, beginning with himself but extending outward
to include others.
Zenil makes visible not only the ineffable sacred but also the queer lives,
bodies, and community that are often rendered invisible in the religious
world, celebrating these as part of the spiritual realm. This stands, of course,
in stark contrast to the systematic repression and even demonization of
LGBTQ people by many of the religious structures of our world, including
the Mexican Catholic church of Zenil’s upbringing and today. But while
religious institutions were (and are) often condemning and shunning LGBTQ
people, artists like Zenil assert a positive and profound vision of spiritual-
ity that emphasizes inclusion, social justice, and the sacredness of sexuality.
Through his profound personal connection with the Virgin of Guadalupe,
he transforms images that represent oppression to many into statements of
freedom. Here, the divine figures serve to liberate both the subject(s) and
the viewers from sex-negative and homophobic ideologies, offering instead
possibilities for holy intimacy through an engaged spirituality.
Holland Cotter writes in a New York Times review of Zenil, that

his images, sacred and profane, have the cumulative weight of a mys-
tery play, reverential and comic, with a melodramatic edge. They tell
the story of a gay man coming to terms with the inhospitable society in
which he was raised, not by rejecting it, but by carving out a niche for
himself within and against its grain.27
88  Justin Sabia-Tanis
Zenil fully embraces his spiritual and artistic heritage as a Mexican and
then utilizes it to express his reality as a gay man in Mexico, including his
life with Vilchis. The result is work that is both devout and playful, express-
ing his views that both sexuality and spirituality are natural and joyful. His
work is, as Cotter notes, both fully expressive of and encompassed within
Mexican culture but also runs counter to prevailing social and religious
norms, thereby expressing a new and liberated Mexican reality in which his
body and his life are holy and included.
The power of Zenil’s work lies in its deep and life-affirming embrace of
the spiritual and the sexual. These images reflect the substance of the artist’s
lifelong conscious search for God and his commitment to his own spiritual
development, one which is lived out both internally and within his relation-
ship to Gerardo Vilchis. In interviews with them as a couple, it is clear that
not only is faith vital to both of their lives but that they view their relation-
ship – with all of the joys and challenges that come from living in deep inti-
macy with another – as a critical component of that faith. Their life together
embodies the realities of their beliefs. Sexuality is intrinsically a part of that
life; there is no separation into holy and profane. This is a faith that refuses
to be confined by papal rules, societal limitations, prudery or shame; it is
boundless, fulfilling, devoted, and sexual.
This is a radical attitude, reflected in Zenil’s daring artwork, in a Catho-
lic country because it challenges the very nature of faith as expressed pri-
marily by the spirit, not the body, especially not the “impure” body of the
homosexual. It also engages the lingering uncertainties about brown bodies
as worthy, given the pigmentocracy still prevalent in Latin America. Zenil
deliberately lifts up his and Vilchis’ native features and brown skin, placing
these visages in holy settings with the Virgin’s blessings.
Zenil presents an alternative that allows for, and in fact celebrates, the
beauty and pleasure of the queer mestizo body. Here, God rejoices in plea-
sures experienced between lovers and partners in their brown bodies. Here,
the Virgin moves beyond the shield of her chastity to reveal a woman who
bore multiple children and loves them all. The indigenous face and body
of the Virgin were meant to be subsumed under the Spanish Catholic epis-
copacy but here re-emerges victorious as an indigenous icon who refuses
to play by the rules. First the Virgin appears to a native peasant; here, she
appears to a queer mestizo who then is obligated – joyfully – to reveal her
loving presence in his life to the world. Her presence in Zenil’s life is part of
her ongoing process of appearing to the Mexican people.
Through these images, Zenil demonstrates that that Mexicanidad is
hybridity. Luis Morett writes, “The work of Zenil highlights his ability to
synthesize, from his own life, the unease of the soul overwhelmed by the
prejudices of the norm, revealing an essence which enshrines religion with
eroticism, virtue with transgression, myth with history.”28 The challenge of
living within a homophobic, racist, and sex-negative culture and faith is
the exact force which allows for the emergence of a holistic and affirming
 Nahum Zenil  89
spiritual vision. Thus, what Zenil adds to theological discourse is this syn-
thesis of the erotic and spiritual through iconography in which the two are
intrinsically and inextricably linked to the point at which they become syn-
onymous, and thus revolutionary.
In Bendiciones/Blessings and Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe, we see
how Zenil centers himself, a gay man, in the heart of Mexico’s faith, under
the blessing and protection of the Virgin of Guadalupe, not as an exile but
as a beloved child. Through these works of art, we see that gay men can
stand at the heart of Mexico’s faith, with a new vision of both sexuality and
Mexicanidad. Edward de Jesus Douglas concludes,

Eliding the nation as race into the gay male and the gay male into the
image, Zenil, like [Frida] Kahlo, creates a sophisticated pictorial fiction
in which the artist himself functions as an authentic and transparent folk
artifact. Artistic process and product become autobiography and mimic
the lived disjunctures between individual and society, sex and gender,
and race and nation. They do so in a form or a space where these dis-
junctures no longer exist. Because of its authenticity and transparency,
indeed, its ethnicity, the folk artifact – as the image itself and as the
artist objectified in the image – is politics by other means, as it critically
manipulates the visual signs of race and nation, embodying, and thus
advocating, radical social alternatives.29

And this is the unity expressed through Zenil’s art – it is highly personal and
yet profoundly political with implications far beyond the individual. Zenil
makes a claim for the freedom of life and expression for all Mexicans. In his
efforts to depict his inner world in which he creates a place of blessing for
himself and his lifelong partner, he offers a word of blessing for all people,
which is inextricably linked to a vision of social justice and political freedom.
Zenil wrote in a poem:

I witness the joyful agonies of my sadness

and of deception repeated as hope.
I welcome the friendly serenity
part of the courtship of reciprocal sentiment.
Fortunate, I
suppress the archangel’s essence
and I am able to enjoy paradise
and displace fruitless insomnias
and escape in coexistence.
I can make my own history.
I can utter to you my repressed word: Love.30

Here he asserts, “I can make my own history/I can utter my repressed

word: Love.” The essence of Zenil’s art is the expression of love, manifested
90  Justin Sabia-Tanis
through his devotion to the Virgin, to Vilchis, to sexuality, to life, to the
Mexican people.
This love requires his refusal to yield the terrain of spirituality to a
homophobic church and his willingness to connect directly with the holy,
particularly through his lived experiences of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His
devotional artwork makes her blessing quite clear and poses to the faithful
the challenge to accept those to whom the Virgin herself has appeared. If the
Virgin has blessed these men, how can the church and the faithful continue
to reject them? Moreover, Zenil’s art represents his ongoing fulfillment of his
religious obligation to proclaim this blessing to the world in thanksgiving for
the Virgin’s continued protection and presence in his life. He must witness to
the truth of her revelation that includes an acceptance of same sex love and
a love for gay men; society’s rejection in no way reduces his responsibility to
proclaim her blessing upon him. In fact, it makes that demand more urgent.
Zenil depicts the queer sexual body in direct contact with the holy, affirm-
ing the sacredness of the totality of the body, including the genitals, created
and blessed by God. Moreover, and even more radically, Zenil shows that
pleasure is part of the religious experience, viewed and approved by the
holy. If the Virgin is present during sex, which is the logical extension of
the traditional understanding of the Divine being present in all times and all
places, then Zenil challenges us to move from seeing sexuality as shameful
and separate from the religious to being an accepted, and celebrated, part of
what it means to be a spiritual person. Thus by eliding and connecting the
sacred and the erotic, he transforms the narrative around sexuality of “you
ought to be ashamed” to “you are being blessed.”
For Zenil, to be gay is to be mestizo is to be Mexican is to be holy. Love
guides us to embrace each in its totality and all together in their unity.

Notes
  1 Cristina Pacheco, “Between Sexuality and Guilt/Entre la sexualidad y la culpa,”
in Nahum B. Zenil: Witness to the Self, Testigo Del Ser, ed. Edward J. Sullivan
and Clayton C. Kirking (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum / El Museo
Mexicano, 1996), 26–7. Translation by Jerry Post, provided in the text, “Creo
que sí. Respondió a una necesidad que tuve desde muy niño y se hizo más y más
fuerte conforme fui sintiéndome más aislado, más solo. Esa sensación era muy
viva y terrible también precisamente porque yo me encontraba rodeado por mi
familia; compartía su lenguaje, sus actos, sus ceremonias cotidianas, pero siempre
me sentía ajeno, extraño, solo. Quizá por eso tuve que hacerme de otra familia:
la Virgen pasó a convertirse en mi madre, Cristo ocupó el lugar de mi padre.”
  2 Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993), 3.
  3 Ruben Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 7.
  4 Gallo, after defining the term, goes on to say, “They [the neo-Mexicanists] pre-
sented a palatable image of Mexico as a colorful, festive country filled with
age-old traditions and untouched by the complex troubles of present-day life.”
 Nahum Zenil  91
(Gallo, 7). This critique, however, does not fit with Zenil’s work and is contested
by other critiques as outlined below.
  5 Alejandro Navarrete Cortés, “Symbolic Production in Mexico in the 1980s,” in
Age of Discrepancies, ed. Olivier Debroise (Mexico City D.F., Mexico: UNAM,
2006), 279.
 6 Ibid.
  7 Ibid., 280.
  8 José Esteban Muñoz, Disindentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance
of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25.
  9 Olivier Debroise, “Nahum B. Zenil,” in Nuevos Momentos Del Arte Mexicano:
New Moments in Mexican Art, ed. James Riesta (Mexico and New York: Turner
Parallel Project, 1990), 83.
10 Holland Cotter, “Art Review: The Self as a Mix of Personal and Political,” The
New York Times, September 12, 1997, sec. Arts, accessed December 28, 2015
www.nytimes.com/1997/09/12/arts/art-review-the-self-as-a-mix-of-personal-
and-political.html.
11 Antonio Viego, “The Place of Gay Male Chicano Literature in Queer Chicana/o
Cultural Work,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (1999): 87.
12 Pacheco, “Between Sexuality and Guilt/Entre la sexualidad y la culpa,” 28.
13 “Nahum Zenil,” an interview with Partricia [sic] Medoza in Peter Weiermair,
Aktuelle Kunst aus Mexiko (Contemporary Art from Mexico): Julio Galan,
Laura Gonzalez, Silvia Gruner, Sergio Hernandez, Fernando Leal, Pedro Olvera,
Ruben Ortiz, Nestor Quinones, Adolfo Riestra, Gerardo Suter, Nahum Zenil
(Frankfurter Kunstverein Raiffeisenhalle, 1992), 85. Note: the correct spelling
of the author’s first name is Patricia. Translation by the author. Original: “Mein
Werk ist vollkommen autobiographisch, erzählerisch, wobei ich der Haupt-
darsteller bin und wickelt sich in einer Abfolge von Theaterszenen ab. Ich bin
aufmerksamer Beobachter meines Existierens, so als würde ich mit der Kamera
Momente einfangen, die gesehen werden müssen. So kommt es, daß meine Selb-
stportraits kein Ende haben, denn die Möglichkeiten sind unbegrenzt.
14 Jaime Moreno Villarreal, Nahum B. Zenil, Artistas en México 35 (Mexico City:
Editorial Gráfica Bordes, Intituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2013), 12–13. Trans-
lation provided in the text, 23: “No tenía nada que ver con lo místico; sí, con el
gusto de vivir. Era el Día del Paisano [ . . . ]. Me escogieron a mi porque, aunque
muy joven, ya usaba la barba; me puse túnica verde, tomé una azucena con la
mano izquierda; investido de cierta santidad iba al frente por la calle de abajo;
llegamos al panteón, hicimos una pausa para recordar a los paisanos muertos,
cantamos y se dijeron discursos exaltando las cualidades de los difuntos [ . . .];
regresamos con la algarabía y música continua al Casino ya adornado con moti-
vos navideños, con el arbolito en el centro.”
15 Ibid., 13. Translation provided by the text, 24: “Aunque el pintor afirma que
esa procesión “No tenía nada que ver con lo místico”, [sic] sí muestra cómo
en su pueblo semejante fiesta civil se reveló profundamente imbuida de espíritu
religioso, lo que nos permite atisbar en su mundo de origen. La recordación de
los “paisanos muertos” en el panteón parece transfigurarse en un oficio secular
de comunión con los santos. Así y de muchas maneras, la reunión de la carne
mortal en el cuerpo místico de Cristo se consagra en la imaginería de Nahum B.
Zenil . . .”
16 “Thank you, Virgin of Guadalupe.” The form of “Virgin,” “Virgencita,” is a
diminutive which is sometimes translated as “Little Virgin,” but is used here as
a term of affection as one would use for a beloved family member rather than a
diminishment of her stature. In some places the title of this work is listed as “Ex-
voto,” but that is the type of art work, rather than the name given by the artist.
92  Justin Sabia-Tanis
17 Pacheco, “Between Sexuality and Guilt/Entre la sexualidad y la culpa,” 31.
Translation by Jerry Post, supplied by text, “La sociedad se encarga de deformer
e impeder el desarrollo natural de algo tan maravilloso como la sexualidad. Hay
leyes que la castigan. Pero no solo la sociedad civil trata de reprimirla, también
las autoridades eclesiásticas. Todo eso vuelve conflictiva a la sexualidad cuando
debería ser vista como algo fresco, natural, agradable, divertido como un juego
. . . . Mi deseo, intención, es que llegue el momento en que la sexualidad pueda
vivirse sin culpa y sin dolor.”
18 Mark D. Jordan, “God’s Body,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western
Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 287.
19 In another painting, also entitled Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe, which shows
a very traditional image of the Virgin, with Juan Diego below her holding up the
moon on which she stands, Zenil painted himself as Juan Diego. That works is
inscribed, “Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe, madre mia.” Madre mia means,
“my mother,” reaffirming the nature of their familial relationship. While many
Mexicans might affirm the Virgin as their mother, I believe that Zenil is referring
here to his specific conceptualization of her as a literal parent figure.
20 Michele Beltran, Elin Luque, and Solange Alberro, Retablos y exvotos, Bilingual
ed. (México, D.F., Mexico: Artes de Mexico, 2000), 39.
21 In the modern Mexican context referenced here, ex-votos refers to narrative
paintings. The term can also mean objects which are attached to images. Zenil’s
work falls within the type of image described by Beltran et al, and de Orellana,
that is a painting that tells the story of a miraculous encounter with a holy figure.
22 Margarita de Orellana, “Exvotos,” Artes de Mexico # 53. Exvotos / Ex-Votos.
Bilingual ed. (México, D.F., Mexico: Artes de Mexico, 2000), 81.
23 Beltran, Luque, and Alberro, Retablos y exvotos, 39, 42. Author’s translation:
“Un exvoto es un acto de devoción personal, realizado para ser visto por los
demás. Tiene por objetivo comunicar a otros fieles cómo la intervención sobre-
natural favoreció a una persona; representa la relación privilegiada que unió
a ésta con Cristo, la Virgen o algún santo. Al momento de verse en peligro, el
creyente suplica a la santa imagen que le socorra, prometiéndole un exvoto si
interviene. Esto puede parecer a primera vista un simple pacto entre el hombre y
la figura sobrenatural. Sin embargo, la relación no es sólo material, pues quien
es favorecido por el milagro se compromete moralmente.”
24 David Gonzalez, “Retratos Y Testimonios de Parejas Homosexuales,” MEXFAM
(2006), 32. Original text: “En Gerardo, Nahum ha encontrado la compañía y
fortaleza que necesitaba. Incluso su mamá lo aceptó ‘porque sentía que Gerardo
me protegía’.”
25 Ibid., 35. Author’s translation, “Admiten que la convivencia no es fácil, pero
juntos buscan la solución a los problemas, “queremos seguir viviendo juntos
hasta que nos muramos y así las adversidades se hacen menos porque tenemos
un objetivo más importante”. Para ellos, “enriquecernos espiritualmente para ser
mejores es una de las bases para mantenernos juntos durante tanto tiempo”. En
esa búsqueda permanente y cotidiana, han aprendido a “evitar los celos, disgus-
tos y problemas”, y a enfocar sus energías hacia lo positivo. Dicen conocerse tan
bien que a veces se descubren pensando lo mismo.”
26 Pilar Turu, “Homosexualidad Y Mestizaje: La Obra de Nahúm B. Zenil,” Cul-
tura Colectiva, n.d., http://culturacolectiva.com/homosexualidad-y-mestizaje-
la-obra-de-nahum-b-zenil/. “Para él, ser gay es ser mexicano. Es decir, estar entre
dos mundos y a la vez en ninguno; como el ser mestizo.”
27 Cotter, “Art Review.”
28 Quoted by Maai Ortíz in “Iconografía Y Descripción Plástica de La Obra de
Nahum Zenil,” Nahum Zenil, June 21, 2011, http://nahumzenil.blogspot.
 Nahum Zenil  93
com/2011/06/iconografia-y-descripcion-plastica-de.html. Original: “En la obra
de Zenil destaca la capacidad para sintetizar, a partir de su propia vida, las inqui-
etudes del alma avasallada por los prejuicios de la norma, develando la esencia
que engarza religión con erotismo, virtud con transgresión, mito con historia.”
29 Eduardo de Jesus Douglas, “The Colonial Self: Homosexuality and Mestizaje in
the Art of Nahum B. Zenil,” Art Journal 57, no. 3 (1998): 14.
30 Raquel Tibol, “Dolorides monologues de Nahum B. Zenil,” in Nahum B. Zenil:
Witness to the Self, Testigo Del Ser, ed. Edward J. Sullivan and Clayton C. Kirk-
ing (San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum / El Museo Mexicano, 1996), 78.
Translation by Illona Katzew and Joseph R. Wolin,

.Presencio las dichosas agonías de mi tristeza

del engaño repetido de esperanza
Doy la bienvenida a la serenidad amiga
parte del cortejo de sentimiento recíproco
Yo bien aventurado
suprimo la esencia de arcángel
y puedo disfrutar del paraíso
y desplazar insomnios inútiles
Puedo hacer mi propia historia
Puedo decirte mi palabra reprimida: Amor.
5 Queering ecclesial
authority with Mechthild
of Magdeburg
A Roman Catholic perspective
Andy Buechel

The situation today: Pope Francis and ecclesial authority

In the spring of 2016, Pope Francis released his document Amoris Laetitia
(“The Joy of Love”). This text – technically known as a post-synodal Apos-
tolic Exhortation – was written after the conclusion of two sessions of the
Synod, the worldwide gathering of Roman Catholic bishops that, in this
instance, discussed the topics of marriage and family in light of the Gospel
and the situation of the modern world. Due to the subject, it was widely
expected that there would be some reference to LGBTQ persons in the final
document. For those seeking change in the way the official Church addresses
topics relating to this population, the text was both eagerly and anxiously
expected. Though based upon the discussions and Final Report of the bish-
ops’ Synod, the exhortations that result are written by the pope (or, at least,
by a ghostwriter following the pope’s directions) and include his personal
thoughts. And with this particular pope, it is difficult to clearly establish his
thinking on matters touching queer persons.
Shortly after his election, Pope Francis made international headlines with
his response “Who am I to judge?” when asked about gay people and their
capacity to live holy lives. He met with – and embraced – a gay former stu-
dent and his partner while visiting the United States (a visit he personally
arranged). He has reportedly spoken by phone to both gay and transgender
Catholics, encouraging them with knowledge of the deep love that God and
Jesus bear them. And the Synod itself, in an interim report published in the
middle of its first meeting in the fall of 2014, acknowledged that lesbian and
gay people had “gifts to offer” the Church and that same-sex couples can give
“precious support” to one another.1 Many, many queer Catholics (and non-
Catholics, for that matter), have found these to be very encouraging signs.
But, naturally, this is not the entirety of the story. The same Synod state-
ment clearly condemned same-sex marriage and “gender ideology,” and even
the seemingly small steps mentioned earlier were quickly pushed back against
by many of the more conservative bishops at the Synod. “Gender ideology”
is the name given by defenders of traditional understandings of gender to
contemporary theory and exploration of gender and sex differences. It is
 Queering ecclesial authority  95
particularly aimed at those working for greater inclusion and understand-
ing of trans* persons, while erroneously presuming that there is nothing
ideological in the traditional gender norms it embraces. Pope Francis has
also critiqued contemporary theory on gender in vociferous terms, not only
in the cliché of it as an assault on the family, but also likening it to nuclear
war and the tactics of Nazism.2 Further, when the pope was Archbishop of
Buenos Aires, then-Cardinal Bergoglio called same-sex marriage a tool of the
“father of lies” to subvert God’s plans for creation.3
In light of all of this confusion, many queer Catholics hoped for clar-
ity from Amoris Laetitia. Would it reflect the more progressive direction
that Francis seems to be encouraging the Church toward: greater mercy and
inclusion? A world that is livable for all? Or would it retrench in the hostility
often evinced toward queer people, including that hostility sometimes felt in
Francis’ own words? Perhaps it would try to split the difference, attacking
“ideology” while offering support to those “trapped” within it? As a gay,
cisgender Catholic man, I hoped for, if nothing else, some clarity as to what
Church officialdom was thinking, if not some development on these matters
beyond what has been endlessly repeated for the past several decades.4
In this, I was disappointed. In my view, Amoris Laetitia essentially punted
on matters dealing with queer folks. In regard to “persons who experi-
ence same-sex attractions”, all “unjust” discrimination is to be avoided but
same-sex marriage is clearly ruled out as it is not even “remotely analogous”
to God’s plan.5 This section shows very little development from the Final
Report, unlike other topics addressed at the Synod, such as the status and
treatment of divorced and remarried heterosexual couples. This suggests
a hesitancy on the part of Francis to aggravate any bishops on this topic,
a diffidence not shown elsewhere. Furthermore, without ever mentioning
them, the experiences and difficulties of trans* people are elided by a sim-
ple condemnation of “gender ideology.”6 In other words, Amoris Laetitia
reads exactly as what most queer Catholics have come to expect from their
Church on these topics: lip service toward non-discrimination but little in
the way of real engagement, encounter, or accompaniment. Very little has
developed or changed.
And yet, I also found much in this document that was edifying, rich, and
rewarding. Many of the reflections on married relationships that Francis
offered, particularly those based on St. Paul’s famous “Hymn to Love”
(1 Corinthians 13), were quite useful as an examination of conscience relat-
ing to my own (non-married) relationship with my boyfriend.7 Throughout
Chapter Eight, Francis works to recover the rich Catholic understanding of
conscience that had been marginalized and minimized during the pontifi-
cates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This treasure of the Catholic tradi-
tion offers much to queer people in the Church and its reclamation by the
papacy is a vitally important development. Even in the disappointing section
on gay and lesbian people, Amoris develops on the Final Report in a small
but crucial way by adding the words “particularly any form of aggression
96  Andy Buechel
or violence” after quoting the Synod Final Report about avoiding “unjust
discrimination.”8
My dual response to Amoris Laetitia – finding it both frustrating (and
potentially quite damaging in its assertions on “gender ideology”) while
also rich and rewarding – is what I’d like to explore further in this chapter.
This response, I contend, is not unique to me and goes to something deeper
about living as a member of the Catholic Church. It is not simply about my
personal response to a particular document or a particular pope, but about
the response to, and role played by, ecclesial authorities in my tradition. As
a Roman Catholic, I believe in the historic apostolic succession, which is
manifested in – but not reducible to – the body of bishops and lower clergy
who authoritatively exercise a teaching and governing role in the Church.
As a queer man, though, I also know first-hand how destructive these same
leaders can be to health and well-being (spiritually and otherwise) when it is
exercised against people like me and other marginalized groups. What does
it mean to both respect the Catholic magisterium as authoritative, and also
find it potentially harmful or marginalizing? How can one live in this kind
of environment and flourish? How can one make the Church one loves more
of what God is calling it to be?

Queering what has been handed down

Richard Rohr speaks about this dilemma when addressing the function of
prophecy within our religious traditions. He believes that prophecy requires
both “radical traditionalism” and “shocking iconoclasm.” This prophetic
task is essential for the life of the Church, but it is often very, very difficult
to do. Rohr attributes this difficulty to our insistence on thinking in terms
of dualities or dichotomies, that we have “pretty much trained people in the
simplistic choosing of one idealized alternative while denigrating the other.”9
One must fully embrace and accept all that ecclesial authority proposes or
else one must abandon the Church. One cannot be a faithful dissenter or
find springs of life-giving water in a desert of ecclesial oppression. Yet, on
the question of how to approach religious authority, we have the example of
Jesus who refused to accept either of these as the only options. Jesus could be
very hard on the religious authorities of his day, even going so far as to call
some of them “whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but
inside they are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth” (Matthew
23.27, NRSV). Despite these harsh critiques, though, Jesus also told his fol-
lowers to listen to the teachings (if not the practices) of these same leaders,
for they “sit on Moses’ seat” (Matthew 23.2).
This refusal to accept the dual choices offered – accept everything in its
entirety or reject the authority of these leaders altogether – has many reso-
nances with some queer approaches to Christian theology. It evinces a deep
love and respect for the given tradition, for it refuses to leave it. At the same
time, though, it refuses to accept those aspects of the tradition as valid which
 Queering ecclesial authority  97
are harmful, untruthful, or deal in death. This refusal is itself a testament to
a deeper fidelity, a love which will not allow a tradition to be less than what
it could be, or claims to be. It subverts the tradition from within, but does
so for the sake of that very tradition. As the title of this collection puts it, it
seeks to “unlock the tradition from inside,” using traditional tools to chal-
lenge that which has atrophied or grown harmful in that very tradition. Yet,
it also puts the one critiquing the tradition or leadership of it in a liminal
position.
Those who read Amoris Laetitia with some degree of benefit must also cri-
tique vocally those aspects which produce harm and re-entrench the oppres-
sion of LGBTQ persons. This is not an act of animosity toward the Synod
or pope, but an act of deeper love for them, the Church, and those within it.
That said, that does require the risking of a stable ecclesial identity. One will
be thought by many – including many that one might respect – as being a
“bad Catholic” or Christian. One may even find oneself excluded from par-
ticular Catholic communities or threatened with refusal of the sacraments.
On the other side, one may well endure criticism from within the queer
community as a form of complicity with an oppressive system and structure.
This instability of identity is, however, a hallmark of queer approaches to
theology and religious practice.
One speaking out about the errors and dangers in statements from church
authorities may transgress boundaries that are seen by some as fixed and
stable. In the context of discussion about Catholic authority figures, this
includes the boundaries of “teacher/learner” and “ordained/lay.” Despite
the important work and re-thinking of these since the time of the Second
Vatican Council, there is still a strong presumption in the Catholic Church
that what has been said authoritatively ends further discussion of the mat-
ter. Though there have been some pro forma gestures toward greater lay
participation in certain areas of church decision making – the Synod on the
Family began many of its sessions with reflections by heterosexual married
couples, for instance – there is still often a belief that lay members of the
Church need to simply accept what is said by higher authorities obediently.
This certainly applies for LGBTQ persons, who are incessantly talked about
in Catholic Christianity, but rarely spoken to at an official level. To speak
of one’s experiences of God, love, relationship, or sex in ways that are not
sanctioned (or even imaginable) by some in authority blurs these boundaries.
It’s all very queer.10
As can be seen from the above example of Jesus, these issues of the
response to – and living with – an authority that is both respected and hostile
are not new. Though this chapter is about queering authority from a specifi-
cally Catholic point of view, there are analogous issues that arise for queer
people of any Christian denomination or religious stripe: the authority of
Scripture and its interpretation; of pastors, bishops, or official teachers; and
the relation of experience to institution. One of the advantages of being part
of a long tradition (made up of some competing and some complementary
98  Andy Buechel
traditions), however, is that we have resources from the past in those figures
who have grappled with similar questions in their own times. Queer theology
seeks to reclaim some of these voices, particularly those marginal ones who
have been too long ignored, for accompaniment and assistance in our own
ecclesial living, loving, and struggling today.

The queer Mechthild of Magdeburg and the queer God

One of those neglected, queer voices that has been useful for me in my reflec-
tion on these questions has been the thirteenth-century spiritual writer and
church reformer Mechthild of Magdeburg. Little is known of this great theo-
logian, and most that is comes from her single book, The Flowing Light of
the Godhead. This text is an excellent resource for engaging in what theolo-
gian Elizabeth Stuart calls “parody.” Stuart sees parody, which she defines as
“repetitions with critical difference,”11 as a key tactic in queer theology. This
allows for a rich retrieval of the Christian tradition – particularly its more
neglected aspects – while allowing it to be made relevant and vibrant today.
When using conversation partners from times so foreign to our own, it’s
important not to fall into a facile appropriation. Though there are many
similarities between the issues Mechthild faced and those of marginalized
Christians today, there are even more differences. Some would argue that it’s
therefore inappropriate to look for much useful wisdom from these sources.
Carolyn Dinshaw, on the contrary, argues that using these temporally distant
figures is particularly useful when thinking from a queer perspective. She
“shows that queers can make new relations, new identifications, new com-
munities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we
can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positional-
ity.”12 And as Amy Hollywood points out, there can be new and unforeseen
pleasures in finding these relations and identifications with those who have
gone before.13 Thus, with both Stuart and Dinshaw, this chapter will look
to the past for ways that we might live queerly today, but also strive not to
neglect the differences that exist as well. In Mechthild we find much that we
can repeat in contemporary theological reflection, even as we might do so
in different ways. Before turning to her specifically on questions of church
authority, let’s first note her resonances with queer lives and theology today.
Mechthild was born to minor nobility in what is today eastern Germany
around 1208 or 1210. As a young woman she became involved with a semi-
formal group of women known as the beguines. The term “semi-formal” is
used because, unlike “official” religious women – mostly cloistered nuns at
the time – the beguines took no formal, permanent vows and often did not
live in enclosures apart from the rest of society. Nevertheless, beguines did
dedicate themselves to lives of voluntary poverty, chastity, prayer, and care
for the needy. This placed them at a liminal position vis-à-vis the expecta-
tions for women in their day by both the church and state. They lived among
the people, usually in the towns, either singly or in common, and did so as
 Queering ecclesial authority  99
unmarried women, yet not as nuns. They defied expectations of what it was
to be a “good woman,” as they were neither wives nor regularly religious,
the two roles most women were expected to adopt. This transgression of
gender roles and boundaries was one of the reasons the movement eventu-
ally garnered the suspicion of church and civil officials, and was eventually
severely restricted by the Council of Vienne in 1311–1312.14
Although more systematic repression of the beguines occurred after the
death of Mechthild, she was nonetheless aware of the risks that she took as
a laywoman writing on theological topics and living the lifestyle that she
did. At one point in The Flowing Light of the Godhead, she is comforted by
God that she is doing the right thing in composing her book, despite many
warning her against doing so because, “If one did not watch out/ It could be
burned.”15 Eventually the pressures upon her became too strong, possibly
because a German bishop threatened excommunication to beguines who
remained outside of enclosures, that in her older age she entered the convent
of Helfta where she continued to compose the latter parts of her text.16
In addition to Mechthild’s transgression of prescribed boundaries for
women, her text also garnered unfriendly attention because of its intense
eroticism. Though this was not novel to Mechthild, and was a device used
by other major church authorities like Bernard of Clairvaux (especially in
his Commentaries on the Song of Songs), the intensity of her eroticism is
striking. This erotic imagery is largely heterosexual, focusing on the intimate
relationship between the (feminine) soul and (masculine) God or Jesus. This
should not make us look at the text being less helpful for queer conversa-
tion, however, as it does not remain rigidly heterosexual. As Amy Hollywood
points out, and as we shall see, Mechthild and the other beguines challenged
the “prescriptive heterosexuality of the culture in which they lived.” This
was done through

an intense, hyperbolic, and often ultimately self-subverting deployment

of apparently heterosexual imagery. This excess often involves a dis-
placement of Christ as the center of the religious life and emphasis on a
feminized figure of divine love [. . .] This very inability to contain medi-
eval divine eroticism within modern categories points to its potential
queerness.17

Even though heterosexuality can be queer in its exercise, there’s something

different going on in Mechthild.
The intense desire and longing in the text is mutual between Mechthild
and the Divine. God is overcome by Love: “When God could no longer
contain himself, he created the soul and, in his immense love, gave himself
to her as her own.”18 The soul, for her part, desires to enter into the depths
of the Divine as a full-grown woman. Her Senses, which try to keep the love
she feels within reasonable bounds, bounds which they can understand and
partake of, are to be left behind in the intensity of her desire for union with
100  Andy Buechel
Jesus. This is because what her Senses can perceive and comprehend are not
enough for her desire: “That is a child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby.
I am a full-grown bride. I want to go to my Lover.”19 And her divine Lover,
elsewhere, expresses his own pleasure and desire for her:

Young lady, you have done very well in this dance of praise. You shall
have your way with the Son of the virgin, for you are delightfully weary.
Come at noontime to the shade of the spring, into the bed of love. There
in the coolness you shall refresh yourself with him.20

Nevertheless, the imagery that Mechthild uses to discuss the union of

human and Divine in love is not only limited to the heterosexual. Mechthild
begins her text with dialogues between Lady Love and the soul, both of
whom are gendered female. The soul laments the various goods that she has
given up in the name of Love, and Love reminds her of the bounties she has
received in return. The soul demands even more recompense for the suffer-
ings that Love has brought her, though:

[Soul]: Lady Love, you are a robber; for this as well shall you make
reparation.
[Love]: Mistress and Queen, take then me.
[Soul]: Lady Love, now you have recompensed me a hundredfold on
earth.
[Love]: Mistress and Queen, in addition you may demand God and all
his kingdom.21

The eroticism between the two female figures is apparent; the intimacy
craved is one that demands all. All of this is ripe for queer exploration.
But this passage also shows us something important about how Mechthild
understands God’s love and power. It is this that we must most attend to as
we think with Mechthild about power and authority in the Church.

Mechthild and ecclesiastical authority

Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead is a rich text for
many reasons. One of these is the way that she thinks about God’s power and
authority. In Mechthild’s time, much like our own, it was common for God
to be imaged as a judge, one whose role is to mete out the proper rewards or
punishments to those before him. As Wendy Farley reminds us, “Lurking in
the background of our ideas about God are assumptions about power.”22 If
we see those in authority on earth as good judges who seek to bring people
into right relationship, we will see God in the same way. If we see power
on earth as capricious and violent, causing pain and harm over any wrong
done or perceived, we will see God similarly. This dynamic – projecting our
ideas of power onto God – also operates in the reverse direction though,
 Queering ecclesial authority  101
creating a kind of feedback loop. If a bishop or pope sees God as the Divine
Emperor, whose will is law and will suffer nothing but submission, their own
exercise of power will likely be authoritarian and obedience will be seen as
the highest virtue. But if God’s power is understood differently, that will also
have implications for how ecclesial authority is to be exercised: the feedback
loop can be short-circuited and re-made. So how does Mechthild understand
God’s power and authority? It is rooted deeply in desire for loving union
with what God has made.
Mechthild’s discussion of God’s power subverts what many of us usually
understand power to be. Power is about being able to have things one’s own
way, about being able to cause others to accede to one’s wishes. It is about
getting things done, and quickly can have associations with domination.
This is not really how Mechthild understands God’s power, though. God’s
power is utterly linked to the formation, maintenance, and consummation of
intimacy. God’s power is not an autonomous force that simply can command
whatever it wants; it is always necessarily linked to the deepening of rela-
tionship. Mechthild’s text begins with God affirming this idea of power in a
rather paradoxical way. God takes credit for the text Mechthild is writing,
and this is the Divine explanation of why: “I made it in my powerlessness,
for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts.”23
In this text, God cannot resist but give Godself to humanity. Even if God
somehow wished to, God couldn’t. The Divine thirst for intimacy and union
with what God has made is too strong. This is how Divine power is to be
understood for Mechthild: not as rooted in a capricious ability to do what-
ever occurs to the Divine mind, but a power to create and maintain union
and intimacy. As Farley states, “God renounces power as ‘might,’ in favor
of love. God is able to do precisely what God wants: create humanity for
intimacy with the divine life and return it to that state when it falls. The abil-
ity to create intimacy is a different power than one that controls empire.”24
In this, Mechthild unites the doctrines of creation and redemption in this
different idea of power: one that potently brings about wholeness and inti-
macy, whether at the beginning or in the healing of our sin. This does not
negate God’s omnipotence, but rather understands what power is radically
differently. God’s power still accomplishes what it sets out to do: it’s just
that what God sets out to do is not usually what we think of when we think
of the powerful.
This desire for union and intimacy between God and humanity can be
seen in the female eroticism mentioned earlier. Lady Love stands allegori-
cally for that love that animates the Holy Trinity, that controls and drives the
Divine. But notice the form of address: the human soul is referred to by Love
as “Mistress and Queen,” with this secular courtly language repurposed
by Mechthild. The usual power dynamics that we would expect are here
reversed or queered. It is not the soul that has to plead before the Almighty
for attention, help, or grace (as too many, particularly queer people, are
led to think), but Divine Love that seeks out the human. God’s desire for
102  Andy Buechel
intimacy and union is such that God surrenders the prerogatives and privi-
leges that we associate with power in order to establish a deeper communion.
At one point, when Mechthild is praying for a soul’s release from purgatory
(a common practice for her day and one that the book spends much time
exploring) that God has justly sentenced, God accedes to her wish, saying
“Indeed, when two wrestle with each other, the weaker must lose. I shall
willingly be the weaker, even though I am almighty.”25 God’s love for the
one who loves God is such that the strict demands of justice are loosened
and God’s power is shown in mercy; God becomes weak that the union of
Godself and humanity might be made strong.
This re-thinking of Divine power has major importance for how Mech-
thild thinks of ecclesial authority. In Book VI, Mechthild gives instruction
as to how a prior, prioress, or other religious superior should act toward
those in their charge. When sending forth one of their brothers or sisters on
any kind of mission, they are to say this: “Alas, my dear fellow, I, though
unworthy of anything good, am your servant in all the ways I can be and not
your master. Unfortunately, however, I have authority over you and send you
forth with the heartfelt love of God.”26 Mirroring the self-emptying authority
of God, the good religious leader acknowledges their own authority and role,
but refuses to exercise it in any way that is dominating. As God’s power is
exercised in a way only to increase and further intimacy between God and
humanity, so is the superior’s authority to be exercised only for the health
and maintenance of community. In this, the authority figure is to model and
mirror God, who does not cling to or insist upon the prerogatives due the
Divine, if those impede relationship. Tasks often viewed as menial, and easily
delegated to less prestigious figures in the community, should be voluntarily
embraced by the one in power:

You should visit the infirmary every day and comfort the sick with the
consoling words of God and refresh them generously with earthly things,
for God is rich beyond all accounting. You should clean for the sick
and in God cheerfully laugh with them. You should yourself carry away
their personal waste, lovingly ask them in confidence what their private
infirmity is, and truly stand by them. Then God’s sweetness shall flow
into you in marvelous ways.27

In this, Mechthild is giving practical advice about the exercise of authority-

in-community in such a way as to mirror God’s use of power. It is a reflection
of Jesus’ admonition that, unlike the rulers of the Romans, those who wish
to have greatness, power, and status in his Kingdom “must be your servant,
and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all” (Mark
11.43–44). As the prior in the community is etymologically first, Mechthild
shows what this means in God’s eyes, and it’s radically different from what
many took ecclesial authority, with all the privileges that was supposed to
come with it, to mean.
 Queering ecclesial authority  103
In addition to this modeling of servanthood, Mechthild instructs religious
superiors in how to approach their task of governing the community. She
knows that a major temptation of anyone with authority is to believe that
they may exercise that office in any way they choose, regardless of what
the larger community thinks or believes: “You should always bless yourself
when prideful thoughts come to you. Unfortunately, these do come into the
heart under the semblance of good and say, ‘Well, after all, you are prior
(or prioress) in all matters. You can certainly do what you think is best.’”
This seems, after all, the very prerogative of having authority. Nevertheless,
Mechthild warns that this is not so: “No, dear fellow, in so doing you disturb
God’s holy peace. With a submissive spirit and endearing cheerfulness you
should say: ‘Dear brother (or sister), how does this suit you?’ and then take
action accordingly to their best-intentioned wishes.”28 Consultation, discus-
sion, listening to the good and wishes of the community are necessary for
authority to be exercised properly for Mechthild. Mere ex officio pronounce-
ment is never sufficient, if it does not have as its first desire the integrity of
the community and its continued life together, which in itself is only valuable
to bring Christ ever more to the world.
Mechthild could be quite scathing when she did not think that author-
ity was being exercised in this way and for these reasons. She lambasts the
higher clergy – up to and including the pope – for their refusal to govern the
Church well, especially in failing to protect and listen to those (like Mech-
thild) who are striving to make the Church what it is called to be in Christ:

Woe, Crown of the holy priesthood, how utterly have you disappeared.
You have nothing left but your trappings; that is, ecclesiastical author-
ity with which you war against God and his chosen intimates. For this
God shall humiliate you before you know it, and our Lord speaks thus:
‘I shall touch the pope in Rome in his heart with great misery, and in
this misery I shall tell him reproachfully that my shepherds of Jerusalem
have become murderers and wolves.29

Note that, even in the midst of this diatribe, Mechthild does not deny that
these people in fact possess authority in the Church. The issue is not whether
they technically can or cannot do something, the issue is how they are choos-
ing to exercise it. They have become the tyrants who lord it over those below
them, and use the authority that God has given to maintain intimacy and
love in the community in such a way as to attack those whom God holds
dearest.
Mechthild’s insistence that ecclesial authority must be modeled on the
way that God exercises power is useful as we think through our responses to
church authority today. How is authority being exercised in our day? Does
it have the trappings of tyranny – with edicts that place heavy burdens on
some, and do so without the input or voices of those who will be affected?
Is power exercised capriciously, without discussion or deliberation? Is the
104  Andy Buechel
purpose of a given ecclesial statement to make intimacy and community
within the Church and with God more readily available, or does it serve to
reinforce the power of some and the marginalization of others? Mechthild
gives us a witness of one who courageously speaks out against this misuse of
power: neither denying the authority in itself nor affirming that it has been
properly exercised. This is the function and role of the queer prophet. It is
the function of one trying to unlock a system of domination from inside.
Mechthild models another queer tactic of resistance to badly exercised
authority: aligning oneself with authority that is well-exercised. Mechthild’s
desire as a beguine to return the Church to its apostolic roots in poverty,
prayer, good works, and intimacy with God were part of a larger movement
in church reform at the turn of the second millennium. Most famous among
the new groups at this time that were seeking to re-make the Church in
Christ’s image (rather than that of the Roman Empire), were the mendicant – or
begging – orders founded by Sts. Francis and Dominic. Of these, Mechthild
was particularly close to the Dominicans. It was most probably her Domini-
can confessor, Heinrich of Halle, who first encouraged her to write down the
“greetings” (as she called them) that she was receiving from God. It was this
encouragement that led her to write The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the
text that has preserved her memory to this day. The Dominican friars seem
to have modeled the kind of servant-leadership that Mechthild encourages
from all church leadership, repeatedly earning her high praise.30
Like Mechthild and the beguines, though, the Dominicans were not with-
out their own opposition within the Church. They were a religious order
founded, in part, to model the kind of apostolic life that too many of the
secular or diocesan clergy often scandalously failed to showcase. Where
many of the diocesan priests had concubines and children (clerical marriage
having only been universally banned the previous century, a rule that was
slow to take hold), the Dominicans were known for their chastity; where
diocesan priests were often barely literate and poorly educated, the Domini-
cans were founded to preach zealously and compellingly, requiring thorough
education; where diocesan priests and bishops seemed interested in worldly
wealth and gain, the Dominicans started by begging for all that they had
and renouncing personal property. This led to numerous conflicts between
diocesan clergy and the new orders, not least because the new groups fell
under the immediate jurisdiction of the pope and were thus seen to threaten
the authority and autonomy of the local bishops. As Sara S. Poor has pointed
out, many of Mechthild’s stronger criticisms of the clergy and church author-
ity stem from her alignment with the Dominicans – and their way of life – in
contrast to the secular clergy.31
This is an important aspect to notice about Mechthild. For her, the issue
was not “dissent” or “heresy” versus “orthodoxy” or “fidelity.” It wasn’t
about accepting Catholic notions of apostolic authority or renouncing them
in favor of her personal views about God, as though these dichotomies
offered the only options. She did not choose between tradition and prophetic
 Queering ecclesial authority  105
speech, nor even between church authority and something else. Authority
in the Church was not (and is not) monolithic. When some figures – even
the pope at times – stood against church reform and the vision of intimacy
with the Divine that Mechthild knew from her own experience, she found
and allied with those church authority figures (often of the lower clergy in
the religious orders) whom she could stand with and who would stand with
her. Sara Poor called this Mechthild’s “critical devotion.”32
Queer Catholics have been exercising this same kind of critical devotion in
their own lives and churches for some time. For every hostile word or action
that might come from popes, bishops, or priests, there are also others who
give refuge. In every diocese in this country there is at least one (if not more)
parishes which are known for being LGBTQ friendly. There are priests who
will minister, accompany, and encourage queer folk. For me, the brothers
and priests of the Society of Mary (Marianists) gave me guidance and friend-
ship that was vital as I struggled with coming out and what it meant for my
relationship to God, Christ, and the Church. I know of one parish deep in the
southern United States where, albeit clandestinely, a “Marriage Encounter”
retreat was put on for gay and lesbian couples, even before they were legally
able to marry in that state. Many Catholic sisters, not able to be clerical
“authority” figures in the Church due to the continued and unjust denial
of ordination to women, nonetheless make their de facto moral authority
known on behalf of queer folk every day. Authority, properly understood, is
not uniformly opposed to LGBTQ persons in the Catholic Church, though
it can often seem that way. Mechthild knew this in her alliance with the
Dominicans, and I have seen it in my own life as well. As much as these
situations may not be ideal – they often have to occur subversively and out
of the public eye – they are also real sites where a different idea of church is
lived and nurtured, where the intimacy with God and community that was
so dear to Mechthild thrives and Christ’s body is made queerly manifest.
I think this way of living church, remaining within a structure that can
be nourishing while often also being oppressive and working for its trans-
formation from within, is important. It is, however, something which can
prove to be simply too damaging for some, if the environment becomes just
too toxic. This is one of the “critical differences” that exists between our
time and Mechthild’s: there are other options which exist for us in ways
that they didn’t for her. In her day, being a member of the Church was not
something optional, nor were there multiple denominations or groups that
one could choose between. To formally renounce the institutions as oppres-
sive or destructive would not only warrant ecclesiastical penalty, but civil
punishment as well. This is not the case today (at least in the United States,
from where I write this, and many other countries). Thus there is some-
thing more intentional about our decisions about church membership – and
accordingly our view about that Church’s leadership – than there might
have been for her. Some queer this situation by maintaining membership in
multiple ecclesial bodies: remaining, for instance, in the Roman Catholic
106  Andy Buechel
Church while also breaking bread with Episcopalians, Independent or Old
Catholic Churches, or the Metropolitan Community Churches. They may
participate in liturgies linked to Roman Catholicism, but find themselves
forbidden to use church properties in many dioceses, which is the situation in
many places with D ­ ignity – a pro-LGBT Catholic group in the United States.
All of these tactics require intentionality and may or may not indicate that
a person renounces or affirms the authority of leaders in a given denomina-
tion. Whatever decisions one makes on these matters, I think that thinking
with Mechthild of Magdeburg on authority can help us grapple with these
questions and help us make our choices.

Mechthild, Pope Francis, and the queering of authority

Having looked at how Mechthild approached and thought about eccle-
sial authority in her day – being both rigorously traditional regarding
authority in itself and openly iconoclastic in criticizing its usual practice –
it might be useful to return to the contemporary topic that began this
chapter: Pope Francis and the queer response to him. This particular queer
Catholic recognizes Francis as having an important role to play in holding
the Catholic Church in unity, the role traditionally ascribed to the Bishop
of Rome. Yet that unity must always be exercised in a way that builds
up intimacy within the community: with God and with one another for
service to the world. How do we think about him in light of Mechthild’s
reflection and example?
In many ways, it seems to me, Francis is trying to exercise his authority
in precisely the way that Mechthild espouses. Francis shares with Mechthild
the idea that God is primarily to be understood as a lover, not as a harsh
and vengeful judge. In fact, Francis’ decision to proclaim 2016 a jubilee Year
of Mercy was about conveying exactly this image of God: one so utterly in
love with humanity and God’s creation that all that is desired is a deeper
intimacy and harmony. In the document that Francis issued opening the Year
of Mercy, he described mercy as the heart of God, the mystery of an infinite
and boundless love:

Mercy: the word reveals the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.
Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by which God comes to meet
us. Mercy: the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person
who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path
of life. Mercy: the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts
to the hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness.33

These words echo the way that Mechthild views God and God’s love for the
world, if expressed in less erotic terms. For Francis, God is that Mystery that
seeks to restore that intimacy damaged by sin. God’s power, then, is closely
linked to God’s mercy; God’s power is exercised to restore that relationship
 Queering ecclesial authority  107
and closeness that has been harmed. In this, Francis’ notion of God’s power
is aligned to Mechthild’s.
More importantly, in many ways Francis tries to live out this idea of what
power is for him in his own exercise of his ministry. The ways in which he
seems to be following the advice Mechthild gave to church leaders in her
day is striking. This can be seen in the small, symbolic gestures that have
marked his papacy, such as insisting on carrying his own bag and paying
his own hotel bill after his election and his decision not to move into the
traditional papal apartments but rather live in a simpler style. His ground-
breaking decision to celebrate the eucharist for Holy Thursday in places like
prisons while incorporating non-Catholics (and non-Christians!) into the
foot washing service echoes the instructions that Mechthild gave those in
leadership positions that they should not stand on the prerogatives of office
but rather serve everyone else.
Flowing from this attitude, Francis sees as one of his primary goals the
reform of the Church into a genuinely synodal body. By synodality, one does
not mean simply the gathering of bishops every few years to discuss some
pressing topic, as occurred in the sessions that culminated in Amoris Laetitia.
This is an important part of the process but more importantly, synodality
refers to the church thinking, discerning, and deciding together. If the notion
was truly put into effect, the laity, lower clergy, and non-ordained religious
would have a major role to play in conversations with bishops and the pope
in how the Church is to be run. This would, necessarily, include those mem-
bers of the Church who identify as queer or LGBT. Some small processes
have been put in place to move in this direction, like the administration of
questionnaires to any willing member of the Church, but this is only a start.
Francis, during the sessions of the Synod on the Family, made it clear that he
didn’t want those gathered to simply tell him what they thought he wanted
to hear. Rather, he encouraged frank, honest, and attentive discussion (and
disagreement) as necessary for the kind of church he was envisioning. When
addressing the opening of the Synod sessions, he related a story about cardi-
nals who were not speaking their minds, for fear that he thought something
different. He told them, “This is not good, this is not synodality, because
it is necessary to say all that, in the Lord, one feels the need to say: with-
out polite deference, without hesitation. And, at the same time, one must
listen with humility and welcome, with an open heart, what your brothers
say. Synodality is exercised with these two approaches.”34 In this Francis is
modeling what he expects authority to look like when these bishops return
to their dioceses.
In this, I think we can understand something of the confusing “double-
ness” that often marks Francis’ thinking on queer matters, as I discussed in
this chapter’s opening. On the one hand, he seems remarkably solicitous and
compassionate to queer people, while on the other he castigates gay marriage
and attacks “gender ideology.” This, I suspect, is him exercising the honest
talk that he wants to see the entire Church exercising. He does genuinely
108  Andy Buechel
believe that modern gender theory – as he understands it – and (some) moves
for greater inclusion of LGBTQ persons are harmful for society. He also sees
these people as human beings, loved by God and made in the imago dei. He
is, I believe, wrong on the first part and his words can do real damage. We
must not ignore this and simply give him a pass based on affection or his
good intentions. But I also believe that he means what he says: we not only
can, but must talk back to the pope. We need to tell him why we believe he’s
wrong and show him the damage that some of his words can do. Not in such
a way as to trap him in legalese (as some conservative cardinals have recently
tried to do in a public challenge to the merciful approach of Amoris Laetitia),
but rather as fellow baptized members of Christ’s body, looking to heal the
real divisions that exist by striving for greater honesty and justice. This is
what the pope himself asks us to do. He has spoken what seems to him to be
the truth. We, as his fellow pilgrims, are to speak clearly and prophetically
what we have discerned in our own lives, trusting that the Spirit is alive and
active. This will not be easy, and institutionally the power is not stacked in
our favor, but it does seem to me that a real opportunity exists for dialogue
at all levels of the Church here.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development. In prin-
ciple, what Francis wants is a Church that is honest about disagreement and
comfortable with the difficult work of arguing together for the good of the
community. Exactly how this will play out remains to be seen, and it’s being
resisted in some quarters. Nevertheless, what we see is a concrete movement
toward the kind of communal exercise of authority which does not simply
dictate based on one’s office, but rather asks of everyone in the Church what
Mechthild told the priors and prioresses of her day to ask their communi-
ties: “‘Dear brother (or sister), how does this suit you?’ and then take action
according to their best-intentioned wishes.”35
Of course, as also discussed earlier, these moves have often been accom-
panied by some very harsh rhetoric toward queer persons, not only from
Francis but from others who hold positions of authority in the Church. Thus
it is essential to also heed Mechthild’s example of finding, supporting, and
accepting the support of those authority figures who are supportive and life-
affirming – even if, in our day, that may mean some making the decision to
leave the institutional body of a given church. I find, on the whole, that Fran-
cis is one of these figures, though it has been essential to me to intentionally
seek out others on the local level in whom I can find spiritual succor. Even in
those comments or occasions where Francis speaks harshly, his overall atti-
tude and approach strikes me as one who would be open to hearing a con-
trary view and, possibly, even modifying his own were he to find something
persuasive. This was not the attitude of his predecessors and I think it should
not be underestimated while thinking about how queer Catholics and Chris-
tians can find true community and home in the churches of their baptisms.
As with Mechthild, we may be suspected by many and never find ourselves
in the ecclesial center; we also may be able to find ourselves nourished by
 Queering ecclesial authority  109
communities that reveal the profound love of God. And like Mechthild, in
her strong and prophetic words to the “Crown of the holy priesthood,” it is
also necessary to hold the pope and others in authority to account for those
words and actions that cause harm to queer persons, women, or any other
marginalized person or group in the church and world.
Mechthild of Magdeburg has left us a text and theological project that
is ripe with opportunity for contemporary queering, to live and parodically
repeat in a very different situation that queer Christians find themselves in
today. By reframing what the power of God means, Mechthild also reframed
what ecclesiastical authority means – remaining traditional while also being
iconoclastic; seeking to unlock the doors of church structures from inside.
Queer Christians, women, and many others find themselves today in very
difficult positions in relation to their church leadership: many both accepting
that authority while also chafing at its destructive elements. This dynamic
can be particularly seen in the example of Pope Francis and the genuine affec-
tion and welcome that many feel from him while also never forgetting the
damage some of his words can cause. Mechthild is one of our many possible
companions as we grapple with how to live in this difficult reality and ten-
sion; she is a resource of encouragement, support, and challenge as we strive
to form the Church into what it professes to be: the very body of Christ.

Notes
  1 This document, known as the Relatio post disceptationem, became quickly
embroiled in questions of translation and accuracy among Catholic conserva-
tives and some Synod participants. It holds no teaching authority in the Catholic
Church, and was intended as a summary of discussions to that point, not as a
final statement. See Péter Erdő, “Synod 14 – Eleventh General Assembly: Relatio
post disceptationem of the General Rapporteur, Cardinal Péter Erdő,” National
Catholic Reporter, October 15, 2014, www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/­relatio-
post-disceptationem-2014-synod-bishops-family. The section “Welcoming
Homosexual Persons” can be found at paragraphs 50–2.
  2 Andrea Tornielli and Giacamo Galeazzi, This Economy Kills: Pope Francis on
Capitalism and Social Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 150.
The comparisons here are indirect, but nonetheless deeply troubling. For a reply
on this point, see Lisa Fullam, “‘Gender Theory,’ Nuclear War, and the Nazis,”
Commonweal Magazine, February 23, 2015, www.commonwealmagazine.org/
gender-theory-nuclear-war-and-nazis-0.
  3 Edward Pentin, “Cardinal Bergoglio Hits Out at Same-Sex Marriage,” National
Catholic Register, July 8, 2010, www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/cardinal_
bergoglio_hits_out_at_same-sex_marriage. The later direction of this author’s
career, who went from praising Bergoglio in this piece to becoming one of his
more ferocious critics as pope from the Catholic right, shows that the confusion
on Francis with these matters is not simply felt by queer or progressive folk.
  4 Though this chapter primarily deals with LGBT and queer matters, everything
about the said above can also apply to Francis’ approach to women. On the one
hand, Francis claims that he wants greater roles and voice for women in posi-
tions of (non-clerical) authority, while simultaneously rejecting the ordination
of women to the priesthood and occasionally using sexist images to illustrate
110  Andy Buechel
points that he wants to make. See Rita Ferrone, “Francis’s Words about Women:
What Does He Really Think?,” Commonweal Magazine, April 5, 2017, www.
commonwealmagazine.org/francis%E2%80%99s-words-about-women.
 5 Francis, The Joy of Love: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of the Holy Father
Francis to Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Consecrated Persons, Christian Married
Couples, and All the Lay Faithful on Love in the Family, Libreria Editrice Vati-
cana, March 19, 2016, §250–251. Compare to the Synod of Bishops, The Voca-
tion and Mission of the Family in the Church and in the Contemporary World:
The Final Report of the Synod of Bishops to the Holy Father, Pope Francis, Synod
of Bishops, October 24, 2015, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/documents/
rc_synod_doc_20151026_relazione-finale-xiv-assemblea_en.html.
 6 Amoris Laetitia, §56.
  7 Ibid., §90–119.
  8 Ibid., §250.
  9 Rohr, “Prophets: Self Critical Thinking.”
10 For more of my thinking on these markers of queer theology, see my That We
Might Become God: The Queerness of Creedal Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cas-
cade Books, 2015), 1–16.
11 Elizabeth Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies: Repetitions with Critical Differ-
ence (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 108.
12 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 39.
13 Amy Hollywood, “The Normal, the Queer, and the Middle Ages,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (2001): 173–9, at 173.
14 Some argue that the beguines were completely condemned at Vienne, but Bernard
McGinn shows that the story is more complicated than that. See, McGinn, The
Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, 1300–1500 (New York: Crossroad,
2005), 61–4.
15 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin
(Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1998), II.26. 96. The first number in the citation
refers to the book number of Mechthild’s text, the second the chapter, and the
third the page number in the Paulist translation.
16 Farley, Thirst of God, 26.
17 Amy Hollywood, “Queering the Beguines: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewi-
jch of Anvers, Marguerite Porete,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western
Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 163–75, at 165.
18 Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, I.22.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid. For more on Mechthild’s nuptial imagery, see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as
Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
21 Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, I.1, 40.
22 Farley, The Thirst of God, 59.
23 Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, I. Prologue. 39.
24 Farley, Thirst of God, 60.
25 Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, VI. 10. 236.
26 Ibid., VI. 1. 223.
27 Ibid., VI. 1. 224.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., VI. 21. 250.
30 See Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, III.1, III.17, IV.20 (in praise of
St. Dominic), IV.21–22, and V.24 for a selection of texts in which she praises the
Dominicans and their mission.
 Queering ecclesial authority  111
31 Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making
of Textual Authority (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004):
41–8.
32 Ibid.
33 Francis, The Face of Mercy: Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of
Mercy, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, April 11, 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/con-
tent/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco_bolla_20150411_
misericordiae-vultus.html.
34 Francis, “Greeting of Pope Francis to the Synod Fathers during the First Gen-
eral Congregation of the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod
of Bishops,” October 6, 2014, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/
speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141006_padri-sinodali.
html.
35 Mechthild, Flowing Light of the Godhead, VI. 1. 224.s.
Part III

Liberating flesh
6 Discovering the missing body
Incarnational inclusivity
Robert E. Shore-Goss

Incarnation is the central symbol of Christianity, but the Johannine affirma-

tion extends the roots of incarnation into fleshiness and fleshly media: “The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1.14). Christian historian
Margaret Miles affirms that “Christianity is a religion of the incarnation.
Christians’ core belief is that God entered the human world of bodies in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth, whose historical life is normative in its claim
about the nature of God and the possibilities of human existence.”1 The fleshy
body of Jesus, God’s incarnation, has, however, been problematic for Chris-
tians, and through the millennia, they have constructed theological strategy
of constricting and managing the physical images of God’s Christ. This had
the dual purpose of safeguarding the restrictive images of Jesus’ body as well
as safeguarding and sanctifying ecclesial control over failed bodies: female,
sexual minorities, racialized peoples, and other devalued bodies.
But at the heart of the Christian notion of incarnation remains a fleshly,
embodied carnality contrary to predominant Christian attitudes to the incar-
nate Christ and fleshliness. Carnal incarnation remains at the heart of Chris-
tianity, but its subversive potential has been restricted. Richard Rohr’s notion
of “alternative orthodoxy” blends a radical traditionalism with a prophetic
iconoclasm. It is a method, albeit a queer strategy, of paying attention to the
different, or what Christian tradition has often ignored. For myself, “radical
inclusiveness” has formed the contemplative nexus/search of my theological
praxis, paying attention to what has been excluded, labelled sinful, different
or dismissed. An orthopraxy of queer erotic desires presents a challenge to
the orthodoxy of a restrictive notion of the incarnation.2
N.T. Wright proposes the ascended body of Jesus as a corrective to eccle-
sial control of the body (and presence) of Christ through the claims of Pen-
tecost.3 He writes,

What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer
is that the church expands to fill the void. If Jesus is more or less identi-
cal with the church – if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk
about his presence within his people rather than standing over against
them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have
created a high road to the worst kind of triumphalism.4
116  Robert E. Shore-Goss
With Pentecost, the church and the Spirit are identified, leaving the church
in control of determining the replacement presence of the risen Christ. But
Pentecost in Luke’s account does not intend that the church just control
the incarnation of Christ, but follow the Spirit as She leads disciples to dis-
cover further incarnated presence, such as Philip baptizing the Ethiopian
eunuch and the Spirit welcoming the first non-Jewish convert to the church
in the form of an African proto-transgender person.5 The Spirit continues to
expand the vision of Jesus’ radical inclusivity of the open table. On the other
hand, Wright continues:

If the church identifies its structures, its leadership, its liturgy, its build-
ing, or anything else with the Lord – and that’s what happens if you
ignore the ascension or turn it into another way of talking about the
Spirit – what do you get? You get, on the one hand, what Shakespeare
called the “insolence of office” and, on the other hand, the despair of
late middle age, as people realize it doesn’t work.6

Wright argues that the disappearance of the risen body of Christ is a way of
speaking theologically that the Ascended Christ is everywhere, even outside
the institutional church and outside of Christianity. The church restricts and
controls the incarnate presence of the Ascended Christ rather than search for
the presence of the Ascended Christ outside itself. When the church exclu-
sively and solely recognizes itself as incarnated presence, it creates “unjust
incarnation.” It refuses to search behind its walls for incarnation and often
turns incarnation unjustly against fleshly bodies.
Linn Marie Tonstad queers the Ascension of Jesus, “Ascension means
that body of Jesus is, in a sense, lost to the church – the church doesn’t have
it, so the church cannot control who gets to be or who gets to eat Christ’s
body.”7 Christ’s resurrected body disappears in the clouds as he ascends.
Symbolically, the Ascended Christ stands as corrective to the story of Pente-
cost, where the church is imbued with the Spirit and claims the authority to
discern the presence of the incarnated, resurrected Christ and define Christ’s
presence. This ecclesial claim to authoritatively define the presence of Christ
and control access to the body of Christ is undermined symbolically by the
loss of Christ’s resurrected body in the Ascension. Tonstad observes, “The
loss of the body of Christ – instead of asserting that body of Christ has been
handed over to the church, it recognizes that the body of Christ, elsewhere
and outside itself.”8 The Ascension of Christ indicates inclusion of Christ’s
presence beyond and elsewhere than in the church.
The church restricted Christ’s presence and image to a heterosexual econ-
omy, failing to remember the words of the righteous in Matthew 25.37–39:
“Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you
something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or
needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison
and go to visit you?” And Jesus’ response: “Truly, I say to you, as you did
 Discovering the missing body  117
it to the least of my (non-heteronormative) family, you did it to me (Mat-
thew 25.40).” Through much of Christian history, the institutional church
had serious difficulty discovering the presence of Christ in the outsider, the
indecent, and the non-normative. Jesus disturbs the church’s purity codes by
shifting the gaze to the impure excluded, for through the exclusion of queer
bodies, the church harms and even crucifies the Ascended Christ.
Theologian Niels Gregersen affirms, “the divine logos became flesh and
was present in Jesus, with the flesh of others, and for all flesh.”9 Jesus shared
the conditions of the flesh in all its shared messiness, joy and sadness, love
and desire, tragedy and suffering. Incarnational inclusivity, on the other
hand, has developed in the postmodern period to expand and deepen the
notion of deep incarnation in cosmology and evolutionary emergence, eco-
logical interrelatedness with the web of life, postcolonial liberation theolo-
gies, incarnational plurality and other religions, and in a variety of queer and
liberation theologies.10 Jesus’ fleshliness has been constructed as the Erotic
Christ, the Christa, the Queer Christ, the Transgender Christ, the Drag King,
the Christ with HIV/AIDS, the Leather Christ, the anonymous Christ, the
Suffering Christ with non-human animal suffering, and so on. These trouble
the heteronormative meme of incarnation.
One important forgotten aspect of incarnational theology, often dis-
missed or suppressed theologically and ecclesially, is that while institutional
Christianity represents the divine/human incarnation as a gendered male
to reinforce and institutionally transform into patriarchal and heterosexist
privilege, it is likewise desexed, sanitized, or spiritualized. Bjorn Kröndorfer
describes flesh (sarx) as “intimate flesh,” for it embraces a male body as “a
vulnerable and fluid body that does not shy away from body fluids.”11 He
notes that “the physical intimacy of sarx appeals more to the theatre-going
audience.”12

Human abjection and the abjected body of the

crucified Christ
Mark Jordan has argued that the body of Christ has been constructed in tidy
and tightly regulated theological speech throughout history:

Much Christian theology claims to be about a divine incarnation. It is

also perhaps more emphatically, a speech for managing that incarnation
by controlling its awkward implications. Some particularly awkward
consequences can only be managed by passing over the members of the
body of Christ in prudish silence. Looked at in this way, the history of
Christian theology can be seen as a long flight from the full consequences
of its central profession. The big business of theology has been to con-
struct alternative bodies for Jesus the Christ – tidier bodies, bodies better
conformed to institutional needs. I think of these bodies as Jesus’ corpses,
and I consider large parts of official Christology their mortuary.13
118  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Jordan’s last comment points to the stagnation of institutional, exclusive
heteronormative Christology as he speaks of “tidier bodies” of institutional
and restrictive constructions of Jesus’ corpse as parts of official Christol-
ogy. The desirous body of Jesus has incited an erotic gaze of both men and
women, and it provided a trajectory to subvert the mortuary Christology
that has repressed eroticism, and stimulated a graced relationship with erotic
and/or queer Christ. The church has created the tidy and decent but unjust
body of Christ.
Paying attention is the foundation for any lectio divina style of Christian
meditation of the text. But when the Word becomes a carnal image such as
the naked male body of Jesus, tortured and suffering with a loin cloth on the
cross, it produces diverse reactions from pious Catholics. The fleshly gaze
upon brutalized flesh becomes a ritual devotion surrounded with closeted,
internalized homophobic scripts and deeply confessional struggles. Similarly,
Mark Jordan notes that the genitals of Jesus’ body are entirely excluded from
ecclesial and theological speech:

the genitals of Jesus are typically and normatively excluded from speech.
To talk about them is indecent or provocative or blasphemous. To medi-
tate on them would be obscene. We are urged to meditate on Jesus’
acts and sufferings. We are asked to gaze on imaginary portraits of him
and picture for ourselves his height and weight, the color of his skin
or the length of his hair. But if our meditation should drift towards his
pelvis, we are immediately rebuked and then condemned as perverted
or pornographic.14

This has occurred ever since the advent of crucified corpse of Christ on the
cross in the late tenth century in German cathedrals. The history of Chris-
tian mystical desire for union with Christ has tapped into heterosexual and
homosexual desires of pious devotees, saints, and mystics. Both Caroline
Bynum and Leo Steinberg, in their examinations of the naked Jesus in reli-
gious art, passed over the questions of erotic gaze in their viewing of the
body of the crucified Christ and emerging art of sexing Jesus.15 On the other
hand, Richard Trexler pushes the boundaries of the naked Jesus on the cross
from the artist’s perspective to a devotional context of same-sex gazing at
the desirous body of Jesus and male arousal at the image. Trexler writes,
“that not completely unlike other gods, Jesus, whether in his image or in the
vision of him in imitation, might physically seduce his devotees.”16 Mark
Jordan highlights a similar concern that Catholic artistic representations of
the naked crucified Jesus were suspected because of the male homosexuality
within the priesthood.17 Jordan writes,

A group of men kneel in a room for long periods to contemplate a figure.

Their focus is a mostly naked man who wears only a cloth to cover his
conspicuously absent genitals. His nude and curiously unsexed body is
 Discovering the missing body  119
represented to an audience as the central object of love. They regard
its every detail as overcharged with affective significance. A number of
the kneeling men are homoerotically inclined, although pledged not to
engage in any voluntary use of their genitals. And they have this rule:
They can never ask whether there is any connection between that repre-
sentation of the naked man and their own erotic inclinations.18

These moments of ritual gazing or contemplative attention to the crucified

body of Jesus are monitored with religious scrupulosity because the bodily
image of Jesus may generate a homoerotic cartography of the “intimate flesh
of Christ” in gay male devotees.
Donald Boisvert, theologian and former Catholic seminarian, speaks of
the erotic Christ as important to his own psycho-spiritual development as a
Catholic youth:

For as long as I can recall, I had a special enthrallment with the Christian
corpus. The body of the crucified Jesus, intensely desirable in its plun-
dered and suffering masculinity beckons me by the sheer power of its
homoerotic enticement. . . . Worshipping the handsomely glorious body
of Jesus hung from this cross, gay men can enter into an act of erotic
and spiritual intimacy with their Lord. As they kneel and bring their
gaze upward, they see suspended in front of them, inviting in his semi-
naked vulnerability, his arms open wide to embrace them, the broken
and desirable body who was all things to all people, the source of their
need and truly its embodiment.19

Boisvert argues that such intimate and imaginary fleshly congress whether
with a woman or a gay man – especially, for someone socially marginal,
involves an erotic gaze engendering “a form of personal wholeness, accep-
tance in the eyes of God; desired and touched by God; summoned forth by
God’s love.”20 Womanist theologian Shawn Copeland, likewise, makes a
similar observation:

Just as a black Christ heals the anthropological impoverishment of black

bodies, so too a “queer” Christ heals the anthropological impoverish-
ment of homosexual bodies. Because Jesus of Nazareth declared himself
with and for others – the poor, excluded, and despised – and offered a
new “way” and new freedom to all who would hear and follow him,
we may be confident that the Christ of our faith is for gay and lesbian
people.21

The new freedom that Copeland stresses is a positive self-valuation with the
observer’s gaze upon and fleshly identification with the crucified Black Jesus.
Similarly Boisvert insightfully offers the notion that a male homoerotic gaze
of Christ becomes a graced moment: “As gay men fix their tearful eyes on the
120  Robert E. Shore-Goss
crucified Jesus, infinitely desirable in his gashed and vulnerable beauty, they
find themselves transfigured into his spiritual partners, and they can imagine
themselves one in and with him lovers in a dangerous time.”22
Patrick S. Cheng narrates how Tony Ayres, an Asian man of Chinese
descent in Australia, discovered embodied grace in an anonymous sexual
encounter with another man. Cheng notes,

That sexual encounter, although anonymous, represented the grace of

the Erotic Christ. The encounter allowed Ayres to understand, for the
first time in his life, “what desire was about,” and it allowed him to be
in mutual relationship with another Asian male. And in doing so, he
experienced, “the most exquisite feeling of liberation.”23

Cheng, like many gay and bisexual Christians, understands the Erotic Christ
as a possible trajectory to overcome negative religious stigmas of themselves
and embrace their own embodied sexuality. The incarnation embeds a fleshly
hermeneutic that incites and excites carnal liberation.

A queer enfleshing incarnation

As a youth, whose homoerotic feelings were deeply closeted, conflicted and
hidden, I gazed on the naked body of the crucified Jesus. The crucified Jesus
embodied a carnal but forbidden intuition before I had the words to describe
my fleshly stirrings. At a very early age, I mapped the fleshliness of the naked
Jesus with my erotic own desires and devotion to follow Christ. This fleshly
connection with Jesus was precisely what anti-body Catholicism feared – a
homoerotic connection. Previously, Mark Jordan observes that the genitals
of Jesus’ body are excluded from ecclesial speech and even theological utter-
ance. As a youth, I wondered quietly to myself if Christ on the cross was like
my sister’s Ken doll: if I took off the loin cloth of Jesus, would I discover that
his genitals were absent?
Mexican biblical scholar Manuel Villaobos Mendoza writes about a simi-
lar discovery in relation to the Black Christ (Senor de Esuipulitas) used by
the Spanish missionaries to convert indigenous people:

One particular Good Friday I was moved by curiosity to see the entire
ritual of Jesus’ transformation. . . . My avid eyes did not miss a single
action that my Aunt Pella performed upon Jesus’ torso. In silence with
prayers, sprinkling holy water, and with great devotion she would clean
each part of Jesus’ body. The stripping of Jesus’ loincloth was the climax
of the forbidden ritual. Finally, the secret of what was behind Jesus’
loincloth was revealed to me; he had no penis!24

Later that Good Friday, after the passion narrative read, each attendee came
up to venerate the crucified body of Jesus by kissing the body. Manuel kissed
 Discovering the missing body  121
Jesus on the lips. The irritated priest said, “What are you doing? Are you del
otro lodo (from the other side)?”25 The crucified Jesus becomes the occasion
of realizing that the church has castrated Jesus, but the childhood incident
as the veneration of the cross led Mendoza to identify connect with the vul-
nerable Christ. What is remarkable is Mendoza’s early experience of being
stigmatized as el otro lado:

Reading and interpreting Jesus’ passion narrative from el otro lado give
me strength to understand that, after all, Jesus’ brokenness and pen-
etrability were ways in which God became fully implicated in the lives
of those who were at the margin, whose lives did not matter and whose
effeminate bodies were not considered to be human. Reading and gazing
upon Jesus’ body through otros lados of interpretation help me to under-
stand that the Crucified One is indeed the Risen Jesus who challenges us
to go back to Galilee and find Good News.26

Like many, the desirable body of Jesus marked their own bodies with the
nails of religious stigma. The ritual performance of kneeling in prayer and
gazing at the crucified Christ sexualized my relationship. I looked to the
wounded Jesus on the cross initially as companion, my best friend, and later
in seminary I realized that I was in love with Christ, not just spiritually but
physically in love. The homoerotic connection with Jesus, that preceded my
own linguistic reflection, bloomed in the Jesuit seminary in the formative all-
male environment, theological studies, maturity in contemplative practices,
and with ordination to priesthood as I came out and accepted my homo-
sexuality. I now look back, realizing that the crucified Jesus represented my
own closeted struggle with homoerotic desires, their repression, yet there
was likewise a psycho-spiritual identification with the crucified Christ and
the risen Christ. My sublimating and channeling my love with the crucified
and risen Christ was a life line for coming out and accepting myself.
Communion – receiving the body of Christ – into my own body was a
ritual of sublimation, relishing the digested wafer as Christ’s body in my own
body and full of erotic overtones. Over the years, there was a slow trans-
formation of erotic self-negativity through fleshly communion with Christ.
Communion was a spiritual-passionate intimacy with Christ. And this is not
just a homoerotic perception but also of many religious women.
Mark Jordan aptly describes the priesthood as a liturgical impersonation
of Jesus with the words of the priest at mass as “sonic drag.”27 He notes,

And the priest at the altar, possess no longer just his own dangerous and
despised body, but the body of Jesus. He possessed it by making it, and he
possesses it by impersonating it. The priest holds the consecrated wafer
has become Jesus holding his own consumable and divine body. . . . For
a man to do it is a symbol of the most physical elevation. The priest as
Jesus makes his body perfect and then passes it around to be eaten.28
122  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Communion and the priesthood helped me accept my homoerotic gestalt.
Christ’s incarnation was extended in the communion ingestion of the body
of Christ and then through ordination. Christ’s incarnation was taking root
in my own flesh. Imperfectly, I enfleshed Christ in imitation. My colleague
Thomas Bohache has helped me to understand this transformation of birth-
ing the queer Christ inclusively:

God calls us to do great things. For Mary, that great thing is conceiving
the Christ in her body. For queers, that great thing . . . means conceiv-
ing of our self-worth, our creativity, and our birthright as children of
God . . . who can give birth to the Christ. This is good news for every
oppressed person but especially for queers, who are often led to believe
that we cannot and should not give birth to anything.29

Similarly, Latin American theologian Mayra Rivera expresses a deep truth

about the fleshly identification with Christ:

unless I can embrace my own flesh, and its beginnings in the flesh of
another, I cannot love other fleshly beings – nor can I understand the
incarnation. What is at stake for them is nothing less than the possibil-
ity of love.30

My fleshly connection with Christ was freeing me from familial shame and
ecclesial homophobia to love myself, men, humanity, and all life. I could
envision myself as priest and lover. Patrick S. Cheng contextualizes the strug-
gle for amazing grace:

If sin is conformity, then grace in the context of the Transgressive Christ

can be understood as deviance, or the transgression of social, legal, and
religious boundaries and norms. Like the act of coming out, one’s ability
to challenge such boundaries and norms is not something that can be
“willed” or “earned,” but is rather a gift of grace from God. Although
there is always the very real risk of crucifixion for challenging societal
norms, there is also the promise of resurrection on the other side in terms
of being true to one’s own God-given sexuality and gender identity.31

I accepted myself as a carnal outsider, as both priest and lover as I left the
Jesuits to pursue a queer journey into the fleshliness of gay life and embrace
an incarnational spirituality.

Incarnational fleshliness promiscuously expanded

John’s Gospel uses flesh (sarx) in its hymn: “The word became flesh (sarx)
and dwelt among us” (John 1.14). The hymn was composed in a Hellenistic
milieu with Jewish and Christian theological commitments, but it offended
 Discovering the missing body  123
Jewish, Platonist Christian, and Gnostic sensibilities alike. God becomes
localized in the flesh of Jesus. God stretched Godself into Jesus of Nazareth.
However, Mayra Rivera notes that “flesh is unstable and complex. . . . A
fixed boundary? Apparently not, not so in a simple way, because those born
of flesh are being called to be born of the spirit. This not only does word
become flesh, but what became flesh will become spirit. The word is trans-
formed as flesh and in the process the flesh itself changes.”32 In John’s Gos-
pel, the fleshly word is transformed into many forms: bread, light, truth and
way, resurrection and life, door, good shepherd, drag-and the vine. Flesh is
not self-contained but very porous, perhaps contagious. Rivera notes, “Like
bread, flesh is shared, becoming part of many bodies, transformed into the
very flesh of those bodies that partakes from it. The exchange entails not
only his flesh, but also the carnality of those invited to share in its life.”33
This divine fleshliness spreads among fleshliness in the world, and it trans-
formed into spirit and life. Incarnational fleshliness is fleshly grace intertwin-
ing with other fleshliness, this fleshly grace intra-carnates in other fleshliness
and inter-carnates in a web of interconnectedness.34 The Johannine vine and
the branches symbolize this organic, interconnected fleshliness and excessive
fleshly abundance.
But at the heart of God’s fleshly incarnation in Christ is an exuberant
excess of divine fleshliness that cannot be restricted, confined, or managed.
It is fleshly grace, unbounded, lavish, and restlessly seeking new incarna-
tions. Emerging theologies of the evolutionary Christ, the cosmic and uni-
versal Christ have stressed the vital expansion of the Ascended Christ.35
The Ascended Christ exceeds those ecclesial boundaries erected. The long
history of the denial of incarnational fleshliness and subsequently sexuality
has scarred Christians and locked them into disincarnational spiritualities.
Laurel Schneider’s insight on “promiscuous incarnation” can be under-
stood as an expansiveness of God’s incarnation in recent theological and
eco-theological writings:

If the Christian doctrine of incarnation insists upon God actually becom-

ing flesh (as it does), then it obliterates both the radical and abstract
otherness of God and the absolute oneness of God upon which it also
insists. Flesh is indiscriminate in its porous interconnection with every-
thing and it is never, at any level absolutely unified. To insist upon a
solitary incarnate moment is to betray the very fleshiness of flesh, its
innate promiscuity; pesky shiftiness, and resilient interruptions of sense.
A solitary incarnation is, in other words, not incarnation at all but a
disembodiment: a denial of the flesh that in its very cellular structure of
integration, disintegration, and passage is always re-forming, dispersing,
and returning.36

Schneider’s description of incarnated flesh as “porous interconnection with

everything” is an apt description of divine incarnation of the Ascended
124  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Christ.37 Likewise, Marcella Althaus-Reid fractures the fixity of Christ’s
Incarnation with her use of the word play with the translation of John 1.14,
“pitching of tent””

Only a Bi/Christ category which happens to be so unsettled, that no

mono-relationship could have been so easily constructed with it. Bi/
christology walks like a nomad in lands of opposition and exclusive
identities, and does not pitch its tent forever in the same place. If we con-
sidered that in the Gospel of John 1.14, the verb is said to have “dwelt
among us” as a tabernacle (a tent) or “put his tent amongst us,” the
image conveys Christ’s high mobility and lack of fixed space or definitive
frontiers. Tents are easily dismantled overnight and do not become ruins
or monuments; they are rather folded and stored or reused for another
purpose when old. tents change shape in strong winds, and their adapt-
ability rather their stubbornness as one of their greatest assets.38

Althaus-Reid expands incarnation with the nomadic of pitching a tent

with bisexuality to construct the fluid and mobile fleshly Bi/Christ, for
such a correlation provides new ways to look outside gender/sexual bina-
rism and hierarchy, and value God’s kenosis into human sexuality: “God’s
divinity depends on God’s own presence amidst the sexual turbulences
of human beings’ intimate relationships, whose knowledge is the knowl-
edge of the excluded queerness in Christianity.”39 Marcella Althaus-Reid
underscores the material proliferation of the Queer God: “The theological
scandal is that bodies speak, and God speaks through them. . . . Queer-
ness is something that belongs to God, and people are divinely queer by
grace.”40 This has vast hermeneutical consequences for seeking out the
sources for revelatory understanding of God’s presence in sexual lives
of outsider peoples and the method of incorporating the messiness of
excluded human sexualities and gender diversity. The Ascended Christ’s
body is recognized outside of the church and in the indecent erotic lives
of queers and outside control.

A Stonewall of promiscuous fleshly performances

Laurel Schneider’s notion of “promiscuous incarnation” is useful in envi-
sioning the artistic rendering of fleshly portrayals of Christ and their impact
upon both artist and audience. “Promiscuous incarnation” becomes a fleshly
hermeneutic that addresses the embodied experiences of the marginalized
and unravels the doctrinal rhetoric of Christian churches that disparage their
bodies and exclude them. It is incarnational in queer forms of resistance –
rituals (liturgy, meditation, BDSM), narrative performances, embodied the-
atrical self-presentations (drag), protests and parades, political strategies,
and innovative praxis, and communities. There is a LGBTQ theatricality of
experience – entangled with queering, camp, humor, and parody.41 This is
 Discovering the missing body  125
the creative and imaginative strategies, generating subversive alternatives to
dominant and colonizing power.
The Stonewall Riot (1969) became memorialized in the annual marches,
celebrations of pride and freedom. These freedoms have globally evolved
into ritual protests, with wild theatricality, drag, and stylized carnivals. I
would argue that Stonewall became a Queer Pentecost for many LGBTQ
religious folks globally. There are numerous examples globally of incar-
national embodiments of marginalized LGBTQ peoples and the roles of
embodiment in the development of their spiritual praxes and theologies, but
I want to draw examples primarily from my own cultural context and from
incarnational performances reflecting my argument of incarnational injustice
in churches ignoring the queer bodies that they disvalue. Queer bodies are
not only sites of oppression but sites of resistance and hope. Black theologian
Anthony Pinn observes,

The body occupies a social space whose texture and tone cannot be fully
assessed only through the workings of spoken language, but we also
must be sensitive to the physical placement, condition, and actions of
real and specific bodies. Meaning is embodied. Human experience, then,
involves an array of factors only some of which are discursive in nature.
Bodies serve as a nonmaterial text to be read, but they are also material
realities that shape information within the context of the world.”42

I will select several embodied texts of queer resistance and rebellion that
challenge the Christian heteronormative meme.

Gender-fuck and drag

Marginalized peoples use what postcolonial literary critic Homi Bhabha
describes as subaltern strategies of “mocking” dominant, colonizing power
and their oppressive hierarchies. Jesus’ symbolic entry into Jerusalem
employs social parody. UCC activist clergy Robin Meyers describes Jesus’
entry as a “transparent lampoon of the imperial power.”43 It is a resisters’
non-parade without imperial trappings and symbols, and he uses parody in
the trappings of his entry as an anti-imperial demonstration against Pilate
and the coopted Temple hierarchy. Not only Jesus but also marginalized
and colonized people have used social parody and humor to resist against
colonial power.
One of the best performers of queer theatricality and social parody is the
Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence (SPIs) a drag-clown nun order, founded
in four continents.44 The nuns are predominantly white cisgender gay males
though there are female nuns, some transgender nuns and, at least, one
heterosexual male that I have met. One Sister Savior Applause describes the
SPIs as “Modern Badass Queen Superhero Nuns.”45 Melissa Wilcox stresses
that the SPIs use “serious social parody”:
126  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Social parody . . . is a form of cultural protest in which a disempowered
group parodies an oppressive cultural institution while simultaneously
claiming for itself what it believes to be an especially good or supe-
rior enactment of one of more culturally respected aspects of the same
institutions.46

Though the SPIs parody Catholic nuns, they imitate the best of their chari-
table works with social activism, compassionate care, and fundraising in the
millions for various LGTBQ and non-queer folks at risk. Their parody is
directed at the restrictive moralism and dogmatism of the Catholic hierarchy
and destructive Christian policies impacting the queer community.
Wilcox locates the Sisters in the “tradition of joyful, playful and perfor-
mative activism.”47 She compares it with Muñoz’s notion of “disidentifi-
cation.”48 She contextualizes their ludic performativity with Sara Warner’s
definition of “acts of gaiety are performances of redress that transform the
vicious banality of homophobia and misogyny into something fantastic and
fabulous.”49 Warner continues that such performativity as “a gesture of radi-
cal openness, gaiety shows us that what hurts, what causes us shame, and
what we feel is wrong with the world is not necessary or inevitable, and it
gives a license to unmake and remake it in other guises.”50
Drag clowns in white-face paint and glitter, with outlandish costumes,
have potent social power in their use of humor and camp. In attending the
play, The Laramie Project on the hate crime death of Matthew Shepard, I
observed how a fundamentalist Christian hate group from the Phelps Clan
picketed and harassed attendees, for they use the common tactic of provok-
ing a public reaction. When the Sisters arrived, with their clown face and
humor, they just laughed and made fun of the Phelps clan. The protesters
were unable to deal with the Sisters laughing at them, they panicked and fled.
The SPIs are experts at queer street theater with the prophetic edge of
the prophet Jeremiah. During the Christmas season, the post-Christian Los
Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence queer the Mexican posada, a ritual
procession and song to find housing for Joseph and Mary pregnant with
child. The Sisters replaced Joseph with a transgender male and Mary with a
lesbian woman. They use rituals of social parody to communicate how the
LGBTQ community is unable to find housing and are not welcome as nar-
rated in the birth of Jesus the Christ. I witnessed similar responses to drag
clown Nuns from Christian protesters, carrying hateful signs and hurling
abuses and invectives.
Queer social parody of drag nuns offers LGBTQ folks redress to religious
shame, guilt, and stigma. Althaus-Reid writes about the urban poor of Bue-
nos Aires who construct the Catholic Saint Liberata as Santa Librada, who
is the cross-dressing crucified Woman Christ. Santa Librada is a hybrid of
Christ and the Virgin Mary, occupying novel space for institutional Christ
and the Virgin Mary used in the Spanish conquest of indigenous peoples in
South America with the cross-dressing alternative of a Jesus/Mary figure
 Discovering the missing body  127
who cares for the poor.51 Latin American Hugo Córdova Quero has argued
how the restrictive, hetero-patriarchal dogma of incarnation has been used
to universalize the way of being embodied and thus against all who do not fit
into its restrictive view – such as transgender and intersex people. Restrictive
embodied normativity is unjust and a misuse of Christ’s incarnation. Quero
writes, “If the doctrine of incarnation is accurate and implies not only the
relationality of divine with creation but also the embodiment of God into
creation, then God is the God of transgender and intersex people as well as
gays, cross-dressers, bisexual, heterosexual people and the like.”52
Drag performativity and transgender/intersex bodies destabilize patriar-
chal and colonial constructions of incarnation. Countering heteronormative
incarnation, the San Francisco SPIs annually celebrate Easter Sunday with the
Hunky Jesus Contest and the addition of the Foxy Mary to the contest.53 One
Arizona UCC church has celebrated the Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary contest.
This contest is perceived as blasphemous by conservative Christians, but it is a
ludic performance with a profound incarnational truth that Christ is embodied
in non-normative bodies. The Hunky Jesus contest can be read intertextually
with the work of postcolonial biblical scholar who argues that Jesus is por-
trayed as a Drag King in John’s Gospel. John uses Ioudaioi (the Jews) over
a hundred times; it appears to include a nationalist elite group committed to
racial purity and going back to the time of the Book of Ezra that stigmatizes
miscegenation, normalizing racialized Jewish heterosexual marriage. Tat-Siong
Benny Liew understands Jesus at the Last Supper in John’s Gospel as a drag-
king, taking on the female/slavish work of washing the feet of his disciples.54
He argues that John portrays Jesus as drag-king, performing a “literary
striptease,” and that the author depicts Jesus wanting water, giving water,
and water flowing from his body on the cross “speak to Jesus’ gender inde-
terminacy and hence his cross-dressing and other queer desire.”55 Jesus as
drag-king performs a theatrical parody of gender and critiques the racialized
Ioudaioi policies of racialized nationalism and its colonial policy cooperating
with the Romans. Liew concludes that John uses a strategy to resist colo-
nial power and its “constructions of racial-ethnic identities that turn out to
hetero-masculinist.”56

The gay stations of the cross

There are two artistic ritual re-iterations of the gay stations of the cross by
Delmas Howe and Douglas Blanchard. These material media are perceived
as blasphemous and perverted by churches, but for many queer Christians,
they have a liberative performativity that address non-normative embodi-
ments to discover the incarnational presence of the risen Christ in their own
lives. I have used some of the paintings on LGBT stations for Tenebrae on
Good Friday.57
The gay artist Delmas Howe has loosely connected 18 paintings in Stations:
A Gay Passion. The series included the titles, “The Stripping,” “Veronica’s
128  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Kiss,” and “The Flagellation.” There are a number of paintings in Howe’s
Stations series with the figure of the martyr Christ in the passion and suf-
fering of gay men with AIDS. Like so many gay men at the time, Howe was
impacted by the death of his spouse Mackenzie Pope to AIDS in 1993. He
observes: “I was amazed at the grief I felt. . . . I didn’t know how intense
an emotion it is, or how it makes you so conscious of the moment. The loss
of Mackenzie, the loss of so many friends.”58 He wanted to mourn the loss
of his spouse and friends to AIDS. It was on a tour of European Christian
art that Howe discovered homoerotic S&M Christian art, and thus adopted
Stations of the Cross as a grieving ritual. He writes:

The passion and crucifixion of Christ, the martyrs – all that tortured
flesh, a lot of it male, just cascading down from every direction. It
occurred to me that I’d come across that in my life in New York, in the
S&M scene with its costumes and role-playing. Sometime after that, I
was in New York again, and made another pilgrimage through the old
gay haunts that are now mostly gone – the piers, the trucks, the bars
of Greenwich Village. That’s when it all came together. I decided to do
a Gay Passion, set on the sex piers, commemorating the tens of thou-
sands of wonderful, attractive, intelligent men wiped out because they
were celebrating their sexuality. I also decided to use S&M imagery to
emphasize the torture that AIDS has caused the whole gay community.59

Howe sets his stations series on the gay sex piers of Greenwich Village in
New York City in 1970s and early 1980s. He intends to celebrate his sexual
relationship with his spouse, gay men, and their sexuality during a period of
early gay sexual liberation and to remember the losses to the AIDS pandemic
in subsequent decades. He notes,

The sex piers are gone now. But the paintings are intended to evoke a
conglomeration of feelings: the celebration of sexuality and the male
body that the sex piers represented, the thrill of all that sex so openly
available at the time, and of course the grief that has followed with
AIDS.60

In the “Flagellation,” Howe portrays a group of leather men in a BDSM

scene on the piers – two hooded men flogging the martyr in the forefront
while four other men are surrounding two others bound and tied up.61 This
is a representation of Christ the martyr embodied in all gay men who have
been humiliated and crucified because of HIV/AIDS or hate crimes. I would
interpret the martyr as the fracturing or proliferation of fleshly Christ incar-
nation into all the lives of gay men. In the cathedral of the New York piers,
Howe affirms that Christ is present in gay promiscuous sex yet also inter-
twined with their suffering and loss through AIDS, with stigma and cultural
rejection. Howe’s stations in the piers provokes deep emotions and memories
 Discovering the missing body  129
for myself. In 1979, my spouse Frank and I were given a tour of the gay
scene in New York City by a friend. Our friend snapped a photograph of
Frank and myself at the piers with the sun shining around us. I look at the
photograph daily, and it brings back memories of our time together and his
loss through AIDS.
There is no question that his portrayal of Jesus’ passion with explicit gay
sexuality and themes upsets erotophobic and homophobic Christians. But
Howe intends to depict moments of “grace” (my term) and liberation of gay
men, oppressed, stigmatized, and deceased. He tells their stories of grace and
erotic connection from the passion narrative of Christ. Howe notes, “I’m
not portraying Christ or his passion. I’m portraying our own gay passion
that has centered for so long now around the disaster known as AIDS.”62
Christ’s fleshly incarnation and passion provide a medium to communicate
God’s grace and presence in the midst of sexual oppression and the trag-
edies of AIDS. Marcella Althaus-Reid points out, “The theological scandal
is that bodies speak, and God speaks through them.”63 This means that the
search for God argues for the search for God’s embodiment among the piers
of New York City, where the erotic bodies of gay men and Jesus coincide.
New circles of hermeneutics of grace are found in unexpected or dislocated
spaces of indecency.
Howe’s “Flagellation of Jesus” exhibits a sacred site, combining erotic
gay intimacy, the BDSM scene of Jesus being flogged, and a protest against
the religious devaluation of gay bodies. Howe uses the nudity to reveal the
grace inherent in the fleshly body of the martyr or Jesus figure, and that grace
is extended to the other bodies present, even the floggers. He extends the
divine fleshliness of Jesus to the fleshliness of gay, fetishized bodies. God’s
incarnated body finds fleshly extension in other bodies, traditionally deval-
ued. Jesus’ fleshliness has a nomadic quality of spreading and circulating in
other dis/graceful bodies depicted, and nomadic, dis/graceful human bodies
provide sites of fleshly revelation and grace.
More recently, gay artist Douglas Blanchard paints his own version of 24
stations of the passion of the Gay Jesus. He incarnates Christ’s flesh in the
fluid fleshliness of gay men, but he downplays the gay features of the gay
Jesus. There is sparse nudity, and Blanchard paints a gay, beardless, white
youth as Christ in blue jeans, near the age of Matthew Shepard before his
death. Douglas Blanchard writes, “I shed some of the gravitas of the conven-
tional image by making Christ beardless and younger. Instead of remoteness. . . .
I wanted Christ to be attractive in the fullest sense, sexually and spiritually,
someone who draws people to Him.”64 Blanchard’s white youth without
any gay markers, has the effect of making Christ every white youth, and this
problematizes Jesus for diverse populations of color and ethnic hybridity and
for women. He is aware of this criticism, “If I do another version of the Pas-
sion, then I would make Christ racially mixed, or racially indeterminate.”65
Blanchard, like many LGBT people, has a love–hate relationship with insti-
tutional Christianity:
130  Robert E. Shore-Goss
I have little love for the Christian Religion, an aggressive imperial cult
with a long history of crime. But I have a deep love for Christian faith. I
love its radicalism most of all. The very idea of God becoming a human
being and. going through everything we must go through is most revo-
lutionary. . . . In Christ, God walked in our shoes all the way to the end.
God experienced our life and mortality as one of us. He put Himself into
our hands as a dependent, as we are, dependent upon each other for our
lives and for our safety.66

Blanchard expresses an incarnational theology: listing the victims of homo-

phobic and transphobic violence such as Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard,
Brandon Teena, and the victims of the Upstairs Lounge. He claims: “All our
murdered dead, known and unknown, are images of Christ crucified.”67 The
crucifixion of Jesus was used by institutional Christianity to scapegoat par-
ticular outsiders or marginalized from women, indigenous peoples, Africans,
people attracted to the same-gender, Jews and Muslims, and others. Such
scapegoat theologies project upon the targeted population the guilt for the
death of Jesus. The crucifixion of Jesus, however, is appropriated queerly by
LGBT folks to counter imperial Christian theologies that target and oppress
LGBT folks. Blanchard, like Howe, places LGBT into the passion event of
Christ and his death.
One of Blanchard’s paintings entitled “Jesus Returns to God” depicts
Christ’s Ascension with two men dancing in the air.68 This painting is worth
spending some time in expounding the Ascended Christ. Douglas Blanchard
describes his painting:

Jesus, shirtless and wearing blue jeans, swoons in the arms of a winged
dance partner who appears to be a hunky male angel. But they both have
crucifixion wounds on their wrists. Jesus is embraced directly by God.
The position of their arms suggests a ballroom dance, perhaps a waltz,
with God’s hand planted firmly on Jesus’ bottom.69

The male youthful angelic figure, bare-chested with wings, holds the Ascend-
ing Christ, also bare-chested, but passionately wraps his arms around the
Christ in an intimate dance and with one hand holding his clothed but-
tock and kisses Jesus on the right cheek. Both figures significantly carry the
wounds of crucifixion on their hands. The opening epigram is taken from the
Song of Songs 1.2, “O that you would kiss with the kisses of your mouth”
Blanchard as well as his co-author Kittredge Cherry indicate that the embrac-
ing angel is symbolic of God’s solidarity with the suffering Christ. Perhaps
a more suggestive reading might comprehend that the Ascended Christ now
embraces the crucified Queer Body of Christ. Earlier Kittredge Cherry writes,

All our murdered dead known and unknown are images of Christ cru-
cified. So are the hundreds of thousands who perished in the AIDS
 Discovering the missing body  131
epidemic, dying in agony and poverty. . . . So are the hundreds of gay
and lesbian young, known and unknown, who kill themselves rather
than face the horror of human hatred barreling toward them. . . . This
is what he tried to paint in the stations.70

This station of Christ’s Ascension and his physical-spiritual embrace of a gay

man symbolically asserts that the institutional church does not have ultimate
control of Christ’s body and presence, for the Ascending Christ embraces the
wounds of gay men, abjected with ecclesial hatred and cultural homophobia,
carrying the marks of HIV, and brutal hate crimes. The Ascending Christ
incarnates the indecent outsider crucified by the church.
I find the Ascended Christ one of the most erotic of Blanchard’s paintings,
and for gay men like myself, I find myself drawn into the erotic embrace of
God with Jesus. Art historian Kittredge Cherry writes:

People tend to react strongly to this image. Some find it too sexual and
recoil at the thought of God’s hand on my butt. (At least God has no
body below the waist here!) Others welcome the painting because it
removes the shame of sexuality, presenting erotic love as holy. Sacred
same-sex kisses are rarer in art than gay bashings, so the most daring
part of Blanchard’s Passion series occurs here after Jesus dies. . . . There
is no longer doubt about whether Jesus was simply an ally of queer
people. The full revelation of his gay sexual orientation does not happen
in his lifetime, but is disclosed in the afterlife by Blanchard.71

Cherry notes that some folks felt that the series should have stopped before
this image while others wanted this image to start this series.72 Blanchard’s
painting of Jesus’ Ascension becomes the hermeneutical key for interpreting
the whole series, with the culmination in a theological affirmation of mystical
marriage with God. Human erotic passions, same-sex passionate connection
with Jesus and God become an affirmation of the theo-dynamics of same-sex
sexuality in Jesus and God.

Corpus Christi
Finally, the last performance media that I want to explore is Terrence McNal-
ly’s play Corpus Christi, which received threats and protests primarily from
William Donohue of the Catholic League and other Christian conservative
groups as it opened at the Manhattan Theater in 1998 and was forced to
close down two weeks later. It was later produced in October 2006 at my
church with a cast of men and women, violating the original intention of
McNally to cast all men. I originally talked to Nic Arnzen, the director, about
finding a transgender person as Joshua/Jesus. It proved not to be feasible. I
discovered that the British transsexual woman and playwright Jo Clifford
did so in the play The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of the Heaven at the
132  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Edinburgh fringe festival.73 The idea of transgender Jesus was as repugnant
as gay Jesus. Jo Clifford has taken her play to Brazil to counter the newly
elected (2018) authoritarian and anti-LGBT president Jair Bolsanaro.
Corpus Christi was wonderfully and emotionally received, and Terrence
sent some Hollywood celebrity friends to scout out and ascertain the quality
of the performance and report to McNally. The play spun off as a mission-
ary movement of the church. It told a story that resonated with audiences:
Joshua/Jesus was bullied in his earlier years by homophobic students in high
school, the tender love of Judas for Joshua and their exchange of rings, and
the condemnation of Joshua by Pilate as the King of Faggots touched audi-
ences. Perhaps one of the dramatic points is the scene with Joshua/Jesus offi-
ciating at the marriage of Bartholomew and Thomas, with the background
music of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major which left few dry eyes in the audi-
ence. It was during the fight for marriage equality and before the US Supreme
Court declared that same-sex marriage was constitutional. The priest in the
play warns Joshua/Jesus of the lethal consequences of this blasphemous mar-
riage ritual of two disciples. This resonated with the audience in the struggle
for same-sex marriage prior to the US Supreme Court Decision in 2015.
The cast was predominantly unchurched, alienated by Christian homopho-
bia, and on opening night, I found the cast holding hands and praying. This
spontaneous custom of prayer continued with every performance and cast
changes with the life span of performances. The play became sacred space
to retell a sacred story in a different carnal mode. Thomas Bohache writes,
“The queer Christ animates his/her followers to speak to others in their own
language: this tells me that there are many diverse ways to tell the Christ
story and to share the Christ Spirit.”74 The cast became a postmodern church
to tell anew the fleshly parable of Joshua, a gay youth in Corpus Christi,
Texas, in the 1950s. For six years, the cast took the play around the US, to
the Fringe Festivals both in Edinburgh (Scotland), and Dublin (Ireland), and
finally to off Broadway. The cast was a zealous missionary movement.
Gay author James Langreaux, who viewed the play several times, wrote
about an event that happened in a performance in Hollywood. He speaks about
a heterosexual married friend, who believed that Jesus could change your sex-
ual orientation from gay/lesbian to straight. He brought his friend, Ian, to a
performance of Corpus Christi. At the crucifixion of Joshua, Langreaux writes,

my friend jumped out of his seat and ran to the foot of the stage, (“Oh
my God, Ian . . . what are doing?) With reckless abandon and utter
humility, Ian leapt up on the stage and fell on his face where he wept
loudly and kissed the actor’s bare feet.75

Ian’s dramatic and emotional weeping stunned the cast and audience. But
there were hundreds of profound and less dramatic emotional responses of
audiences, who heard the carnal story of Joshua and his troubled relation-
ship with Judas and institutional religion. Brandon, who played Joshua/
 Discovering the missing body  133
Jesus, narrates his experience of the play at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in
San Francisco.

One beautiful man came up to me after the show and said: “Before I
came here, I thought I was dying with AIDS, now that I am leaving here
now, I am living with it and will live a happy life of many years with it.
I feel healed.” I started crying.76

For six years, the cast, mostly non-affiliated with institutional religion,
became an ecclesial community with a story about same-sex love and fighting
against homophobic bullying. They told an inclusive story of grace to the dis-
solute. The cast made a documentary of their spiritual journey “Playing with
Redemption,” now on Netflix, detailing their experience and the transforma-
tion that they derived from the play. The cast became a postmodern church
with an embodied ritual performance of a homo-carnal Jesus to retell the
gospel story to fight for marriage equality and against homophobic bullying.77

Finding the disappearing risen Christ

Jesus’ risen body disappears from the sight of the disciples at the Ascension.
Luke symbolically indicates that the disappearing body is replaced by the
Spirit’s presence to the church. Throughout history, the church has claimed
the presence of the risen Christ in word and sacrament, in particular through
the eucharist. Yet the risen Christ has been entangled with the presence of the
Spirit, and the church has claimed the sole right to ascertain and determine
officially that presence in ritual and prayer. The church has maintained regu-
lation and control of that presence. But the Ascended Christ remains outside
of ecclesial control. Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew, “just as you
do this to the least of my family, you do this to me” (Matthew 25.40). This
is unregulated ascended presence of Christ.
Ascension theology juxtaposes the presence and absence of Christ’s risen
body. The Ascension requires that the church cannot regulate the Spirit nor
the Ascended Christ but must seek out the Ascended Christ. The Ascended
Christ can no longer be found in the empty tomb. N. T. Wright observes that
“the language of Jesus’ disappearance is just saying that after his death he
became, as it were, spiritually present everywhere.”78 It is the mission of the
church to discover the presence of the Ascended Christ, even in areas where
the church neither regulates nor is comfortable. Christ’s incarnation expands
promiscuously within non-orthodox embodiments.

Notes
  1 Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Mal-
den, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 1.
  2 Rebecca M. Voelkel attempts to speak of a female recovery of the carnal knowl-
edge of God in Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and the Movement of
134  Robert E. Shore-Goss
Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017); see also Michael Bernard Kelly,
Christian Mysticism’s Queer Flame: Spirituality in the Lives of Gay Men (New
York: Routledge, 2019), 9.
  3 N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the
Mission of The Church (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2008), 109–17.
  4 Ibid., 112.
  5 Sean D. Burke, Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013).
 6 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 113.
  7 Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Cas-
cade Books, 2018), 1951.
  8 Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Trans-
formation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2016), 273.
  9 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ: Three Dimensions of
Deep Incarnation,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, ed.
Niels Henrik Gregersen (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 231.
10 Lisa Isherwood, Introducing Body Theology (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press),
1998; Cheng, Radical Love; From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer
Christ (New York: Seabury, 2012); Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; Robert E.
Goss, Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay & Lesbian Manifesto (San Francisco, CA: Harp-
erSanFrancisco, 1993), Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus ACTED UP (Cleveland,
OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002).
11 Bjorn Kröndorfer, “Genderless or Hyper-Gendered? Reading the ‘Body of
Christ’ from a Critical Men’s Perspective,” in Reading the Body of Christ: Eine
Geschlectertheologische Relecture, ed. Saskia Wendell and Aurica Nutt (Tübin-
gen, Germany: Anna Brungart, 2016), 151–2.
12 Ibid., 151.
13 Jordan, “God’s Body,” 283.
14 Ibid.
15 See Robert E. Goss, “Christian Homodevotion to Jesus,” in Queering Christ:
Beyond Jesus ACTED UP (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 128–9; also,
Richard Rambuss, Closeted Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998), 42–9.
16 Richard C. Trexler, “Gendering Jesus Crucified,” in Iconography at the Cross,
ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 108.
17 Jordan, The Silence of Sodom, 203–4.
18 Ibid., 205.
19 Donald Boisvert, Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of the Saints (Cleve-
land, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2004), 170. I want to make note that the erotic language
was censored and toned down by Pilgrim Press. See Boisvert, “Talking Dirty
about the Saints: Storytelling and the Politics of Desire, Theology & Sexuality
12, no. 2 (2006): 165–79, and in particular, 171–2.
20 Ibid., 171.
21 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press), 2010, 78.
22 Boisvert, Sanctity and Male Desire, 171.
23 Patrick S. Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ
(New York: Seabury Press, 2012), 77–8.
24 Manuel Villalobos Mendoza, Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark (Sheffield, UK:
Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), 1.
25 Ibid., 2.
26 Ibid., 163–4.
27 Jordan, The Silence of Sodom, 207.
 Discovering the missing body  135
28 Ibid., 207–8.
29 Thomas Bohache, “Embodiment as Incarnation: An Incipient Queer Christol-
ogy,” Theology & Sexuality 10, no. 1 (2003): 26.
30 Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2015), 3144.
31 Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace, 106–7.
32 Rivera, Poetics of Flesh, 437.
33 Ibid., 476.
34 My eco-spirituality is dependent upon my fleshly and intimate connection with
Christ as a youth and in the Johannine insight of the porous fluidity and expan-
siveness of God’s incarnation into the web of life: Shore-Goss, God is Green: An
Eco-Spirituality of Incarnate Compassion (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016).
35 Gregersen, 234. Many other authors in the edited volume, Incarnation, find
themselves overlapping and expanding the insights of Gregersen. I add such
works as Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ and Stations of the
Cosmic Christ (2017) and Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ (2019).
36 Laurel Schneider, “Promiscuous Incarnation,” in The Embrace of Eros: Bodies,
Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 241–2.
37 I arrive at similar notion of Christ’s incarnation as grace or compassion intercon-
nected ecologically in my book God is Green (2016).
38 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 119–20.
39 Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 38.
40 Ibid., 77.
41 Mark D. Jordan, “Notes on Camp Theology,” in Dancing Theology in Fetish
Boots: Essays in Honor of Marcella Althaus-Reid, ed. Lisa Isherwood and
Mark D. Jordan (London: SCM Press, 2010), 181–90. See also Elizabeth Stuart,
“Camping around the Canon: Humor as a Hermeneutical Tool in Queer Read-
ings of the Bible,” in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, ed.
Robert E. Goss and Mona West (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2000), 23–34.
42 Anthony B. Pinn, Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought
(New York: New York University Press, 2010), 9.
43 Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Community of Resistance (New
Haven, CT: Yale University, 2015), 1676. Warren Carter calls this protest entry
“street theater” in Matthew and the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
2000), 414.
44 See The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Inc., “Orders Worldwide,” The Sisters
of Perpetual Indulgence, n.d., www.thesisters.org/world-orders. At the moment,
they are absent from Africa and Asia, and that may be due to cultural conditions
of exporting the Sisters, though I found my work on mad saints in Tibetan Bud-
dhism to be a striking parallel.
45 Melissa N. Wilcox, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (New
York: New York University Press, 2018), 276.
46 Ibid., 1617.
47 Ibid., 68.
48 Muñoz, Disidentifications.
49 See also Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of
Pleasure (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 192.
50 Ibid., 2231. See also Warner, 192.
51 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 79–81.
52 Hugo Córdova Quero, “This Body Trans/Forming Me: Indecencies in Trans-
gender/Intersex Bodies, Body Fascism and the Doctrine of the Incarnation,” in
Controversies in Body Theology, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood
(London: SCM Press, 2008), 117.
136  Robert E. Shore-Goss
53 Alex Mak, “It Was the Biggest Hunky Jesus Contest in History,” Broke-Ass
Stuart, April 2, 2018, https://brokeassstuart.com/2018/04/02/it-was-the-biggest-
hunky-jesus-competition-in-history/.
54 Tat-Siong Benny Liew, “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Exam-
ining John’s Engendering and Transgendering Word Across Different Worlds,”
in They Were All Together in One Place, ed. Randall Bailey, Tat-Siong Benny
Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009),
251–88.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 281.
57 Yasmine Hafiz, “‘Stations Of The Cross: The Struggle For LGBT Equality’ By Mary
Button Emphasizes Shared Sufferings,” Huffpost Religion, May 27, 2014, www.
huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/stations-of-the-cross-lgbt-equality_n_5168966.
html.
58 Lester Strong, “Coloring the World Queer: Delmas Howe’s Stations: A Gay
Passion, The Archive no. 22 (2007), www.leslielohman.org/the-archive/no22/
delmas-howe_strong-22.html.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 BDSM, or bondage-discipline/Dominance-submission/sadomasochism.
62 Lester Strong, “Coloring the World Queer.”
63 Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (New York: Routledge, 2003), 34.
64 Kittredge Cherry with Douglas Blanchard, The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision
(Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphile Press, 2014), 19.
65 Ibid., 11.
66 Ibid., 21–2.
67 Ibid., 22.
68 Blanchard’s “Jesus’ Return to God,” FineArt America, March 21, 2014, http://
fineartamerica.com/featured/22-jesus-returns-to-god-from-the-passion-of-christ-
a-gay-vision-douglas-blanchard.html.
69 Cherry with Blanchard, The Passion of Christ, 121.
70 Ibid., 22.
71 Ibid., 121–2.
72 Ibid., 122.
73 British transsexual woman and playwright, Jo Clifford wrote and performed
one person play, “The Gospel to Jesus the Queen of Heaven,” in Lyn Gard-
ner, “Edinburgh Festival 2014: Female Jesus Teaches a Lesson in Tolerance,”
The Guardian, August 7, 2014, www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/
aug/07/edinburgh-festival-2014-gospel-according-to-jesus-domino-effect. Listen
to Jo Clifford at https://vimeo.com/135951101.
74 Thomas Bohache, Christology from the Margins (London: SCM Press, 2008),
268.
75 James Alexander Langreaux, Gay Conversations with God: Straight Talk on
Fanaticism Fags, and the God Who loves Us (Scotland, UK: Findhorn Press,
2012), 136–7.
76 Nic Arnzen with the Cast and Friends of Corpus Christi, “Communion: Playing
with Redemption,” in Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for
LGBTQI Christians, ed. Robert E. Shore-Goss, Thomas Bohache, Patrick S.
Cheng, and Mona West (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2013), 241.
77 See Arnzen and Cast, “Communion: Playing with Redemption,” 229–49.
78 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 110.
7 Queering violent scenes
A Eucharistic interpretation
of BDSM
Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong

In spite of its internationality and plurality of cultures, Hong Kong is largely

a conservative society. This conservatism is particularly apparent in issues
of sexuality and it renders BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and
Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) plays a taboo. Thus, it hinders the
public from understanding what BDSM really is and makes them confuse
it with sexual violence.1 A number of short essays introducing BDSM were
published online on the Stand News, a reputable local Internet news website,
in 2016,2 and this enabled the public to obtain a more accurate image of
BDSM. However, there is virtually no theological investigation of BDSM in
Hong Kong thus far. What we have are just some pale and feeble objections
based on superficial, non-theological understandings of the Christian faith.3
While this is understandable given the general conservatism of local Chris-
tian communities, the absence of Christian intellectual voices of BDSM
will further marginalize them in the public deliberation of sexuality issues.
Moreover, it is totally plausible that BDSM practices exist among Christians.
Without adequate resources to reflect upon such practices, those Christians
will be unnecessarily tormented by guilt and shame. A gay Christian con-
fides to the authors that within Christian communities, the idea of sex is still
severely constrained by a dualistic mindset of natural and unnatural. Sexual
practice that is regarded as unnatural is usually linked to immorality. There-
fore, their shame becomes a major barrier for Christians who are BDSM
practitioners to disclose their erotic practices. In this context, the current
chapter aims at offering a theological reflection on BDSM by connecting it
with the Christian tradition.
A way of doing this is to appeal to the tradition of Christian asceticism
that involves masochistic practices.4 While BDSM plays apparently have
strong ascetic elements, they, as Jeremy Carrette argues, exist “within a dif-
ferent order of experience” from asceticism.5 Moreover, the idea and practice
of masochistic or radical asceticism is quite alien to most modern Christians,
especially Protestants who emphasize the personal dimension of spirituality.
For this reason, we turn to a sacramental act which involves most if not all
Christians: the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. In this chapter, we will try
to explore the inherent connections between the Christian interpretation
138  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
of Christ’s Passion in Eucharistic celebrations and the queer hermeneutics
of BDSM plays. Our main argument is that both Eucharistic celebrations
and BDSM plays employ the same hermeneutic strategy, namely to queer
a violent scene through the transformative power of rituals and to convert
exploitative abuse into a liberating sacrifice.6
Our arguments will proceed in the following way. First, we will explain
what BDSM is by clarifying some common misconceptions, and elaborat-
ing its rules and parameters. Second, with the aid of a case study, we will
introduce how BDSM plays can serve as transformative rituals that convert
pains to pleasures. Third, we will illustrate how the Eucharist reinterprets
the violent scene of Calvary as a healing grace through its peculiar herme-
neutic strategy and highlights its commonality with the ritualistic power of
BDSM plays. Finally, we will demonstrate how a Eucharistic interpretation
can illuminate and further enrich the liberating power of BDSM plays. In
this chapter, “play” refers to an activity that takes place, whereas “scene”
indicates a picture presented in a particular setting within a play or an event.

BDSM: conceptions and misconceptions

As stated previously, reliable resources for a more accurate idea of BDSM
are scarce in Hong Kong. People often identify it with sexual violence and
BDSM is thus stigmatized. This situation is worsened by the fact that Hong
Kong is deeply influenced by the Japanese pornographic film industry.7 Most
Japanese adult videos (AVs) involving BDSM, according to our experience
and observation, try to please their viewers through degrading the body and
personhood of the subs. These depictions have distorted the image of BDSM
and further hindered a deeper understanding of what it really is. Therefore,
we will first clarify some common misconceptions and then elaborate its
rules and parameters in the following paragraphs.
If one goes through a few Japanese BDSM AVs, one will soon realize why
people often regard BDSM as a kind of sexual violence. In fact, the scenes of
these videos are mostly of a sexually violent nature rather than actual BDSM
plays. In these videos, BDSM is actually a synonym of sexual assaults or
abuses inflicted by the doms upon the subs. Of course, an actual BDSM play,
however, does contain these elements. However, those videos lack the essen-
tial or sufficient conditions of an actual BDSM play: mutual consent, recip-
rocal pleasure, and uncompromising rules and parameters. In those videos,
the bodies of the subs, regardless of their sex and gender, mainly serve as a
commodity to cater to the sensual desire of the consumers. Furthermore, the
enjoyment of these so-called BDSM plays is unidirectional in which the doms
experience enjoyment while the subs suffer. This pattern is reinforced by the
fact that the camera mainly focuses on the painful expressions of the subs.
While pain, suffering, and humiliation are some of the core elements of
BDSM, actual BDSM plays are entirely different from these Japanese AVs. As
mentioned in the beginning, BDSM refers to three pairs of concept: bondage
 Queering violent scenes  139
and discipline, dominance (or domination) and submission, and sadism and
masochism. The last pair of terms was invented by the Austro-German psy-
chiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis published in
1886.8 However, contemporary critics generally find Krafft-Ebing’s (as well
as Sigmund Freud’s) pathological account of sadomasochism (SM) unsatis-
factory as he stigmatized it as a kind of perversion and abnormality.9 Another
important figure in the development of the study of SM is British physician
Havelock Ellis. While Ellis was able to recognize love instead of cruelty as
the basis of SM and uphold the role of human will and imagination,10 he
still missed the essence of SM as he was not aware of its social character
and overemphasized the importance of pain, which is in fact not a neces-
sary element in a SM play.11 Contemporary studies show that there are three
main criteria, which we have already mentioned, for BDSM: mutual consent,
reciprocal pleasure, and uncompromised rules and parameters.
First of all and most importantly, BDSM is a consensual game.12 All prac-
titioners, including doms and subs, play this game freely, willingly, and vol-
untarily.13 The content and the level of simulated torture are well negotiated
before the start of the game.14 No one should transgress the accepted rules
and parameters.15 This central feature of BDSM is often concealed in Japa-
nese AVs.16
Second, the goal of a BDSM play is not pain and suffering as such but
mutual pleasure. While it is true that the infliction and reception of various
kinds of abuse (physical or non-physical) are key features of BDSM, what
the practitioners seek is not suffering per se but the pleasure generated from
such simulations of suffering. Suffering leads to agony, but the parody of
it can bring about pleasure under mutual consent and skillful practices.17
Particularly, BDSM requires one to take care of one’s partner as himself/her-
self, whereas violent assault aims at harming others maliciously.18 It is also
important to note that in BDSM plays, not only do doms seek pleasure from
the subs; it also goes the other way round at the same time. On the surface,
BDSM displays the binary opposition between the powerlessness of the subs
and the power of the doms. However, the reversal of power also takes place
in reality because the doms are responsible for observing the accepted rules
and the subs have the power to order the doms to treat them in ways that
they like.19 In fact, there are no essential or innate sadists and masochists in
BDSM. The role of power relationship between doms and subs are fluid and
ever-switching, rather than fixed and static.20
Third, as one may have already noticed, all BDSM practitioners – ­especially
the doms – should strictly follow the rules and parameters set right before
the start of the game.21 Those rules and negotiated parameters should never
be compromised. Anyone who violates them should be removed from the
game.22 Furthermore, safety and responsibility is always emphasized in
BDSM. BDSM practitioners are not amateurs who play in an ad lib way.
Rather, they have to be trained and educated in order to acquire adequate
techniques as well as self-mastery and self-knowledge.23 In addition, a safe
140  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
word must be set in case of emergency, i.e. whenever the sub is reaching
a physical or psychological threshold.24 In any case, BDSM practitioners
always stress that all BDSM plays should be “sane, safe and consensual.”25
To summarize the foregoing discussion, we define BDSM play as a kind
of mutual and consensual practice (often but not necessarily erotic) that
transforms pain, humiliation, and/or suffering to pleasure through simulated
scenes of assault, manipulation, and/or exploitation. Based on this defini-
tion, we will now move on to a discussion of how BDSM plays can serve as
transformative rituals that convert pains to pleasures.

BDSM plays as transformative rituals

The foregoing discussion tells us that a BDSM play is a simulation of abusive
scenes aimed at transforming seemingly miserable experiences into pleasur-
able joy. It should never be a form of actual abuse.26 On this basis, BDSM can
be seen as theater. Robert Stoller claims that “the art of sadomasochism . . .
is . . . its delicious simulation of harm, of high risk.”27 This theatricality,
accordingly, “allow[s] people to play out fantasies of harm, humiliation,
revenge, and triumph without actually harming, humiliating, revenging, or
triumphing over others.”28 These fantasies, according to John Noyes, then
“seize upon the machinery of domination and pervert its usage” and further
transgress stereotypes of cultural identities.29 In brief, BDSM, when comply-
ing with the principle of “sane, safe, and consensual,” is a theater which
transforms domination into liberation through its specific form of fantasies
and imaginations.
Some critics go further to see BDSM as a ritual – a religious theater. Mark
Thompson, for example, regards BDSM as a kind of intense sexual ritual
which allows ecstasy or transcendental self-awareness to enter everyday
lives.30 By seeing BDSM as primarily a “consensual exchange of power in
an erotic context,”31 Julianne Buenting attempts to explore the rituality of
BDSM more deeply. With reference to theorists including Michel Foucault,
Victor Turner, Ronald Grimes, Catherine Bell, and Lawrence Hoffmann,
she asserts that “rituals are complex events, involving multiple persons with
varying expectations, a variety of acts in which various people participate
with various levels of intentionality and commitment and so much more.”32
She then continues to declare that BDSM is not just an example but indeed
a paradigm of ritual because this theatrical act consciously and intention-
ally toys with and makes use of frightening scenes to open up another world
through the intense exchange of powers and relationships.33 In this way,
she believes that “BDSM can contribute to the process of transgressing and
transcending stereotyped gender roles, developing trust and negotiation
skills, and rehearsing vulnerability through both control and submission.”34
Jonathan Cahana, in his comparative study of ancient gnostic ritual and
queer BDSM, adds that BDSM, deeply rooted in ritual traditions, enables
its practitioners to “validate their experience as a quest after self-knowledge
 Queering violent scenes  141
that necessarily transcends the here and now.”35 This transcendental power
of BDSM is further elaborated in the account of Corie Hammers, who argues
in the following way:

Sadomasochistic practice shifts bodily orientations in ways that . . .

reconfigures the everyday, which I argue can be characterized as a move
towards agential/embodied living. In the temporal, transient space of
BDSM, individuals speak of a type of “becoming”, wherein the affective
and somatic ‘effects’ of BDSM flow into and impact the mundane – the
daily, quotidian aspect of life (what BDSMers refer to as the “vanilla”
world).36

In the language of self-awareness theory, this reconfiguring effect of BDSM

operates by redirecting high-level self-awareness, which may plausibly
be burdensome and aversive, to low-level sensation and arousal. In non-­
technical terms, BDSM plays release the practitioners from daily responsi-
bility and make them focus on their bodies.37 Hammers’ study shows that
BDSM plays effectively help (female) sexual violence survivors to get out of
their traumatic experiences and reclaim their subjectivity.38 She concludes
that “BDSM, when done with care and trust, can become a form of somatic
intervention that enables bodily recuperation.”39
Thus far, we can see that BDSM, as a theater or a ritual, can transform and
heal practitioners through reinterpreting and reenacting some violent and/
or miserable scenes. Our interview with Avaem Tenjou Rika (pseudonym), a
shibari (the Japanese terms of “to tie” and referring to a specific style of rope
bondage) rigger in Hong Kong and the founder of Shibari for All, further
illustrates this point.40 Before becoming a rigger, Rika had been a bondage
model for two years. Later, she learned to become a rigger under various
instructors in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and then started Shibari for
All in 2016, a project which aimed at introducing the art, beauty, and joy of
shibari to the general public. Similar to what we have discussed above, Rika
also emphasizes that “sane, safe, and consensual” are mandatory for all shi-
bari players. Besides, partners in shibari can switch roles according to their
preferences, and both have the same level of autonomy during the game.
Rika was first introduced to shibari by a friend of hers when she was
going through rough times and was soon addicted to it. To her surprise,
what captivated her was not so much the sexual desire aroused in shibari but
the experience of tranquility. For her, shibari is primarily a form of medita-
tion, though it is simultaneously sexual and erotic. By practicing shibari, she
learned more about herself, her own desires as well as her relationship with
others.41 In a demonstration video in which Rika performs shibari as a rig-
ger with her female model, she wears a black low cut dress and covers her
mouth with a black mask, exemplifying both mystery and sensuousness. As
her model kneels on the floor, she blinds her with a handkerchief. She then
ties the model’s hands with a long red rope and caresses her face lightly. After
142  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
that, Rika continues to tie the model’s knees and ankles, and slowly brushes
her legs. Finally she ties the rope across the model’s breasts, and then the
rest of her body. During their play, Rika focuses on nothing other than the
reaction of her model. Rika asserts that the eroticism she expresses during
a workshop is mainly for performative purposes. However, sometimes she
does feel “turned on,” as in the case of a photo shoot when she was sexually
aroused by the sensuous posts.42
Rika calls her performance a threesome: The rigger, the model and the
audience are in relation with one another. The model is aroused by the fact
that he/she is being watched by the audience, the rigger’s action toward the
model is also affected by the enthusiasm of the audience, and likewise, the
engagement of the audience depends on the interaction between the players.
For this reason, Rika affirms connectedness, mutual pleasures, and equal
participation of all people who participate in the play. She also asserts that
shibari can be a liberating act for the practitioners as an art form or as a
physical play. She hopes that a better understanding on shibari and BDSM
can eliminate public misconception that these plays are distorted, patho-
logical, and immoral, and thus can liberate the practitioners from guilt and
shame.43
The “thick description” of Rika echoes scholarly discussions about
BDSM. For the practitioners, it is not only a pursuit of sexual pleasure
but also a quest for their own self and subjectivity. This is the rituality
of BDSM. Using the example of shibari, being tied up and restrained in
front of others (the rigger and sometimes the audience as well) – no mat-
ter clothed or naked – is a seemingly humiliating punishment. However,
through simulating these humiliating scenes in a sane, safe, and consensual
way, BDSM transforms humiliation into a liberating power that heals the
practitioners and satisfies their deep desire. Seen in this way, this ritual
involves a hermeneutic strategy which converts suffering into joy by queer-
ing a scene of humiliation. In the next section, we will further investigate
this hermeneutic strategy.

Queer hermeneutics in BDSM and the Eucharist

There are several scholarly attempts to link the hermeneutic strategy of
BDSM with the Christian tradition. For instance, Kent Brintnall attempts
to juxtapose the wounded masculine body on the cross with BDSM and
homoeroticism.44 Drawing on the thought of Georges Bataille and Kaja
Silverman, he argues that the image of the crucified Jesus, as a victim of
ritual sacrifice par excellence, offers “an alternative model of masculinity”
by infusing weakness and feebleness into male subjectivity and confronting
the spectators with the abyss of death and non-being.45 This renunciation
of subjectivity, he argues, is similar to the BDSM ritual which requires the
practitioners to give up their self-identity in order to acquire the expected
pleasure.46 While Brintnall’s masochistic hermeneutic of the crucifixion
 Queering violent scenes  143
provides an insightful interpretation of the Christian tradition (especially to
gay Christians), we contend that his hermeneutics of imagination is more
a re-appropriation of the story of crucifixion than a substantial attempt to
connect BDSM with the Christian tradition.
Rather than putting BDSM and the Christian tradition together and search
for their parallels, Lea Brown tries to explore the spiritual and theological
dimension of BDSM. BDSM is a play – with imagination and toys as its
basic components – that helps her to dance with Eros and get along with
her own erotic power. Furthermore, she claims that Eros is her connection
with God.47 In other words, BDSM is an important way for her and other
BDSM practitioners to connect with God. It empowers one to get to the
depth of one’s soul through intense interaction with one’s partner in trust,
and ultimately leads one to the gift of healing and wholeness.48 Therefore,
she asserts that

when we experience God’s love through the non-judgemental [sic]

respect and care given by another in Ds play, especially in a scene where
we are revealing the parts of ourselves that have been labelled as “sick”
or “perverted”, we experience the unconditional love of the Divine in
profound ways that have the power to turn such damaging labels into
the new names of “whole” and “blessed”.49

Brown’s thought has adequately expressed the relationship between the

intense eroticism of BDSM and the depth of love in the quest for God.
Nicholas Laccetti’s recent attempt to theologize BDSM by opening up a
dialogue between it and Christ’s crucifixion further enhances this insight by
linking BDSM with Christ’s crucifixion and the Eucharist.50 Unlike Brintnall,
Laccetti focuses not on the feeble masculinity of Jesus but on the analogy
between BDSM and Calvary. In his work, Laccetti argues that BDSM scenes
and the cross of Calvary employ the same strategy in drawing their power.
BDSM scenes turn social oppressions and inequalities into erotic power,
whereas the cross of Calvary uses the corruptness of the world as its raw
material.51 Thus, he claims that “the cross of Calvary is the BDSM scene
par excellence – on the cross, all of the world’s brokenness, its sin, its fallen
social relations, are taken up in a single event, Christ’s consensual torture
and sacrifice.”52 In this ultimate BDSM scene, the impassible Godhead is the
dom and Jesus Christ, both impassible in terms of his divine nature and pas-
sible in terms of his human nature, acts as the sub. God must be conceived
as impassible in this case because if we understand the cross of Calvary as
the BDSM scene par excellence, the suffering and death in it must not be
real. Since BDSM does not inflict any real pains or sufferings, the cross of
Calvary would be a BDSM scene rather than a violent event only if God is
impassible. In other words, only an impassible God can stop real suffering
and death from gaining legitimacy and get rid of distorted oppressions and
social inequalities.53 Moreover, the two natures of Jesus Christ enable him to
144  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
take up all human sins without being consumed by them, thus making him a
perfect sub of the BDSM scene.54 Laccetti goes on to assert that

the Eucharist is the avenue of our participation in the cross. If under-

stood as transubstantiation, the sacrament is a truly transgressive BDSM
scene. It is the only scene that parodies oppressive social relations . . .
without really parodying them, as it allows us to really enter the reality
of Calvary rather than merely act as a repetition-with-a-difference of
the event.55

Laccetti contends that the cross of Calvary – the BDSM scene par excel-
lence – can, unlike any other BDSM scenes, truly liberate Christians from sin
and brokenness through the Eucharist.56 Quoting Elizabeth Stuart, he claims
that “through the Eucharist ‘all and everything are caught up in this great
drama of salvation’ – the drama, the S/M scene, of the cross of the impassible
God.”57 In brief, the Eucharist brings the transgressive and salvific power of
the BDSM scene par excellence into presence.
Laccetti’s penetrative work powerfully links the queerness of BDSM with
traditional theology and offers an imaginative way to reconsider both of
them. However, it has some limitations. First and most importantly, by say-
ing that the cross of Calvary is the BDSM scene par excellence in which the
impassible Godhead and the queer (simultaneously passible and impassible)
Christ take the role of the dom and the sub respectively, Laccetti was virtu-
ally denying the factuality of violence of Calvary. The crucifixion, in this
aspect, is nothing more than a divine drama or theater. Nevertheless, the
Nicene Creed clearly states that Jesus Christ did suffer, and by no means
ought we to consider this suffering as something pseudo. Furthermore, this
conception may also jeopardize the historicity of our faith. Second, Laccetti’s
analogous account relies heavily on Roman Catholic doctrines, including
transubstantiation, the real or corporeal presence of Christ in the bread and
the cup, and the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist.58 This is understandable
as Laccetti is a Catholic theologian. Nonetheless, this form of argument
is alien to most Protestant Christians,59 and does not provide a Christian
perspective which is not based on teachings which are specific to Roman
Catholicism. Third, while Laccetti has employed a number of dialectical
rhetorical sayings like parodying without parodying, a re-presentation rather
than a representation, and masochism without masochism,60 he did not offer
satisfactory explanations that make the paradox plain. As a result, one can
hardly tell whether Laccetti’s argument is dialectical or indeed contradictory.
Perhaps a key problem of Laccetti’s account is its attempt to identify the
cross of Calvary with a BDSM scene. In this case, Carrette’s warning about
simplistic associations between BDSM and Christian theology makes much
sense.61 On the one hand, as Carrette contends, theology needs to understand
the political ideology that underlies various manifestations of BDSM.62 On the
other hand, we also need to be cautious about confusing analogy with direct
association. Laccetti’s notion that the cross of Calvary is BDSM scene par
 Queering violent scenes  145
excellence is deemed to fall prey to such confusion because no clear analogical
distance can be found between them. We contend that a reason for this short-
age is that Laccetti does not pay enough attention to the theatricality or ritual-
ity of both BDSM and the Eucharist. Therefore, instead of associating BDSM
with the crucifixion and the Eucharist in a direct way, we try to investigate
into the similarity between the Eucharist and BDSM in hermeneutic strategy.
The institution of the Lord’s Supper is closely related to the Passion of
Christ, for it is – or resembles – the eating of Jesus’ body and the drinking of
his blood (1 Corinthians 11.23–26). Similar to the cross of Calvary, eating
someone’s body and drinking someone’s blood are bloody and violent acts.
Although the Lord’s Supper is, at least on the phenomenological level, not an
actual cannibalism, this anamnesis of the death of Jesus Christ directs people
to a brutal and sanguinary event. However, this brutality and bloodiness is
washed away by means of ritualization that transforms a remembrance of a
violent event into “a sacramental meal which by visible signs communicates
to us God’s love in Jesus Christ.”63 To put it differently, when the anamnesis
of the Lord’s crucifixion through “eating his body and drinking his blood”
becomes a sacrament, i.e. the Eucharist, the violent nature of the event is
transgressed and is transformed into a celebration of God’s love. The cel-
ebration of the Eucharist is not a repetition of Jesus’ suffering and death
but a confession of Christ’s presence. Every time the church celebrates the
Eucharist, the presence of Christ is confessed and experienced.64 It radically
challenges “all kinds of injustice, racism, separation and lack of freedom”
and restores human dignity through the penetration of God’s all-renewing
grace.65 Thus, the Eucharist brings about sanctification and reconciliation,
preparing us to “offer ourselves as a living and holy sacrifice in our daily
lives.”66 Using the language of BDSM, the Eucharist is like a scene that rec-
ollects the cross of Calvary for the sake of transforming painful suffering to
healing grace. We take the bread and the cup as if we are eating the body and
drinking the blood of Jesus Christ, but it is not really a violent act.
Similar to BDSM scenes, we can see from the previous discussion that the
Eucharist employs a hermeneutic strategy which converts suffering into joy by
queering a violent scene. It is a reinterpretation of the violent scene of Calvary
which has wounded Jesus of Nazareth and ultimately claimed his life. In reen-
acting the breaking of his body and the shedding of his blood, it transforms
the brutal death of Jesus into a visible healing grace that blesses and unites
its receivers. The Eucharist is thus a queering process in the sense that it has
inaugurated a peculiar way to perceive the bloody scene of Calvary which
was at odds with the dominant and normative understanding of that time.

Toward a Eucharistic interpretation of BDSM

There are many possible interpretations of Jesus’ violent death in Calvary,
but a Eucharistic interpretation has adopted a queer hermeneutics that has
become an inalienable part of Christianity. It shows that queer interpretation
is not modern innovation but is instead rooted in the long-standing Christian
146  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
tradition, and thus sheds light on our theological reflection on BDSM. How-
ever, before we proceed to develop a Eucharistic interpretation of BDSM, we
need to pay attention to the paradoxical nature of BDSM as a ritual in order
to avoid any naïve amalgamation of BDSM and theology.
In light of the study of anthropologist Margot Weiss, Laccetti rightly
asserts that “BDSM is not inherently transgressive.”67 Although BDSM does
short-circuit oppressive social relations through parody, it does not necessar-
ily entail that it will bring about transformation and liberation. After all, it
really depends on how one actually practices BDSM.68 Notwithstanding the
symbolic power of BDSM scenes, Weiss departs from a Foucault-inspired
analysis and vigorously contends that BDSM, like any other forms of sexual-
ity, is primarily a social relation that is always within and thus influenced by
the vanilla world or, more specifically, by socioeconomic norms and struc-
tures.69 In this sense, the BDSM scene is not a bracketed sexuality but a
“crowded social field” which is directed by the economy of power relation-
ship.70 After all, a BDSM scene, according to Weiss, is open for interpreta-
tion. It neither repeats nor cuts off from social power; rather, it intensifies
the tension and complexities of social relationship without any simplistic
resolutions.71 As Brown contends, playing with power is always complex,
and thus we can hardly contain BDSM “within a box of rules and regula-
tions,” even if it is strictly sane, safe, and consensual.72
Interestingly, Noyes had already raised a similar criticism more than a
decade earlier. For him, BDSM is in fact a blurring of the distinction between
real and simulated violence. It can be dangerous and requires a series of con-
scientious techniques and strategies in order to pervert the oppressive social
power and to be transgressive.73 In any case, however, BDSM is an ambigu-
ous practice. Noyes explains this inevitable ambiguity of BDSM in this way:

On the one hand, masochism is a paradoxical strategy for removing

social violence from the sexual scene. It is a limited and controlled enact-
ment of violence, aimed at escaping the punitive and disciplinary func-
tion . . . which our culture attaches to violence. . . . But on the other
hand, masochism is a continuation of social violence. It defuses violence,
rendering it harmless and profitable, while perpetuating its forms. And
once the technologies of control become the object of erotic attachment,
who is to say whether control is subverted by eroticism, or whether
eroticism is reintegrated into control?74

In other words, violence and domination are always entangled with BDSM
practices. In parodying a scene of violence and suffering, it unavoidably takes
on its violent and abusive form. As form can never be separated from content,
violence and suffering continue to exist in the attempt to transgress them. For
instance, when a dom whips a sub in a BDSM play, it is really an act of whip-
ping, though its purpose is not hurting the other. Therefore, BDSM involves
both the continuity and discontinuity of social domination and violence.
 Queering violent scenes  147
Furthermore, we must also be cautious about the influence of late capital-
ism on the practice and conception of BDSM. Carrette reminds us that a
theology of BDSM will become overly sensational and confusing if it does
not have this critical awareness.75 Like Noyes and Weiss, Carrette focuses
much on the inextricability between BDSM and the social context, but his
particular contribution lies in his insight into the influence of economic and
commercial culture on BDSM. He asserts that BDSM is “a technology of
modern living which draws on a whole series of cultural resources” and thus
cannot be read or interpreted outside commerce and the media.76 Otherwise,
such reading or interpretation will become an ahistorical phantom which
neglects the possibility of BDSM becoming a commercial strategy.77 There-
fore, Carrette underscores the economics of (intense and intimate) relation-
ship in BDSM plays in the context of our late capitalist world rather than its
phenomenological parallels to any traditional Christian elements.78
In line with the thought of Noyes, Carrette argues that BDSM is both
oppressive and liberating. It carries the oppressive structural relation, but
at the same time generates liberating pleasures that transform the practi-
tioners.79 On the one hand, it can be dangerous as “submission without a
purpose or symbolism other than its own pleasure simply becomes a form of
reasserting the psychosexual self, which sustains capitalism.” On the other
hand, it can also be valuable “if [BDSM] pleasures are located in the intense
exchange between persons and the non-empirical realities” because in this
way “the intensity of pleasure becomes a revelation of God.”80 Carrette
raises a critical point here: the indispensability of a transcendental reference.
For him, this transcendental reference is the presence of love and justice,
and the presence of them is God. If a BDSM play does not point to any
surpassing purposes or symbolisms, the physical rapture of it is nothing but
idolatry. On the contrary, if it directs the practitioners to the presence of love
and justice, the complexity of intense exchange will become a pathway to
intimate expressions of love.81 In this case, BDSM can become a gift of God
that renews the vanilla world, as in Carrette’s words:

This loving intensity is a gift of the exchange between the created order
and its creator, between life and its refusal to produce and its free will
to celebrate the intensities of being alive. The divine presence in acts of
erotic exchange transforms them into mysterious encounters with our
God-given power and our submission to God’s loving power. God brings
an ethic of value to games of submission and domination, which . . .
shapes the contours of our everyday life.82

In addition, Carrette also affirms the significance of theology for the under-
standing and interpretation of BDSM. In order to break away from the
oppressive structure of late capitalism, he contends that it is not enough for
BDSM to simply be a consensual act since our consent is more or less manu-
factured in and by this late capitalist society. From a Christian perspective,
148  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
he believes that we have to interrogate the consensual politics of BDSM,
asking “whether they are given by God (the presence of love and justice)
as Christ was given to the torturous pains of crucifixion out of love for the
world.”83 For him, only in this way can we responsibly theologize BDSM
and make real contribution to the conception of it. When we have the criti-
cal awareness that our intense exchange serves for the presence of love and
justice, BDSM is able to transcend the mode of late capitalist production and
free our bodies “from the market of global exploitation” by creating a ritual
space that leads to non-productive pleasured relationship which brings the
presence of love and justice into the vanilla world.84
This brings us back to our discussion on the Eucharist. While Carrette
accurately suggests that the critical awareness directing us to God – the
presence of love and justice – is critical to the reading of BDSM in our
late capitalist society, he does not specify how Christians can acquire and
maintain this critical awareness. It is at this point that we need a Eucharistic
interpretation of BDSM. Our foregoing discussion argues that the Eucharist
and BDSM share a similar hermeneutic strategy that queerly transforms a
violent scene into liberating practice. It is on this basis that a Eucharistic
interpretation of BDSM makes sense. The core argument of our proposal
is that a “Eucharistic awareness” enables and empowers those – especially
Christians – who read and/or practice BDSM to discern the presence of love
and justice in the midst of such an intense exchange and seductive scene.
According to Saint Paul, we are accountable to the body and blood of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thus have to examine ourselves and discern Christ’s
body every time we eat the bread and drink the cup of the Eucharist; other-
wise, we are not only eating and drinking in vain but also raising judgment
against ourselves (1 Corinthians 11.27–29). This awareness is what we call
a “Eucharistic awareness.” It keeps reminding us of the mysterious nature
of the sacrament – the fact that we are partaking in something deeper or
higher, namely the presence of Christ through sharing the bread and the
cup. To acquire it, faith is required.85 As faith is primarily not about one’s
cognitive acceptance of a certain set of doctrines but God’s gift to us through
Jesus Christ; that we can discern the presence of Christ depends on grace.
Indeed, it is God’s grace that drives us to partake in the Eucharist. Thus,
“the [E]ucharist is essentially the sacrament of the gift which God offers to
us in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.”86 Furthermore, “as it is
entirely the gift of God, the [E]ucharist brings into the present age a new
reality which transforms Christians into the image of Christ and therefore
makes them his effective witnesses.”87 In other words, it is the gift nature of
the Eucharist that makes us aware of Christ’s presence and hence empowers
our everyday life. The presence of Christ is not something we can actively
bring about by celebrating the Eucharist but is a grace given to us which we
can only receive passively. Likewise, BDSM play is not liberating in itself.
Unlike what consumerist culture has told us, we are not healed because
we are engaged in BDSM. Rather, it is the intense exchange between the
 Queering violent scenes  149
practitioners which transforms us and makes us realize the presence of love
and justice.
As we have argued in light of Carrette’s theological account, the key to
enact the ritual power of BDSM is the critical awareness of the presence
of love and justice. Here, we try to demonstrate that one way to acquire
and bear in mind such awareness is to interpret and/or practice BDSM in
a Eucharistic way. Hence, instead of regarding the cross of Calvary as the
BDSM scene par excellence, we suggest that a Eucharistic awareness is cru-
cial for theologizing BDSM. Taking this into account, it is not the desire
or passion of the practitioners but the call to love and justice which urges
them to the play. In other words, BDSM, seen in this way, is a gift given to
them for the pursuit of deeper relationship and greater love. It is a somatic
and spiritual exercise for them to contemplate on the suffering of the world
and catch a glimpse of peace and justice. This Eucharistic interpretation
illuminates BDSM by realizing that pleasure and liberation are not gained
by but via the infliction and reception of suffering. What is really enjoyable
is not the suffering (or the simulation of suffering) itself but the love and
justice which it points to. When our late capitalist society compels us to take
advantage of the suffering of others, a Eucharistic interpretation of BDSM
overturns the power relationship of the dom and the sub. It breaks away
from the indifference and injustice of this world by being compassionate to
one’s partner. In BDSM play, it seems that the dom has made the sub suffer,
but they deeply connect to each other and to the world through great love
and care. Similarly, in celebrating the Eucharist, it seems that we have bro-
ken Christ’s body and shed Christ’s blood, but we are in actuality sharing
the salvific grace of God. Both BDSM and the Eucharist have symbolically
queered violent scenes so that these scenes can be transformed into healing
and liberating grace.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have argued that both Eucharistic celebrations and BDSM
plays employ the same hermeneutic strategy, that is, of queering a violent
scene through the transformative power of rituals and hence convert exploit-
ative abuse into a liberating sacrifice. While BDSM strives to parody a scene
of suffering and overturn its power structure by reformulating it into a plea-
surable and liberating theater, the Eucharist inaugurates a peculiar way to
perceive the bloody scene of Calvary and converts exploitative abuse which
takes the life of Jesus into a moment of salvation and redemption. This com-
monality in rituality and hermeneutics makes a Eucharistic interpretation
of BDSM possible. Furthermore, as BDSM is not inherently transgressive
and liberating, a Eucharistic interpretation of BDSM can make significant
contribution to the reading and practice of BDSM by helping observers and
practitioners avoid a consumeristic ideology and break away from the per-
petuation of social violence and the hegemony of the late capitalist system.
150  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
The Hong Kong populace knows very little about BDSM and often mis-
takenly equates it with sexual violence. For this reason, it is important for
BDSM practitioners to clarify what BDSM really is. Yet this is far from
being enough. They also need to penetrate the theatrical or ritual nature of
BDSM in order to become aware of, and understand its inherent ambigui-
ties. A religious analysis of BDSM is significant at this point and a theo-
logical account is of particular importance to Christians. This chapter is a
preliminary attempt to connect such a queer and intense erotic practice to a
fundamental part of the Christian tradition. Although there are undoubtedly
many other possible interpretations, we hope that this chapter can dialogue
with traditional Christian thought on numerous levels.

Notes
  1 This general observation that the public often confuses BDSM with sexual vio-
lence is confirmed by Linda Wong Sau-yung, executive director of the Association
Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women, one of the most renowned local
associations concerning domestic and sexual violence in Hong Kong. Linda Wong
Sau-yung, Facebook Messenger conversation to author (Mok), June 5, 2017.
  2 See the website of the Standnews, https://thestandnews.com/erotica2/ [in tradi-
tional Chinese].
  3 See, for example, “Zhiyao shi ziyuan, wan SM ye wufang?” [Is it really okay
to play SM if it is voluntary?], the website of Hong Kong Sex Culture Society,
published January 20, 2003, accessed June 2, 2017, www.sexculture.org.hk/b5_
article_detail.php?title_id=56; Ng Wai-wa, “‘Xing’ shi renquan hai shi daode
wenti?” [Is “sex” a human right or moral issue?], the website of The Society for
Truth and Light, published November 6, 2014, accessed June 2, 2017, www.
truth-light.org.hk/nt/article/%E3%80%8C%E6%80%A7%E3%80%8D%E6
%98%AF%E4%BA%BA%E6%AC%8A%E9%82%84%E6%98%AF%E9%
81%93%E5%BE%B7%E5%95%8F%E9%A1%8C%EF%BC%9F.
  4 See, for example, Robert M. Price, “Masochism and Piety,” Journal of Religion
and Health 22, no. 2 (1983): 161–6; Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the
Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2001); Anna Elizabeth Fisk, “‘Wholly Aflame’: Erotic Asceticism in the Work
of Sara Maitland,” Theology & Sexuality 16, no. 1 (2010): 5–18. See also Kar-
men MacKendrick, Counterpleasures (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1999), 65–86.
  5 Jeremy R. Carrette, “Intense Exchange: Sadomasochism, Theology and the Poli-
tics of Late Capitalism,” Theology & Sexuality 11, no. 2 (2005): 15.
  6 We are not suggesting that BDSM is abusive and exploitative in nature. There is
a subtle difference between Eucharistic celebrations and BDSM plays. The former
transforms an actual abusive scene (the crucifixion) to a sacrament that commu-
nicates grace, whereas the latter makes use of a fictional scene that is seemingly
abusive to emancipate the practitioners.
  7 Ng Wai-ming, Riben liuxing wenhua yu Xianggang: lishi, zaidi xiaofei, wenhua
xiangxiang, hudong [Japanese Popular Culture and Hong Kong: History, Local
Consumption, Cultural Imagination, Interaction] (Hong Kong: The Commercial
Press, 2015), 10.
  8 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New
York: Stein and Day, 1965 [1886]), 53, 86. See also Bill Thompson, Sadomas-
ochism: Painful Perversion or Pleasurable Play? (London: Cassell, 1994), 16–17;
 Queering violent scenes  151
Thomas S. Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel, “S&M: An Introduction to the
Study of Sadomasochism,” in S&M: Studies in Dominance & Submission, ed.
Thomas S. Weinberg, rev. ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Book, 1995), 15–16;
John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5–6.
  9 For examples, see Thompson, Sadomasochism, 16–27; Weinberg and Kamel,
“S&M: An Introduction to the Study of Sadomasochism,” 15–17. For Freud’s
account, see Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” in The Basic Writings
of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library,
1938), 569–71.
10 See Thompson, Sadomasochism, 28–35.
11 Weinberg and Kamel, “S&M: An Introduction to the Study of Sadomasoch-
ism,” 19.
12 Julianne Buenting, “Rehearsing Vulnerability: BDSM as Transformative Ritual,”
Chicago Theological Seminary Register 93, no. 1 (2003): 40.
13 Robert J. Stoller, Pain and Passion: A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of S &
M (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), 17, 290.
14 Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 80–1.
15 Noyes, The Mastery of Submission, 2.
16 In fact, this is not limited to Japanese AVs and is also the problem of Western
poronographic films. See Stoller, Pain and Passion, 242.
17 Ibid., 15–16; Noyes, The Mastery of Submission, 11.
18 Thompson, Sadomasochism, 14.
19 Stoller, Pain and Passion, 14–15; Buenting, “Rehearsing Vulnerability,” 41.
20 Thompson, Sadomasochism, 14–16. For more details, see MacKendrick, Coun-
terpleasures, 123–43.
21 Andrea Beckmann, The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion: Decon-
structing Sadomasochism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 97.
22 MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, 132.
23 Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, 10.
24 Beckmann, The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion, 117.
25 Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, viii.
26 Noyes, The Mastery of Submission, 4.
27 Stoller, Pain and Passion, 19.
28 Ibid., 49.
29 Noyes, The Mastery of Submission, 12; see also ibid., 184, 200, 216–17.
30 Mark Thompson, introduction to Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and
Practice (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1991), xix.
31 Buenting, “Rehearsing Vulnerability,” 40.
32 Ibid., 44.
33 Ibid., 44–5.
34 Ibid., 46.
35 Jonathan Cahana, “Dismantling Gender: Between Ancient Gnostic Ritual and
Modern Queer BDSM,” Theology & Sexuality 18, no. 1 (2012): 67–8.
36 Corie Hammers, “A Radical Opening: An Exploration of Lesbian/Queer BDSM
Public Sexual Cultures,” in Sexualities: Past Reflections, Future Directions, ed.
Sally Hines and Yvette Taylor (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 248.
37 Ibid., 253.
38 Ibid., 257–62.
39 Ibid., 264.
40 Avaem Tenjou Rika (pseudonym; founder of Shibari for All), interviewed by the
author (Wong), May 19, 2017.
152  Bryan Mok and Pearl Wong
41 Ibid.
42 “Shengfu SM ≠ biantai nueda: shi yishu he mingxiang” [Shibari SM ≠ perverse
beating: it is art and meditation], YouTube video, 1:42, from an interview tele-
vised by HK01 on May 3, 2017, in Cantonese Chinese, posted by “HK01,” May
5, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcmsI_xco60.
43 Rika, interview.
44 Kent L. Brintnall, “Rend(er)ing God’s Flesh: The Body of Christ through a Mas-
ochistic Hermeneutic,” The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin
34, no. 3 (2005): 45–8.
45 Ibid., 47.
46 Ibid., 46.
47 Lea D. Brown, “Dancing in the Eros of Domination and Submission within SM,”
in Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-
Reid, ed. Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan (London: SCM Press, 2010), 148.
48 Ibid., 149–51.
49 Ibid., 151.
50 Nicholas Laccetti, “Calvary and the Dungeon: Theologizing BDSM,” in Queer
Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, ed. Kathleen T. Talvacchia
(New York: New York University Press, 2015), 148–59.
51 Ibid., 153.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 155.
54 Ibid., 155–6.
55 Ibid., 156.
56 Ibid., 157–8.
57 Ibid., 156, quoting Elizabeth Stuart, “Making No Sense: Liturgy as Queer Space,”
in Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honor of Marcella Althaus-Reid,
ed. Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan (London: SCM Press, 2010), 121.
58 Ibid., 156–7.
59 We do notice that some of these Catholic doctrines are shared by some Protestant
churches such as the Lutherans and the Anglicans/Episcopalians. However, they
do not constitute the faith and experience of most Protestants outside Lutheran-
ism and Anglicanism.
60 Laccetti, “Calvary and the Dungeon,” 156–7.
61 Carrette, “Intense Exchange,” 15.
62 Ibid., 13–14.
63 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva, Switzer-
land: World Council of Churches, 1982), 8.
64 Ibid., 10.
65 Ibid., 12.
66 Ibid., 10.
67 Laccetti, “Calvary and the Dungeon,” 151.
68 Ibid., 150–2.
69 Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, ix, 6.
70 Ibid., 154.
71 Ibid., 230.
72 Brown, “Dancing in the Eros of Domination and Submission within SM,” 146.
73 Noyes, The Mastery of Submission, 3–4.
74 Ibid., 14.
75 Carrette, “Intense Exchange,” 12.
76 Ibid., 14.
77 Ibid., 15.
78 Ibid., 17.
 Queering violent scenes  153
79 Ibid., 18–23.
80 Ibid., 24–5.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 25.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 26–7.
85 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 10.
86 Ibid., 8.
87 Ibid., 11.
8 Unfaithful noxious sexuality
Body, incarnation, and
ecclesiology in dispute
Hugo Córdova Quero

Introduction
This chapter focuses on the challenges and concerns presented to queer theolo-
gies and theologians when exploring the relationship between the doctrine of
incarnation, bodies, and ecclesiology. I focus on queer theologies, especially on
indecent theology, proposed by the late theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid as a
way to address issues of bodies, sexuality, and the doctrine of the incarnation
amidst the lives of queer believers.1 In doing so, we need to remember that the
materiality of the incarnation has rippled consequences for ecclesiology, that
is, the community of believers from where queer believers have traditionally
been ostracized. I take as an example the film La Mala Education [bad educa-
tion]2 as a cultural artifact that can help us to visualize the negative aspects of
the dismissal of the relationship between the doctrine of incarnation, sexuality,
and bodies in the context of the Roman Catholic Church.
The first part of the chapter draws from traditional systematic theology
to highlight the ways that bodies, sexuality, and the Divine have historically
been constructed. The second part deals with the way that indecent theology
addresses this topic by queering La Mala Educación. It focuses on the man-
ner that La Mala Educación challenges queer theologies and theologians to
embrace ecclesiologies that would foster friendship, love, compassion, and a
healthy understanding of sexuality and the performances of gender.

Bodies and the Divine

Bodies and theologies

Right-wing Christians – who catalog queer individuals as part of the negative
side of the “good/bad” binary – tremendously demark the context of queer
theologies. This operation of segregating power has permeated all dimen-
sions of societies. Not only have they in general stigmatized queer individu-
als, large sectors of religions have done the same, especially Christianity.
From traditional systematic theology, Christianity hauls an implicit notion
that God decides upon every fact of life by either making everything suitable
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  155
or fixing everything that goes wrong. However, this very same notion makes
us realize that the “good/bad” binary is an uncertain and subjective world.
The reality is that people of faith usually believe that God’s work is to pun-
ish those who deviate from the “normal,” which, in turn, is determined
by specific exculpatory interpretations of morality, Bible readings, and/or
theological worldview(s). To such a degree, cultural constructions shape not
only this reality for human beings but also God.
Most Christian churches perceive bodies, gender, and sexuality as dan-
gerous areas that need to be controlled to achieve holiness or salvation.
From spiritual practices that censor bodies as negative – thus, for example,
encouraging self-flagellations – to systems of hierarchies based on gender,
sexual orientation, color of skin, class, or nationality, among many other
instruments, Christian churches have obtained their power to legislate which
bodies are fit to “God’s grace” and which ones are not.
The clearest example of such control is a narrow interpretation of the
body of Jesus to universalize the way for being human. As a result, if gay and
lesbian believers thwart Christian assumptions of sexuality or couple-ship,
other queer believers resist these assumptions through their bodies, which
sometimes – as in the case of transgender or intersex individuals – do not
readily fit those expectations. Furthermore, the expectations of broader soci-
eties regarding these matters are allied with the hopes of many mainstream
Christian churches usually displayed in dogmas, in Bible readings, moral
teachings, and institutional policies. In the end, we find that there is little if
any room for queer people in those churches, although some conservative
Christian churches are beginning to accept queer believers – many times
imposing on them to refrain from any sexual activity.
The arguments are well known, ranging from citing the Genesis accounts
of human creation – where “male and female [God] created them” (Genesis
1.27c NRSV) is synonymous with heteronormativity – to interpretations
of Jesus’ message – for example, the Sermon on the Mount as condoning
heteropatriarchy, moral teachings and traditions, and theological statements.
However, the most predominant arguments come from other passages,
which include the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19.1–11) or the
Leviticus passages, which are taken out of historical context and interpreted
as “God’s punishment” against queer individuals. The result is hopelessness.
The options are either to convert to mainstream assumptions of right-wing
Christianity – that exhibit a narrow understanding of bodies, gender, and
sexuality within the heteropatriarchal matrix – or to remain outside tradi-
tional religious lands. When venturing deeper into spiritual territory, it is
essential to note that Christianity has bodies and human dignity at the core
of the doctrine of the incarnation, one of the central dogmas – a term that
means “ordinance of beliefs” – of this religion. However, the map of religious
territory has been void of any marker that does not point toward a pseudo-
spiritualized depiction of faith. The consequence: queer believers have been
written out of that cartography.
156  Hugo Córdova Quero
Bodies and incarnation
The incarnation of Christ reveals the goal of God’s self-communication as
union with all creation, including queer individuals. In Christianity, the
incarnation of Christ is the gate that made possible the beginning of this
process of union with God – also known as theosis) – because humanity and
the whole of creation are the final images of God.3 Karimpumannil Mathai
George states: “Humanity together with the material creation constitutes the
ultimate image of God. . . . The integral connection between God, creation,
incarnation and humanity is so overwhelmingly present in the concept of
humanity as a frontier being that dichotomies are eliminated.”4
The doctrine of incarnation also confronts us with the materiality of gen-
der and sexuality. Feminist theologians were the first to critique this aspect of
the traditional doctrine of the incarnation through the question: “Can a male
savior save women?” as Rosemary Radford Ruether eloquently asks.5 This
question does not intend to deny the Gospel witness about Jesus. Instead,
what lies beneath is the question about a heteropatriarchal male-Christology
that oppresses women and all those who do not fit into that pattern. If the
maleness of Jesus is vital for his soteriological task, then, by extension, his
maleness saves females. Christian teachings, especially Roman Catholicism,
have taken this position. For example, Aline H. Kalbian cites John Paul II’s
Veritatis Splendor6 (1993) and Evangelium Vitae7 (1995), in which the Pope
“uses maternal images to convey a series of messages about moral theol-
ogy.”8 It indeed draws from a classic sexual division of labor where women
are confined to motherhood as their “normal” role:

In both Evangelium Vitae and Veritatis Splendor, the Virgin Mary is the
ultimate model for the moral life: “Mary is the radiant sign and inviting
model of the moral life” (John Paul II 1993, par. 120). She combines
merciful compassion and empathy for all sinners with a determination
to protect moral law from “beguiling doctrines, even in the areas of
philosophy and theology (par. 120).”9

It is clear, according to Kalbian’s and Radford Ruether’s analysis, that Chris-

tianity chooses a male-centered vision to understand Christology and, by
extension, Soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), to favor a subordinate
place for women. In this fashion, Radford Ruether affirms:

The figure of divine wisdom in Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon is

theologically identical to what the New Testament describes as the Logos
or ‘Son’ of God. Because Christianity chooses the male symbol for this
idea, however, the unwarranted sense develops that there is a necessary
ontological connection between the maleness of Jesus’ historical disclo-
sure of a male God. The female figure of divine wisdom is displaced from
the orthodox Trinity, although Gnostic forms of Christianity continue to
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  157
conjure this figure and to see her as the origin of the creation, fall, and
redemption of spiritual humanity.10

Veritably, the incarnation of Christ is challenging to assume if we tie the

whole process of salvation to Jesus’ maleness. The categories of gender,
sexuality, power, and order are intrinsically related to the incarnation, and
conditioned by culture, political environment, economic relations, historical
events, and social processes.

Queer believers and incarnation

The Christological dilemmas have been historically significant for the discus-
sion of theologians, but they render Jesus’ body as invisible in the process. If
the doctrine of incarnation implies not only relationality of the divine with
the creation but also the embodiment of God into the creation, then God is
the God of lesbians, polyamorous, transgender, and intersex people as well
as of gays, cross-dressers, bisexuals, and non-conformist heterosexual indi-
viduals. A theology that denies this reality is, in fact, a pseudo-spiritualism
that colonizes by functioning according to Marx’s term, the “opium of the
people.” In this case, the images of God and Christ that come from this
colonial religion are idols that segregate people, whether in Christian com-
munities or secular societies.
That has not been entirely dismissed by traditional systematic theologians.
As Gavin D’Costa argues, incarnation related to sexuality and gender ori-
entations is a topic of debate raised by feminists like Mary Daly and Grace
Jantzen.11 Furthermore, D’Costa states that all Christians act as co-­redeemers
with Christ: “Jesus’ divinity means that all women and men are now capable
of representing the divine in their participation with the risen Lord, through
the power of the Spirit.”12
It is in later works that he has begun to engage in a dialogue with queer
theologies. In his chapter “Queer Trinity,” D’Costa unfolds a very pro-
vocative analysis by queering Hans von Balthasar’s work on the Trinity.13
Although a very dense chapter, he taps on topics such as women’s ordination
and, through the use of French scholar Luce Irigaray, denounces the hidden
human mechanisms that mold and condition the expression of the Divine in
religious discourses. However, his “queering” falls short at the time of risk-
ing going beyond traditional systematic theologies.
In the same way, queer theologians have begun to address this situation
from a perspective that also takes into account Jesus’ sexuality. Mark D.
Jordan – in his chapter “God’s Body” – addresses the issue of corporality and
sexuality in the body of Jesus.14 For centuries – as Jordan deeply analyzes –
Christianity has invested energy in affirming the incarnation while denying
the gender and sexuality of Jesus. If we are going to be genuine disciples of
Jesus, the incarnation of Christ demands of Christianity an equal response
to the world. If God is the parameter/model for human life, and sexuality is
158  Hugo Córdova Quero
part of life, when we say that sexuality and gender performance are fluid, we
are saying that God is also fluid. This interpretation of God can be related
to the sacred Tetragrammaton YHWH, the name of God in Exodus (Exodus
3.14). The sacred Tetragrammaton can be translated as I am who I am, or
I am who I will be, or even, I am who I am becoming.15 This dynamic God,
who cannot be fixed or represented in a single image without stepping into
idolatry, is the dynamic of a God that is fluid.
Therefore, the topic is critical because queer folks have been denied the
means of salvation by using Jesus as a “moralizing weapon.” Jordan’s con-
tribution – along with those of other queer theologians – is essential. Jordan
states:

Christian traditions have wanted to hide on Jesus’ body the organs of

male sex at the same time that they have wanted to insist upon his male
gender. A full consideration of this division might look to the difference
between male organ and male power, between what theorists distinguish
as the penis and the phallus. . . . When canonical theologians have con-
sidered Jesus’ sex, they have refused to allow it what might be considered
ordinary sexual operations. Reasoning from hypotheses about genitals
in Eden before the fall, and from rules about the right use of sex, they
have suggested, for example, that Jesus never had an erection.16

The incarnation of Christ represents a cosmic moment when God united

with all humanity and creation, yearning for the overcoming of heteropatri-
archal oppression. How can Christian churches speak in the name of a God
who challenges their practices of domination and subordination through the
pivotal dogma of Christianity? Christian churches need to recognize the real-
ity and materiality of bodies, sexuality, and even brokenness in the lives of
people due to the compulsory oppression of heteropatriarchalism. We can no
longer consider incarnation merely an issue of dogma, as it must be seen as
a subject of daily life in which the body of Christ – along with his sexuality,
desires, passions, and sense of justice – should guide us. The implications of
this statement were made very clear for me in the daily activities of a group
of nuns in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As a result of economical un-development, most of the counties in Greater
Buenos Aires have become poor. A group of nuns in one of those counties
do not pray the rosary at home. Instead, they go to pray beside the creek
that runs through the center of their neighborhood. Factories hide the fact
that they do not follow environmental legislation, and they bribe the local
government. Through their dumping practices, the creek quickly became
saturated with contaminants. Additionally, the nuns find needles used to
inject drugs, abandoned and vandalized vehicles, and remaining parts of
illegal abortions at the creek every day of the week.
Seeing these signs of the times, the nuns pray for the “victims” of those
atrocities. After this terrible – and yet powerful – prayer time, the nuns walk
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  159
the streets of their neighborhood to listen to the people, to talk about Jesus,
and to invite them for gatherings, workshops or masses. Because God is a
community of relationality incarnated in them through their following of
Christ, these nuns cannot live their faith without being part of a process of
building new relationships to help people face these situations of oppression.
For these nuns, confessing an incarnated God is not a subject of dogma,
but acts as their strength in everyday life amidst seemingly hopeless situa-
tions. The incarnational ministry of nuns who live the relationality of God
in their neighborhood seeks ways to proclaim the liberation and resurrection
of the Gospel in a context that reflects violence and death. Their actions may
not change the whole of society or the world, but they certainly change the
lives of thousands of people in that neighborhood and create the possibil-
ity for more substantial societal and structural change. They embrace what
Ivone Gebara suggests about Christ/Sophia:

It is this wisdom that teaches peoples to seek justice and freedom and to
call them by many names; it is this wisdom that teaches long-­sufferings
and patience, mercy and prophecy; it is this relational wisdom that
awakens us today to the ecological crisis and prompts us to seek ecojus-
tice in the name of our entire Sacred Body.17

Drawing from the incarnated ministry of these nuns, we must acknowledge

that to do queer theologies requires us to embrace fully, challenge, distort,
disrupt, and queer traditional dogmas. As George states:

It is only by discovering the vital connection between the image of God

in corporate humanity and God’s self-emptying act of incarnation in
Christ that we can restore the lost balance of the vision of creation in
our times. The paradox of Christ making the whole creation his body by
the kenotic act of dispossessing the self sets the paradigm for a Christian
approach to creation.18

Precisely that is what queer theologies propose. That is, to fully understand
the relationality of God acting in creation through the witness that comes
from the event of the incarnation of Christ.

Queering La Mala Educación

Indecenting theology
Althaus-Reid’s emphasis on (re)connecting theology with the dignity of indi-
viduals whose bodies and sexuality have long been invisibilized and banished
from the “decent” teachings of Christian denominations is laudable. It is
within this queer methodology, framework, and interpretation that queer
theologies arose with the challenge to embody alternative spaces to interrupt
160  Hugo Córdova Quero
heteropatriarchal dicta that deny individuals the hope and the liberating
message of the incarnation. Althaus-Reid’s book Indecent Theology showed
how queer theologies subvert the dictates of society and their concomitant
alliance with legitimate religious institutions dating back to the Spanish colo-
nial times, as in the case of Latin America.
The project of an indecent theology is, in fact, a hermeneutical task that
requires multiple deconstructions where sexuality is always a key element
to understand theological, political, and ideological transactions within the
materially incarnated daily lives of queer believers. Althaus-Reid states:

My purpose is . . . to explore the contextual hermeneutic circle of sus-

picion in depth by questioning the traditional liberationist context of
doing theology. In this way the project of Indecent Theology represents
both a continuation of Liberation Theology and a disruption of it.19

For Althaus-Reid indecent theology is a critique to Latin American Libera-

tion Theology – hereinafter cited as “TLL” for its acronym in Spanish – as
well as a way to continue its liberating tone. The Althaus-Reid project in
Indecent Theology seeks to actively liberate TLL by outing it from the clos-
ets of tradition and power dominance while luring the re/membering of the
dignity of those who remain under oppression. It is within this framework
that its methodology and interpretation, through a queer hermeneutic circle,
challenges indecent theology to incarnate those third spaces that would con-
test and challenge heteropatriarchal binaries that police and censor bod-
ies and sexualities. As Althaus-Reid cleverly showed in her monumental
Indecent Theology, queer theologies disrupt the dicta of society and their
counterpart(s) in religious institutions while bringing into the conversation
sexual realities and their actors. She does this by reaffirming that the incarna-
tion is not just a belief of the Christian faith but a necessity to recognize the
counter-oppressive act of God. In the incarnation, the queer God liberates
all the creation. In fact, in the incarnation we see a God in transition whose
kenosis needs sexuality to be articulated in history, that is, in the struggles
of people for identity and the production of desires.20
For Althaus-Reid, the stories of the daily lives of women and men in Latin
America are preponderant. Often, these stories are told and remain skewed
by moral judgment, especially when these stories intersect with sexuality and
religion.21 Somehow, society segregates those stories through cultural closets
where only some heterosexual stories are privileged to come out.22 The real-
ity is that in most cases, geographical and political events, social norms, and
cultural differences play an important role in limiting coming out narratives.
For many people, coming out is a privilege regardless of their willingness
to be out. In this regard, the performativity of sexuality and the possibil-
ity of visibility through society in many parts of Latin America differ from
many Anglo-Saxon contexts where homonormativity tends to the sine qua
nonmandate of coming out for a “real” and “honest” definition of sexual
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  161
identity. In certain societies in Asia for example, many queer folks no longer
speak about coming out, but about inviting people in or coming home as
more appropriate reflections of cultural realities in various Asian cultures.23
Rather than forcing people to come out, Althaus-Reid focused her criti-
cism on the fact that Christianity through heteropatriarchal oppressive the-
ologies contributed largely to maintain cultural closets in the West.24 On the
other hand, she appreciated sexual histories, especially in cases were coming
out was a desire but not a viable option. Therefore, indecent theology neces-
sarily claimed sexual stories as revelation.25 By doing so, indecent theology
becomes a vehicle for doing theology while listening to the experiences of
people as a theological act.

La Mala Educación
Can the film La Mala Educación help us to explore the relationship between
sexuality, bodies, and incarnation? As many films dealing with religion have
attempted to spin a positive aspect in terms of this relationship, my take is
that La Mala Educación takes the opposite direction by pointing out the
negatives effects of this relationship when power is abused and directly
affects the lives of those who are caught in-between. In this film, ecclesiol-
ogy implies the material oppression of the faithful and the complete negation
of God’s kenosis through the incarnation. In other words, ecclesial institu-
tions become “bodies without organs”26 where the negotiation of power is
rendered sterile and gives way to a hegemonic colonial abuse(s) of power.
That is precisely what La Mala Educación prophetically announces to the
world though it is an actualized evangelical message.
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, this film places the story in Madrid in 1980
where director Enrique Godad is looking for material for a new movie. Sud-
denly, he receives the visit of his ex-schoolmate, Ignacio Rodríguez, who
brings to him a story entitled La Visita (The Visit). According to Ignacio,
the first part of the story is inspired by their common childhood at St. John’s
School, while the second part creates new situations for the adult life of the
characters. The main character of La Visita is Ignacio who, when grown up,
becomes Zahara, a transgender actress who impersonates Sara Montiel – a
famous Spaniard actress – on stage. Zahara wants to blackmail a priest,
Father Manolo, who not only abused and harassed him while at school, but
who also expelled Enrique from the school after discovering the affection
that developed between the two (then) ten-year-old kids.
Without knowing it yet, Enrique has found the material for his new film.
But the visit paid by Ignacio, or Angel Andrade as he wants to call himself
nowadays, has opened up in Enrique a past that he has left behind. Soon,
Enrique will discover that the man in front of him is Juan, the brother of
Ignacio. The latter died three years earlier from overdosing himself with
heroin. Juan and Father Manolo, who already has become Juan’s lover, gave
the deadly poison to him. While La Visita ends with the death of Zahara, La
162  Hugo Córdova Quero
Mala Educación is ended by Father Manolo, now using his moniker “Mr.
Berenguer,” who uncovers all the truth in front of Enrique’s eyes.
Despite the convoluted plot – which in the end is one story (La Mala
Educación) containing another (La Visita) – the interrelation of episodes
from daily life as well as of created situations highlights the primary topic
of this film. It deals with the use of power and its connection with sexual-
ity within the religious realm (the abuse by Father Manolo) as well as its
consequences in the secular world (Ignacio as a heroin-addicted transgen-
der woman). Almodóvar presents the story in many ways and degrees of
intensity. For example, when Ignacio as a kid is narrating his success in
reaching the honors board of the school and its award by being taking
along with the other honored students to a picnic day in the country, the
film takes us to a river. Many kids are running toward the water to swim
and enjoy nature. They look happy, free, and relaxed. Suddenly the sound
of a kid singing appears, and the camera moves from the kids in the water
to a close up on the boy singing in front of the water while Father Manolo
plays the guitar. It is Ignacio singing the song entitled “Moon River.” While
Ignacio continues off-screen with the words “tell me where I can find God
the good and ill . . .” the camera moves to focus on the kids enjoying the
water and swimming. Then the camera is back to where Ignacio and Father
Manolo were left before that movement, but they are not there. The voice
of Ignacio singing remains off-screen, this time with the words “tell me
what is hidden in the dark, and you will find it.” The bushes are shaking
and suddenly Ignacio, after shouting “no,” runs out of the bushes pulling
his pants up. Behind him, Father Manolo also runs out of the bushes while
calling Ignacio.
Ignacio falls on the ground and hits his head; the camera then approaches,
and we see blood coming out of his forehead while the voice of Ignacio
narrates off-screen, “A trickle of blood divided my forehead in two. I had a
feeling the same thing would happen with my life. It would always be divided
and I could not help it.”27
In these words, the whole set of effects of that education on Ignacio is
summed up. Over the plot of the movie, we discover that rape, sexual harass-
ment, lies, physical abuse, and fear are the elements that mold and finally
ruin the life of Ignacio. The film denounces what queer theologies have also
begun to expose: that traditional Christianity has denied the body by viewing
it as the locus of per/version, and that vision has split humanity into selves
and bodies. While selves are to be saved, bodies are to be punished, which
contradicts the incarnation in which selves are never possible without liber-
ated bodies. Unfortunately, this divide facilitates the overuse of power on
those who are more vulnerable, lower in the chains of institutional power
and control. The film locates Ignacio and Enrique amid this situation. Father
Manolo is the character that embraces and carries out the cumbersome appa-
ratus of institutional Christianity to punish deviant behaviors, while, at the
same time, liberating his fantasies. In a sense, Father Manolo is just as split
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  163
in two as Ignacio himself in the latter’s self-description of being split as a
result of such an education.
If sexuality and bodies are surgically removed from the incarnated God
in God’s creation, then Christian churches are rendered as places of oppres-
sion and abuse of power. In his book Queering Christ, Robert E. Shore-Goss
describes how this operates in Christian Roman Catholicism. He states:

The body must be denied; it must be disciplined, bound, and restricted.

The body must be abused in the name of self-conquest and spiritual
transcendence. The ascetic self is disembodied and fragmented; it is split
from the body. The separation of the self from the body has had tragic
results. It degrades the body and degrades human sexuality in particular.
Bodily spontaneity is feared and denigrated. Embodiment is seen not as
a mediating spirit but as blocking spirit. The regime of bodily mortifica-
tion to produce the ascetic self numbs the person to the bodily issues of
compassion and justice. It is a regime similar to anorexia nervosa, shar-
ing characteristics with the asceticism of severe restraint, bodily reten-
tion of fluids, and sexlessness.28

In this quotation, Shore-Goss not only describes the noxious effects of sepa-
ration between body and self within institutional power but also points out
how this desensitizes the actors in charge of reproducing the dicta of that
institutional power, in this case, clergy and religious men and women. In
some cases, the consequences would affect the lives of people to the point of
no return. If Shore-Goss in his own life was able to find liberation and resis-
tance to these dynamics in the love of Frank and David, and be able to make
the theology of his experiences, La Mala Educación shows the underside of
this. The locus for this anti-evangelical oppression is fully visible in the lives
of Ignacio and Ernesto, who then re-present the stories of millions of people
who were, are, or will never be able to find liberation and resistance as the
hope of incarnation has been sliced out from them. Scene 10 “Cinema Sin”
and scene 11 “Predator” illustrates this issue very well.
In scene 10 Ignacio describes the movie theater as the place where he had
the happiest moments with Enrique. It is there that they discovered the films
by Sara Montiel, Spain’s gay icon.29 The scene shows Sara Montiel on screen
in the movie Esa Mujer [that woman]. In that scene, Sara plays the role
of Soledad, a woman returning to the convent where she used to belong.
When Soledad enters the room, the nun does not recognize her. Soledad
then asks, “Don’t you recognize me, Mother? Has the world changed me
so much?” To these words, the nun responds, “Mother Soledad? What are
you doing here?” While the dialogue continues on screen, we see Ignacio
and Enrique crossing their arms to reach each other’s genitalia. The camera
then returns to the screen where the film of Sara Montiel is playing to then
return to Ignacio and Enrique from behind. While the nun on the screen
denies shelter to Soledad by saying: “It is not God who rejects you. It is
164  Hugo Córdova Quero
I, in the name of my order,” we can still infer from behind the seats that
Ignacio and Enrique are masturbating each other. Paradoxically, it will be
the same religious institution, namely, the Roman Catholic Church that, in
the person of Father Manolo, will reject them in their affections through
this veiled hand-job. By inference, maybe God is not rejecting Ignacio and
Enrique in this story; it is perhaps just Father Manolo – in the name of his
particular reading of God’s will – who rejects them. However, the inter-
textuality continues with the next scene, which makes this rejection more
evident and complicated.
Scene 11 continues in the dorms of the school later that night. Ignacio
cannot sleep and goes to the restroom. Enrique follows him. Ignacio is
guilty about the event at the movie theater. When the two kids are talking
in the bathroom, Father Manolo enters the dorm. He notices that there are
two empty beds and walks toward the restroom. The two kids hide in one
of the stalls, but Father Manolo can find them. After reprimanding them,
Father Manolo sends Enrique to sleep and takes Ignacio to the chapel to
say mass. Two off-screen statements of Ignacio mark this scene. In the first
comment, Ignacio is still at mass with Father Manolo, and Ignacio exclaims,
“I think I have just lost my faith at this moment. . . . So I no longer believe
in God or hell. As I do not believe in hell I am not afraid . . . and without
fear, I am capable of anything.”30 Then, Ignacio is at the sacristy helping
Father Manolo to remove his altar garments. After begging him not to expel
Enrique, Ignacio, still off-screen, continues, “I sold myself for the first time
in that sacristy to avoid the expulsion of Enrique. But Father Manolo tricked
me. I swore that one day I would make him pay for that.”31
However, following Michel Foucault, nobody is entirely passive in
response to the dicta of institutional power.32 As the film shows, Ignacio
was able to hunt and dominate Father Manolo who formerly dominated and
abused him. However, Juan – Ignacio’s brother – would also dominate the
lives of Father Manolo and, for a while, of Enrique. As stated by Foucault,
power comes from everywhere, and there are many participations in issues
of power that exceed the classic oppressor/oppressed binary.33
Even so, the queering act of the movie is situated precisely in the intri-
cate net of names and characters that intermingle in the plot of the film,
displaying different dynamics of power. As for Ignacio/Zahara, Juan/Igna-
cio and Angel, and Father Manolo/Mr. Berenguer, the characters display
different performativities and dynamics to live and survive their circum-
stances. Their consistent naming and re-naming themselves allow them
to distort the dicta of the dominant institution depicted in this film, the
Roman Catholic Church. Naming, or labeling, is a powerful act of institu-
tions and, by extension, of those who carry the authority to do so in the
name of those institutions.
Judith Butler offers us an enlightened example by questioning or interro-
gating the act of naming through baptism. In her work The Psychic Life of
Power, she analyzes the connection between language and its power to call
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  165
and fix identities that are ad eternum connected to the name along with an
ongoing presence of the namer.34 She explains:

In other words, the divine power of naming structures the theory of

interpellation that accounts for the ideological constitution of the sub-
ject. Baptism exemplifies the linguistic means by which the subject is
compelled into a social being. God names “Peter,” and this address
establishes God as the origin of Peter; the name remains attached to
Peter permanently by virtue of the implied and continuous presence in
the name of the one who names him. . . . Indeed, “Peter” does not exist
without the name that supplies the linguistic guarantee of existence.35

Therefore, “The conceptual problem here is underscored by a grammatical

one in which there can be no subject prior to a submission, and yet there is
a grammatically induced ‘need to know’ who undergoes this submission in
order to become a subject.”36 Finally, Butler states: “This performance [of
submission] is not simply in accord with these skills, for there is no subject
prior to their performing; performing skills laboriously works the subject
into its status as a social being.”37
In this film, for example, Father Manolo acts in the name of God. How-
ever, the churches as institutions carry the power to mold, judge, and define
the lives of those who are under their authority, many times even believing
that they are replacing God. In La Mala Educación, the performance of the
Roman Catholic Church as a Christian institution seems to be disconnected
from the God it attempts to re/present. The Christian churches name a par-
ticular understanding of the Divine as “God.” Therefore, the image of that
“God” carries the presence of the institutional church as a namer. Rome has
been the epitome of that reality for centuries. Scene 11, quoting the dialogue
between the nun and Sara Montiel as Soledad, is quite illuminating in this
respect. The phrase, “It is not God who rejects you. It is I, in the name of my
order,” summarizes the tension posited between God and the institution/s
that speak/s in the name of God. Amid this tension, common individuals
such as Ignacio and Enrique are deeply affected by it, and the consequences
over them are hard to surmount. On the one hand, they are not able to see
God behind such an institution. On the other hand, individuals like Father
Manolo or the nun in the film inserted in La Mala Educación run the destiny
of the institution according to their vision, which sometimes does not accord
with the spirit of the God they attempt to (re)present.

La Mala education: begging for a liberative incarnation

La Mala Educación strongly re/connects its characters with two major
realms: context and corporality. Their use of religion – or their cry for it –
relates to the same struggles that Christ had in order to assume his corpo-
rality and calling. In fact, by re/connecting context and corporality, they
166  Hugo Córdova Quero
are re/connecting creatureliness with the Divine. On the other hand, queer
theologies challenge us to be fully encarnacional, taking Christ as the para-
digm for our theological task, a task in which queer theologies are deeply
indebted to TLL.
Moreover, queer theologies cannot lose sight of material bodies and daily
lives as the primary focus of their work. It is in everyday life, in the struggles
as well as in the pleasures of multiple subjects, that queer theologies reside.
The believers to whom they speak are bound to particular contexts. In every
case, there are numerous negotiations and ways to perform gender and sexu-
ality. What queer theologies seek is to open up spaces for those involved
in these dynamics in order to work toward liberation. That liberation can
only be possible through incarnation. Paradoxically, incarnation has been
undermined in traditional systematic theology when the divinity of Christ
has occluded his humanity. The core of the Christian faith resides in the fact
that God became fully human in Jesus Christ.
If this is true, the body is indeed the place, the locus, and the geography
where salvation is made possible. Now, that body is not ethereal; instead,
that body feels, suffers, and has an incredible ability to feel pleasure, to enjoy
its corporality, to seek desire. Desire and pleasure are as important as the
struggles for justice. Notably, the recovery of desire is in itself another act
of justice. However, not many theological discourses, spiritual practices, or
liturgical ordos take the whole dimension of the body into account. Sexual-
ity, pleasure, and even orgasms are mostly absent from what is considered as
“Christian,” “spiritual,” and “decent.” When we bring in different ways that
cultures construct the body, everything gets more and more “closeted.” That
has terrible consequences for the daily life of queer and straight people alike
in different cultures, for their bodies, their sexuality and their relationalities.
How is it that society and religious discourses managed to outcast, ostracize,
and discriminate people?
These issues can be better understood by looking at what I identify as a
twofold dynamic. The first one is related to what I call the “Discursive Tech-
nologies of Othering,” which are to exoticize, stigmatize, label, dehumanize,
demonize, and silence.38 The second one is related to what I call the “Mate-
rial technologies of Othering,” which are racism, classism, ableism, ageism,
xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and body-fascism.39 On this, I draw from
Foucault’s concept of the “normalizing judgment” in his book Discipline and
Punishment, where he affirms that punishment “compares, differentiates,
hierarchizes, homogenizes, [and] excludes. In short, it normalizes.”40 These
discursive and material technologies of othering divide and exclude people
but also make those who are cataloged as “other” inferior to the ones per-
forming the process of othering. It could also be discussed from a Sartrean
and Lacanian perspective that the process is double, as the “other/s” even
mold the apparent superior cataloguer.
In one way or another, religious discourses would have to face these situ-
ations. For that reason, it is highly essential to re-member the connection
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  167
of bodies with material lives, with economies that alienate those lives, with
politics that deny dignity to those lives, with cultures that closet them into
expectations to fulfill. Furthermore, religious experiences are closeted into
ready-made recipes to follow rather than liberating the soul to the multiple
possibilities of God’s love and creativity. Moreover, to que(e)r(y) theological
discourses is to go back to the roots of what the religious experience was
about: the union of the human life with the Divine and the whole creation.
In Christianity, this is fully reached in the event of the incarnation of Christ.
To go back to the roots of creation is not to naively hug trees without ques-
tioning the economic system that is killing thousands of trees in the Amazon
regions in the name of progress and financial profit. Instead, I am talking
about really re-discovering what makes us humans in connection with the
Divine, and consequently acting in the world in accordance with that connec-
tion. To understand these situations in the context of daily life and counter
them from a theological perspective is a necessity for queer theologians.

Incarnation and ecclesiology: queer friendships

Incarnation leads us to the construction of communities where friendship
is carried out as a way to queer the heterosexual matrix and embrace the
multiple diversity of humanity. This statement is grounded in the contribu-
tion of Elizabeth Stuart, who in her book Just Good Friends, shows us the
importance of friendship for queer theologies.41 Stuart begins her argument
looking at the words of Jesus in the pericope of John 15.12–17:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love that this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you
servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master
is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to
you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose
me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that
will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.
I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.42

She sees in this pericope that the relationality proposed by Jesus is very
different from the one proposed by Paul in his epistles, in which he defines
a “master/slave” relationality. Stuart recognizes that Jesus’ teachings carry
out a distortion of blood and ownership lines of kinship in a way that ben-
efits friendship. Jesus offers a “friendship which essentially involves mutual
service and sacrifice.”43 Stuart sees this pattern in the Biblical witness when
affirming, “It is only in friendships that the Scriptures present us with mod-
els of equal, mutual and just relationships. In these relationships, God is
present in the passion between the persons.”44 With this authority from the
Scriptures, she turns to human beings. According to her, human beings are
168  Hugo Córdova Quero
called by God to incarnate this friendship. Stuart continues affirming, “We
are called to relate to the world in friendship: a relationship which as it grows
between people results in mutual and equal acceptance, respect and delight,
it is an embodied relationship with social and political repercussions.”45
The recognition of friendship in this way affects social and political life
individually as well as communally and links the whole of creation. If God is
a friend, and we are called to incarnate that friendship, which also affects our
social and political life, then God is also related to the whole creation. This
statement could not be possible without the incarnation of Christ, seeking
to make the whole of creation of the indwelling place of God.
Therefore, the idea of God as a friend is an incarnational perspective, but
also requires us to talk about mutual responsibility and interrelation. This
idea has tremendous implications for ecclesiology. It is not possible to claim
to be part of Christ’s Church and not receive all human beings as friends of
God. Stuart defines the lack of this dimension of responsibility and inter-
relation as sin and points out the fact that sin is part of “the various forces
in our society that conspire to keep us apart from each other, to assume
masks and play roles, to treat each other unjustly.”46 Therefore, our task
as queer theologians and believers is to “fight in the name of Christ against
the constructions of injustice in the world. This includes fighting against
the construction of sex, and relationships in general, in terms of domina-
tion and submission.”47 This statement implies a requisite of self-evaluation
for Christianity in order to see how this domination and subordination are
reproduced in our theologies and our institutional organizations. This is also
a fundamental concern in Indecent/Queer theologies. On this Stuart affirms:

“Love means not having to say you’re sorry” – one of the biggest lies ever
invented and one of the biggest causes of injustice, for this idea encour-
ages irresponsibility by assuming people that they are not accountable
for their actions. Love demands recognition and repentance from injus-
tice. The Church will never convince the vast majority of lesbian and
gay people, bisexual people, battered women, and all those victims of
demonic dualism, that has distorted our attitudes to the body and rela-
tionships, of its friendship unless it first acknowledges its guilt and asks
for forgiveness.48

This demand for acknowledgment of responsibility is a massive claim against

ecclesiastical institutions that want to speak in the name of a God, whose
“essence (. . .) proclaims that at the heart of God there is relationality.”49
This also goes in the same direction that Mary Hunt has taken in her book
Fierce Tenderness, where she states:

Friendship with the divine, whether he, she, or it, is inspired by human
friendship, and vice versa. This does not trivialize the divine nor ele-
vate the human. It merely names friendship as the adequate relational
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  169
referent. As women begin to value friendships with women, the refer-
ent for divine-human friendship is given new content. . . . [T]he divine
friend surprises with Her revelations at times, inspiring humans to the
same serendipity.50

Through the incarnation of Christ, the whole of creation is called to inter-

relations and mutual dependency that cannot allow Christian churches or
societies to sustain situations of injustice and exclusion. How can Chris-
tian churches speak in the name of a God who challenges their practices of
domination and subordination? Queer theologies based on friendship and
egalitarian perichoretical relationships have to promote dialogue and under-
standing among different people in order to build community, avoiding a
ghetto mentality that has sometimes colonized GLBTT movements.
If gender and sexuality are performative and fluid, and humanity mir-
rors the Trinity through the incarnation, God’s friendship with creation also
reflects this performance and fluidity. This statement destroys exclusivist
images of God and humanity, of punishing those who do not fit readily into
the narrow heteropatriarchal dicta of some ecclesiastical bodies. Sexuality
and ethnicity are intimately connected, and queer theologies have to promote
communities of friends that can be inclusive and pluralistic. Through these
means, queer theologians and theologies stand at the forefront of a new theo-
logical vision in which clusters of resistance are a point of contact with queer
theory and social movements, from which we learn that bodies do matter.51
How can we, at the same time, participate in the proliferation of repeti-
tive practices in order to disrupt the compulsory heterosexuality that is the
norm for those repetitions? How will communities – religious or social – be
able to do this? Let me offer an example. Some years ago, I participated in
a conference for ministers caring for people living with HIV/AIDS and the
GLBTT community. It was a meeting in Buenos Aires, with the participa-
tion of people from many parts of South America – Argentina, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Brazil, and Chile – and from diverse ecclesiastical traditions. There
were lectures and the opportunity to share experiences of our pastoral activi-
ties. I remember that one of the most enthusiastic participants was a young
priest in his mid-30s, from the north of the country. He was working with
a very poor base community church whose population was mainly hetero-
sexual, but there were a good number of queer people. He told us that he
organized a Bible study group for Lent, leading up to baptizing the commu-
nity’s babies at the Feast of Easter. One day, Cassandra52 – one of the trans-
gender parishioners – told the group that she had never been baptized. As
she came from a non-religious family, growing up and starting her transition,
possibilities of being baptized disappeared completely. Cassandra explained
to the group that it would profoundly impact her faith in no longer having
the opportunity to be baptized.
This caused great concern in the community, not only because most of
the people there had already been baptized as children, but also because the
170  Hugo Córdova Quero
person in front of them was cataloged as male at childbirth but lives and feels
as female. The issue was discussed in the community, and the priest resolved
not to push the community into any decision. However, one of the members
said, “She is a member of our community and she also wants to reaffirm
her faith. Why can’t she receive the sacrament?” That posed a susceptible
situation amidst the community. The controversial issue was not about the
possibility for somebody to be incorporated into the church through bap-
tism. Instead, it was on how to proceed in that situation when it implied the
recognition of a travesti [transgender] as a full participant in the church.
Finally, the community said that they would support Cassandra’s baptism.
They participated in her catechetical process and even organized a party for
the baptism day. However, and this is one of the most exciting things, they
baptized Cassandra with her female name, the one of her chosen displayed
gender. At the time, the gender identity law that the Argentinean Congress
enacted in 2013 was not even a dream for queer people.
Here we have a contemporary example of how the heterosexual order is
disrupted through repetition, and also through the disruption of the dicta of
heteronormativity. This is the complete opposite of the message of La Mala
Educación, in which the ecclesiastical power not only disregard the identities
and experiences of its characters but also destroyed any healthy connection
between faith, incarnation, and sexuality. Along the same line, Stuart poses
an excellent question that works to disrupt hegemonic structures that enslave
human beings and narrow their relationships.53 These narrowing functions,
especially in the case of sexualities and gender performances, do not fit into
the heterosexist binary. This heterosexist binary is what Butler defines as
the compulsory heterosexuality that molds the performativity of gender and
sexuality.54 On this matter, Althaus-Reid would also state that,

At the core of any discussion on sexuality lies the threat to destabilizing

dogmas and ecclesiologies which have made God a resource of hetero-
sexual authority. That requires the courage to find God outside sexual
ideologies and ideologies of race and class. Sexual ideologies, in particu-
lar, are crucial in sustaining political ones, and women’s rights inside
and outside the church, as well as God’s rights, depending on how we
confront them in what needs to be an alliance for more than one truth
‘out of the closet’ for heterosexual and non-heterosexual people alike.
Meanwhile, God remains hidden by ideology. God also remains in the
closet as a prisoner of the orthodoxy of theology and pornography, claim-
ing for el derecho a no ser derecha, the right not to be straight in a church
where the orthopraxis of love should be more important than its ortho-
doxy base on an uncritical position rooted in a heterosexual ideology.55

Therefore, the incarnation of Christ remains as the locus from where to

contest and interrupt the heteropatriarchal matrix and its dicta over the lives
of human beings, their sexuality, and the performance of their gender. It is
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  171
the responsibility of Indecent/Queer theologies to participate in the process
of incarnate God’s liberation and to rebel against ecclesial powers that seek
to dehumanize and to divide the Body of Christ represented in the Christian
churches.

Conclusion
Sexuality, bodies, and the doctrine of the incarnation are pivotal to the daily
lived experiences of the faithful. Queering this dogma should bring into
the conversation all the dimensions of human experience in order to affirm
that in Jesus all humanity is embraced by the Divine. The analysis of La
Mala Educación has given us ample examples of anti-incarnational abuses of
power and oppression of bodies and sexuality within a religious institution
such as the Roman Catholic Church.
Queer theologies offer a third space in order to destroy heteropatriarchal
binaries at play in abusive religious institutions. The doctrine of the incar-
nation calls queer believers to decolonize our relationalities and notions of
friendship and partnership, even amid the problematic displays of ecclesias-
tical power. In the particular case of indecent theology, it joins other queer
theologies in raising a prophetic voice to take up the cuddles of Incarnation
in our bodies, gender, and sexuality in the following of Christ. In light of
noxious mandates of sexuality within the boundaries of oppressive theolo-
gies, queer/indecent theologies allow us to integrate our own experiences
with that of Christ faithfully. It is imperative to remember that our task is to
queer and decolonize Christian beliefs, not to make an adaptation functional
for power structures, either religious or politic/economic. The film La Mala
Educación prophetically points out the fact that when God becomes a slave
of human interpretations, the material consequences are deployed in the real,
tangible lives of the faithful.
Christian churches and other religious institutions should think deeply
about the role they play in the political and social arena through the foster-
ing of heteropatriarchy. What is defined by law or condemned by it does not
necessarily imply that the churches have to assume the same attitudes as the
nation-state or societies. Communities of believers should be independent
of the fluctuations of the politics of the State, mostly when those politics are
against the message of Jesus, which deeply involves community, solidarity,
love, and friendship. Every time I watch La Mala Educación, I cannot avoid
wondering what the lives of its characters would be if an incarnational theol-
ogy were the basis for the religious institutions in which they participated.
We can dream and see a few examples of religiosities that are liberating,
but the film continues to prophetically alert us of the broad deployment of
theo(ideo)logies that oppress individuals and communities.
If we are to be faithful disciples of Jesus, the incarnation of Christ demands
of Christians an equal response to the world. If God is the parameter/model
for human life, and sexuality is part of life, when we say that sexuality and
172  Hugo Córdova Quero
gender performances are fluid, we are saying that God is also fluid. The
perichoretical and amical understanding of God through God’s relationality
with the creation is a continuous liberating dynamic. It is this God who is
present in creation through the incarnation of Christ, and seeks the whole
of creatureliness to be God’s indwelling place. The whole of creatureliness
definitively implies sexuality, gender performance, and bodies. They are the
locus for a real, tangible friendship with God. Queer theologies and indecent
theologians are midwives in the unfolding of the new life of creation. Our
bodies form the locus for that marvelous cosmic process of birthing incar-
nated liberations.

Notes
 1 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology and The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003).
  2 Pedro Almodovar (Dir.), La Mala Educación [Bad Education], 105 minutes (Sony
Pictures, 2004, DVD).
  3 Robert V. Rakestraw, “Becoming Like God: An Evangelical Doctrine of Theosis,”
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 2 (1997): 260.
  4 Karimpumannil Mathai George, The Silent Roots: Orthodox Perspectives on
Christian Spirituality (The Risk Books Series #63) (Geneva, Switzerland: WCC
Publications,1994), 37.
  5 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), 116.
  6 John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, August 6, 1993.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_
enc_06081993_veritatis-splendor.html.
  7 John Paul II, The Gospel of Life, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, March 25, 1995.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_
enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html
  8 Aline H. Kalbian, Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contempo-
rary Catholicism (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 120.
  9 Ibid., 121.
10 Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 117.
11 Gavin D’Costa, Sexing the Trinity: Gender, Culture and the Divine (London:
SCM Press, 2000), 56.
12 Ibid., p. 30.
13 Gavin D’Costa, “Queer Trinity,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western
Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 269–80.
14 Jordan, “God’s Body,” 281–92.
15 J. Severino Croatto, Liberación y Libertad: Pautas Hermenéuticas (Ciudad
Autonoma de Buenos Aires: Mundo Nuevo, 1973).
16 Jordan, “God’s Body,” 285–6.
17 Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, trans.
David Molineaux (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 91.
18 George, The Silent Roots, 44.
19 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 5.
20 Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 68.
21 Hugo Córdova Quero, “Risky Affairs: Marcella Althaus-Reid Indecently Queer-
ing Juan Luis Segundo’s Hermeneutic Circle Propositions,” in Theology in Fetish
Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid, ed. Lisa Isherwood and Mark
D. Jordan (London: SCM Press, 2010), 207–18.
 Unfaithful noxious sexuality  173
22 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 135.
23 Carolyn Poljski, Coming Out, Coming Home or Inviting People in? Supporting
Same-Sex Attracted Women from Immigrant and Refugee Communities (Mel-
bourne, Australia: Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health, 2011).
24 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 173.
25 Ibid., 148.
26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 2 vol. (London: Continuum, 2004).
27 “Un hilo de sangre dividía mi frente en dos. Y tuve el presentimiento de que con
mi vida ocurriría lo mismo. Siempre estaría dividida y yo no podría hacer nada
para evitarlo.” [La Mala Educación, Scene 7, “Padre Manolo” (Father Manolo)].
28 Robert Shore-Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Cleveland, OH:
Pilgrim Press, 2002), 11.
29 “Ignacio has become Zahara, a transvestite and drug addict, who impersonates
Sara Montiel (Gay icon, a sort of a Spanish Mae West of the 60’s and 70’s) and is
a member of a fifth-rate variety company” (“Bad Education – Directed by Pedro
Almodovar,” 2004).
30 “Creo que perdí mi fe en este momento. . . Por lo tanto no creo más en Dios o en
el infierno. Y como no creo más en el infierno, no tengo miedo . . . y sin miedo
soy capaz de hacer cualquier cosa.” [La Mala Educación, Scene 11 “Predator.”].
31 “Me vendí por primera vez en aquella sacristía para evitar la expulsión de Enrique.
Pero el Padre Manolo me engañó. Juré que algún día le haría pagar por ello.” [La
Mala Educación, Scene 11 “Predator.”].
32 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writ-
ings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John
Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Phantom, 1980).
33 Ibid.
34 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1997).
35 Ibid., 110–11.
36 Ibid., 117.
37 Ibid., 119. Original emphasis.
38 Quero, “This Body Trans/Forming Me,” 90.
39 Ibid.
40 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 183.
41 Elizabeth Stuart, Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of
Relationships (London: Mowbray, 1995).
42 Texts are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
43 Stuart, Just Good Friends, 170.
44 Ibid., 173.
45 Ibid., 213.
46 Ibid., 220.
47 Ibid., 231.
48 Ibid., 237.
49 Ibid., 241.
50 Mary Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York:
Crossroad, 1994), 84.
51 Butler, Bodies That Matter.
52 This name is a pseudonym.
53 Stuart, Just Good Friends.
54 Butler, Gender Trouble, 30.
55 Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: On Pov-
erty, Sexual Identity and God (London: SCM Press, 2004), 102.
9 Deafinitely different
Seeing deafness, Deaf, and
healing in the Bible from Deaf
perspectives
Kristine C. Meneses

It is quite “normal” for us to put a cordon in biblical exegesis, with some

scholars who are too engrossed in knowing the details, yet impart their
understanding of God’s word and overlook the need to include certain peo-
ple or groups in biblical conversations. The term “cordon” here pertains to
the boundary, the line that seems to exclude the perspectives of some readers
or groups on God’s word. Although postcolonial and contextual readings in
biblical hermeneutics have emerged,1 it seems that a certain people or group
is still missed out. Women, the mestizaje, black and Asian people, and LGB-
TIQA+ continue their efforts to penetrate the circle of biblical scholarship.
Nevertheless, we tend to forget to include those whom we label as disabled,
specifically the Deaf. Why is this? Can the Deaf not be our conversation
partners in unraveling G-d’s dabar? Do we debase their contribution in visu-
alizing the Word? Do we fear that by including them in our conversation, our
“normative” reading of what we believe as “normal” will be challenged by
them? To listen to Deaf perspectives of biblical stories, specifically stories in
which they are directly involved, challenges our medical perspective of deaf-
ness, and questions our status quo reading of the healing narratives. Thus,
understanding the Word from their perspectives invites us to see them not
as persons with defect, but another human variety.
This chapter attempts to challenge the “normal” reading of the healing
narrative of the Deaf man in the gospel of Mark by engaging some of the
Deaf in the conversation. This chapter offers perspectives on the Deaf and
deafness in the scripture, which we often (intentionally, or unintentionally)
miss out on. Hence, this chapter problematizes our pegged perspective that
Deaf and deafness are auditory deficits that need repair. By medicalizing the
Deaf and deafness, we exclude them from our biblical conversations. How
many of our biblical exegeses and hermeneutical studies have included the
perspective(s) of Deaf people?2 It is the aim of this chapter to let those who
are involved (or not) in the story to enter the circle. This is an opportunity
for a theological inclusion of Deaf people who are often set aside. Our tra-
ditional reading of the Deaf and deafness in the scripture henceforth will be
challenged, yet surprisingly would lead to a life-giving, more holistic view
of humanity, relationship, and theology, if only we go out of our closeted
 Deafinitely different  175
“normative” reading of disability in the scripture. What does it mean to
be Deaf, and what is deafness other than something negative we have long
labeled? What pictorial, pastoral, and practical reading of Mark 7.31–37
does a Deaf reading have to offer to biblical hermeneutics? What theologi-
cal insight can an alternative reading of the said pericope contribute to a
traditional image of G-d who has the power to heal or cure?
To answer these questions, this chapter will first present society’s per-
spective on Deaf and deafness. Second, it will lay out of representation of
Deaf and deafness in the scripture, both in the Old and New Testament.
Third, it will demonstrate that many Deaf people do not consider themselves
as impaired or disabled; rather they see themselves as part of a linguistic
minority because of their unique language.3 Moreover, their unique culture
can be traced to their organic experiences, shared history, and means of
communication expressed in sign language,4 bodily movements, iconic and
facial expressions – a sort of distinctive art in the form or mime – as well as
literature and humor. Apart from language and experiences, Deaf culture is
beyond spatial boundaries because the Deaf are diasporic. Such a view of
Deaf culture can give us a new way of understanding Deaf people who have
a language that is not spoken but signed, who listen not with their ears but
eyes, not confined by land but united by language. Thus they see themselves
as an ethic-linguistic minority, a unique culture. Having an overview of the
Deaf perspective about their identity, language, and culture will help us in
understanding an alternative reading of Deaf, deafness, and the Divine from
both an exegetical exploration, and the perspective of some of the Deaf from
the Philippines and Korea, about the story in Mark 7.31–37. This chapter
will conclude with a theological and pastoral call to advocate inclusivity
and diversity.

I Deafness is a defect, being Deaf is defective:

a discriminating globalized hegemonic ableist and
audist5 society
Today, advances in science and medicine make us label what appears not to
be a “normal” body as impaired and disabled, including those with mental,
physical, and sensory disabilities. There is a lingering fear of disablement as
our body deteriorates. We want to show that we can still perform, that we are
still “useful.” Such a “culture of fear”6 of disablement is heavily influenced
by our globalized culture which attaches a person’s value on his or her bodily
and cognitive capability and performance. Thus, disability is a disgrace. It is
disqualified and displaced. Disability is an unacceptable body in our society.
As no one would choose to be disabled, we want to “fix” or “repair” a
“defective” body. Similarly, many religions see disability as negative, a subject
for cure or healing, and the disabled person becomes an object of charity.
A medicalized or pathologized perspective of disability leaves the dis-
abled person in an unfortunate condition, pitied, abused, exploited, and
176  Kristine C. Meneses
stigmatized. Looking at disability as bodily anomaly consequently negates
the disabled altogether. There must be something more and beyond what
meets the eye in disability. While we may simply see the surface, there is a
need to go deeper in understanding disability, the disabled, and particularly
the Deaf.
When we see people who are disabled, we are left unsure about how to
interact with them. We either avoid looking at them or we stare at them with
an unconscious statement that something is “wrong.” Thus, they become
object of lookism, which is derogatory and discriminating. The term lookism
appeared first in The Washington Post Magazine in 1978 and it pertains to
discrimination based on physical appearance and attractiveness.7 In connec-
tion to the Deaf, lookism pertains to their difference as people who com-
municate in sign language and mime. Living in an ableist and audist8 society
is a lifetime adjustment for the disabled, and the Deaf, because they remain
as the minority that is consistently disqualified.
In medicalizing disability, the body is treated as a pathological malady,
a deformity, a lack, an anomaly, defective, and so on. Medical practitio-
ners and scientists consequently work in a deficit-based understanding of
their personhood. Focusing on body deformity retains the enforcement of
correction, rehabilitation, repair, or normalcy. Morally and ethically, we
unconsciously devalue and disenfranchise the person and the narrative of
the disabled as disqualified disablehood.9 We forget that disability is not
entirely an individual’s problem, but a condition society has constructed,
construed and configured. In this sense, another model is needed to question
the medical/pathological view of disability.
The enforcement of normalcy by the medical model of disability projects
a sort of physiological hegemony, where the “normal” body is acceptable in
society, and disabled and Deaf bodies are demeaned.10 To (en)force normalcy
onto the disabled is to disregard their uniqueness. Consequently, we fail to
recognize other dimensions of their personhood – their disablehood.
On the other hand, the social model of disability argues that we locate the
problem of disability in the experiences of oppression and social constructs,
which leads to the stigmatization of the disabled. People sense their disability
because society makes it difficult for them to access what is necessary for
them. We have created physical, structural, environmental, and attitudinal
barriers. This model is highly politicized for it locates or frames the forms
of oppression that disable the disabled, beginning with the unwelcoming
enforcement of normalcy by the temp-abled bodies.11 Furthering their double
disablement is our systemic and subtle internalization of ableism and audism
in everyday life, such as in history, politics, economics, institution, culture,
and nature,12 which the social model of disability is challenging.13 We uncriti-
cally allow the power binary to play in our consciousness, such as abled/
disabled, normal/abnormal, and ideal/deviant. This internalized binary of
bio-ideal limits hinders the full participation of the disabled in society. To
reiterate, as Mike Oliver says,14 disability is not the problem. Rather, it is
 Deafinitely different  177
the attitude of people toward the disable that disables. Hence, we block
our perspectives to see disability, and particularly deafness, other than and
beyond loss. We need to see and consider Deaf perspectives as a benefit to
culture, society, and theology.

II Deaf and deafness a benefit: deconstructing the

“loss” perspective
Records of Deaf people are scarce. Nonetheless, the survival of their heritage,
in particular their language, is a proof of a past that needs to be told together
with their culture. One possible cause of barrier in recording the history of the
Deaf is due mainly to the invisibility of deafness.15 In the past, deafness was
not a disease or impairment. Deafness was held in opposition to intelligence.
Society equates knowledge with the eloquence of articulating one’s thoughts.
As the Deaf expressed themselves through gestures, mimes, and facial expres-
sions, which did not form the norm of articulation, they were labelled as dumb.
In Asia, Deaf narratives are similarly unrecorded because of the prevailing
view of deafness as a curse, a punishment of the divine, or karma.16 Deaf
exclusion is part of a society’s internalized shame with the inability to hear.
In the Philippines, we do not have accurate statistics of the Deaf, particularly
those residing in remote areas because some families hide them for fear of
stigma. Their invisibility in society makes it difficult for many of us to be
aware of, and understand the Deaf. More importantly, sign language was
difficult to record in the past. In one of the Deaf schools in Chungju, Chun-
gcheong Province, South Korea, all of the students wear cochlear implants.
This assistive medical devise claims to “cure” hearing impairment. Parents
opt for their children, some as young as three years old, to go through sur-
gery to implant the device.17
In France, different Deaf groups gather every week to understand and
assert who they are as individuals and as a community. A well-known Deaf
person, Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, organized an annual banquet in honor of
Abbé de’L Épée which was well attended by Deaf people.18 Through this
regular fellowship, the Deaf develop positive and powerful principles.19 A
summary of their basic principles as formulated by Berthier, Claudius For-
estier,20 and Alphonse Lenoir21 is listed as follows:

1 Deaf communities possess the gift of languages so special that they

can be used to say things which speech cannot.
2 These languages are even more special because they can be adapted
to cross international boundaries when spoken languages fail.
3 Consequently, Deaf people model in potential the ability to become
the world’s first truly global citizens, and thus serve as a model for
the rest of society.
4 Deaf people were intentionally created on earth to manifest these qualities,
and the value of their existence should not be called into question.
178  Kristine C. Meneses
5 Hearing people unable to use them are effectively “sign-impaired”
citizens.
6 These languages were offered as a gift to hearing people, that if they
joined with Deaf people and learned them, the quality of their lives
would be improved.

The banqueteers were well aware that the majority of Deaf people had
not yet had the opportunity to attend Deaf education and experience sign
language socialization. But they pledged themselves to continue to fight to
ensure that all Deaf people had the “right” to these experiences.22
Often, we do not think of deafness as a way of life, or of the Deaf as another
human variety in ways that the Deaf consider themselves. The existential
question, “What does it means to be Deaf?” is simplistically answered by the
majority that the Deaf are different. The Deaf see themselves as displaying
diversity, not a consequence of their inability to hear, of auditory deformity,
or bodily anomaly.23 Despite a life of in-betweenity, that is, living in a hearing
society while connected to the Deaf community, many Deaf people gradually
accept their identity and deafness, and they continually discover themselves as
fluid. For them, deafness is a “way of life.”24 There are Deaf people who do
not fully accept their deafness because they were brought up to believe that
they were hearing persons. Thus, deafness for them was an auditory defect
that needed repair. In this case, many of them gave in to assistive medical
technology, such as cochlear implantation. Though a Deaf person manages
to live a life of in-betweenity, the difficult negotiations of their identity can be
detrimental to their self-understanding and the acceptance of their Deafhood.
There is a high possibility that a Deaf person will gradually embrace the hear-
ing identity for practical reasons and the avoidance of stigma.
Thus, for the hearing majority, perspectives of deafness as a “way of life”
and the Deaf as another human variety are difficult to comprehend because
we equate a holistic life to a “functional” body or senses. For Bauman, hear-
ing loss can be viewed as gaining deafness that is not a negative but a positive
condition.25 The Deaf must be valued and respected as they are. Their picto-
rial language, communication, perspectives, arts and designs, psychology,
humor, and philosophy are some of the things they have to offer us that can
enrich our views on people who are often labelled as disabled, different, or
deviant. Bauman and Murray asserted that “Deaf ways of being in the world
are ways that contribute to the cognitive, creative and cultural diversity of
the human experience.”26

III Deaf and deafness in the scripture:

disqualifying from story-telling
Often when we read the scriptures, we look for answers that we are comfort-
able with. Anything that is negative seems unappealing. We thus omit further
reading and understanding. Our Sunday schools, the pulpit, and our Catholic
 Deafinitely different  179
school curricula highlight only the great faith of scriptural characters, while
concealing their weakness and even disability. This is quite unfortunate for
we only see one dimension of their human realities. Discounting disability
in the scriptures (and deafness and the Deaf later), as well as the characters
who are disabled, makes it difficult for us to understand and appreciate the
depth of our humanity. Disability, disease, and impairment seem to prevent
some biblical scholars from more in-depth studies, thereby limiting biblical
hermeneutics around “healing.”
Our reading of disabilities in the scriptures often points to defective physi-
cal conditions and sensory failure. The Oxford Dictionary suggests there are
two meanings of “sense”: (1) the faculty through which our body responds
to external stimuli; and (2) a method of comprehension or understanding,
as in “to make sense,” or “common sense.”27 Reading the narratives of
the blind man Bartimaeus, the lepers, the paralytic, the convulsed man, the
woman with the withered hand, the Deaf, and others whom Jesus touched
and “healed” makes us comfortably consider their condition to be mere
physiological. We thus fail to “make sense” of their very person, the one
who comes to us with stories to share.
This being said, there is a need to consider the context of the audience.
Many of us believe that we must remain faithful to the text’s context of
the past, to avoid possible abuse of its interpretation. However, where will
we draw the line? Is eisegesis a method that is misleading? Can the Divine
not self-reveal through other means? In this case, Deaf perspectives can be
a means to reveal the Divine from the contexts and stories on the ground.
In reading the scriptures, there is a need to disrupt the simplistic equation
between sense organs and sense perception. It is possible to listen with one’s
eyes, speak using our hands (as the Deaf do), express though facial expres-
sions, smell with one’s tongue, and taste with one’s touch.28 It is unfortunate
that sensory-disabled characters in the scriptures are not explored much, and
are not given enough value by many biblical scholars. In 2004, the Society
of Biblical Literature endeavored to create a Biblical Scholarship and Dis-
abilities Studies Consultation, believing that an alliance of the two fields
could be mutually beneficial, beginning with “critiquing concepts of what is
normal, healthy and good.”

A  Unchallenged orientation: Deaf and deafness, unwelcoming?

In the Old Testament there are 14 occasions in which the term “deaf”
occurs as a translation. In the New Testament, there are five such instances.
The Hebrew terms vrexe (cheresh) and vr;x’ (charash) are at times used
interchangeably. Surprisingly, the term “deafness” is never used in the
scriptures, specifically in the NRSV translation. It is worth noting though,
that the Hebrew word vrexe (cheresh) for “deaf”29 is likewise referred to
as ~Leai (illem: mute or unable to speak) or ~j;a’ (alam: put into silence,
or to stop).30
180  Kristine C. Meneses
In Exodus 4.11; 38.14; Isaiah 29.18, 35.5, 42.18, 19, and 43.8, the
Hebrew word vrexe (cheresh) is used, which pertains to the incapability to
hear. In Psalm 28.1, 39.13 and Micah 7.16 the Hebrew term vr;x’ (charash)
is used to pertain to “dumb,” “silent,” “speechless,” or “showing deafness.”
In Psalm 28.1, the term “deaf” insinuates a “refusal to listen.” Similarly, in
Psalm 39.13, the said term is translated as “withholding peace.” In Micah
7.16, “deaf” is referred to as “silent.” It is interesting that the Hebrew term
vr;x’ (charash) can also mean “to cut in,” “engrave,” “devise,” or “plough,”
that is an “artisan” or a “craftsman.”
There are four occasions in which “deaf” is used differently that are only
found in the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE). In Isaiah 44.9,
the Hebrew term vAB (bosh) means “put to shame,” “ashamed,” “discon-
certed,” “disappointment,” “feel shame,” and “ashamed before the other,”
thus giving the impression that to be Deaf is a disappointment, a condition
that one should be ashamed of. Similarly, in Lamentations 3.56, the term
~l;[‘ (alam) which means “hide,” “to conceal,” “secret” or “be hidden” is
translated as “deaf” in English. Does this therefore mean that it is better
for one to hide one’s condition when one is Deaf? Little wonder then that
up to this day, there are Deaf people who are “put inside a closet,” their
condition kept a secret, or they are forced to use assistive medical devices
simply because it is shameful not to be able to hear. In Sirach, the Greek term
u’peri,dh|31 (uperorao), which means “overlook,” “ignore,” “pass over” or
“disregard” is translated as “deaf” in the English translation. This insinu-
ates that a Deaf is a person who ignores or overlooks others. In Baruch
6.40, NABRE translates the Greek term evneo.n32 as “deaf,” rendering it as
“speechless.” This translation is closest to the Hebrew term ~Leai (illem),
which means “unable to speak,” “silent” or “speechless.” Why did the trans-
lator use the terms “deaf” and “dumb,” instead of just the latter?
As mentioned earlier, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew term vrexe (cheresh)
seems to pertain to stopping from hearing something, or a sort of a blockage
to hear. It is therefore associated with deficit, negative and unpleasant experi-
ences, or a condition that must be concealed. It is only in the book of Leviticus
19.14 that the term vrexe (cheresh) is used as an adjective to protect the Deaf.
If we look more closely, deafness in the Hebrew scripture, though negatively
associated with physical deficit or lacking, is never an object of healing. How
are the Deaf and deafness treated in the New Testament?
The approximate translation of the word vrexe (cheresh) in Greek is
kwfo.n (kophon),33 which means either “deaf,” “mute,” or “dumb,” and
is mentioned 11 times.34 In the NABRE, the term “mute” is categorically
used, and as described in Matthew 9.32, refers to a person who “could not
speak.” Furthermore, among the Synoptic gospels, it is only in the gospel
of Mark that the Greek word kwfo,j (kophos: deaf) is used in an adjective
normal accusative case in three instances.35 Here, the Greek word mogila,loj
(mogilalos: difficulty to speak) is also used instead of a;laloj (alalos: speech-
less),36 although the latter is common in the gospels.
 Deafinitely different  181
Common scholarship in reading the passage of the Deaf man in Mark
7.31–37 is focused on giving a theological or Christological significance
of Jesus’ healing or miracles by seeing deafness as an infirmity and a tragic
condition. Other scholars connect this passage to the fulfillment of the Isaiah
prophesy,37 where the “ears of the deaf are unstopped.”38 According to Ben
Witherington III, Mark’s gospel is structured in a way that Chapters 1–8
establish Jesus’ identity.39 Retaining our narrow and cordoned normative
interpretation of deafness and the Deaf here as a cure by Jesus prevents us
from seeing the Deaf in the gospel and those around us.
I begin now a reconsideration and re-telling of the gospel of Mark, as we
encounter a Deaf man at length and “see”40 him and his story.

B A disorientation in Mark 7.31–37: Deaf in

an exegetical exploration
The narrative focuses on the miraculous action of Jesus, which inevitably
retains the Deaf person as an object of healing. In this section, I provide an
in-depth exploration of deafness and the Deaf by giving the Deaf a space in
the conversation in which they are mainly involved. As retaining a medical-
ized reading of the narrative is problematic, what alternative reading can be
drawn in re-visiting Mark 7.31–37? How does a pathological reading of this
passage affect our perspective and treatment of the Deaf? What is the take
of the Deaf themselves of this narrative?
In re-telling this passage, I wish to make clear that first, the exegetical tools
used are the narrative41 and socio-rhetorical analysis in relation to the Deaf
orientation. Further, a “disorientation-re-orientation”42 hermeneutics on the
passage from a Deaf orientation can supply new meanings and challenge
normative interpretations.

Scene 1: expository
Then he (Jesus) returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of
Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis.

The narrator gives us a summary of the itinerary and route of Jesus. The nar-
rator is not interested in the purpose of Jesus’ activity. In fact, Mark the evan-
gelist projects Jesus as one who is always at work and unstoppable. If one
refers to the map of North and Central Palestine, and follows his itinerary
route, one will notice that Jesus was all over the place. Sidon is at the north
of Tyre, while the Sea of Galilee is at the south of Tyre, and the Decapolis is
at the East with its cities far apart. Where is Jesus going?
Tyre, Sidon and Decapolis are wealthy places. Places may or may not only
be geographical locations, hence the need for critical scrutiny and creative
imagination. Tyre means “a rock,” which could either pertain to its location
at the port or acts as a clue to a character’s condition. Sidon43 in Greek means
182  Kristine C. Meneses
“hunting,” which could relate to the action of some characters who later
went “hunting” for Jesus for some reason. Decapolis could be composed of
two Greek words deka (deka) which means “ten,” and polij (polis) which
mean “city.” However, Decapolis is not a matter of quantity. Instead, this
term denotes collections or clusters of cities, which could be more than ten.44
This provides a possibility that there were “multitudes” of people of varied
ethnicities residing in the area.
After an encounter with a Syro-Phoenician woman, will Jesus have a dif-
ferent reception to another Greek populace who will approach him with a
request?

Scene 2: Jesus, Deaf man and crowd; They brought to him a Deaf45 man
who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his
hand on him.

The crowd spoke to Jesus, and “begged him to lay his hand on him.” Yet
ironically, we do not hear this plea coming from the Deaf person.
Deaf in Greek is kwfo.n (kophon),46 and is translated as either “deaf” or
“dumb.” The adjective kwfo.n (kophon) describes a person whose condition
is the inability to speak or articulate the self, thus, speechless. Noteworthy is
that both Jesus and the Deaf individual remain speechless. The word kwfo.n
(kophon) can likewise mean “blunt” or “dull.” These two meanings are
extremes. A person who is blunt could simply be frank and straight-forward.
Words uttered could be sharp and hurtful, like a sharp stone, or flint, which
in turn seems to allude to Tyre, which also means “rock.” As an extreme
interpretation, a person who is “dull” is lifeless or shy. This person could
have lost a zest for life, or is embarrassed with his or her condition.
It would be worthwhile to consider that the Hebrew term for “Deaf,”
vrexe (cheresh),47 is not categorically an impediment but a condition of being
silent, as in to listen, which could be something voluntary.48 Could it be that
the Deaf person kept silent because he was being misunderstood? Could it
be that he opted to be “dull” after trying to be “blunt” in expressing his
thoughts and feelings, but people misjudged him?
The actions of the crowd: “brought,” “begged” Jesus to lay his hand on
the Deaf seems to indicate urgency and force. The Greek verb fe,rousin49
(pherousie: brought) can also mean “to bear,” “bear patiently,” “endure,”
“put up with,” “move with force or speed,” or “carry with burden.” If we
consider the alternative meanings of the verb “brought,” could it be that
the Deaf was forcibly brought to Jesus? Did the Deaf feel that he was a bur-
den to the crowd? Did he accept that something was wrong with him? Did
he simply accommodate the crowd on what they wanted, but deep inside
refused to be told what he needed to be and do? Did he even need healing?

Scene 3: Jesus and the Deaf; He took him aside in private, away from
the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his
 Deafinitely different  183
tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Eph-
phatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened,
his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

It is in this scene that we finally hear Jesus speak one word in the entire nar-
rative: “Ephphatha.” Notice the silence of the Deaf person throughout. Was
this a sign of his consent to what Jesus was doing to him? Did he think or
feel that Jesus was absurd when he put his hands on his ears, and spat and
touched his tongue? Was this his gesture of accepting Jesus into his space?
The impression we have in reading this scene is that the Deaf person
seemed to be “dull” and the one who was “blunt” was Jesus. The Deaf per-
son seemed to be dull by allowing Jesus to performing some sort of “magic”
on him, and Jesus was “blunt” in putting his hands in the ears of the Deaf
person, and spitting on and touching the tongue of this individual. Jesus’
actions give us the impression that what he did was a sort of quack treat-
ment. After doing all these to the Deaf, Jesus uttered a “magic” word Effaqa,
after which all things broke “loose,” the ear of the Deaf was made open, his
tongue loosened, and he spoke plainly. If this was a moment of rejoicing,
why was the Deaf person still silent? He uttered no word to prove that Jesus
indeed “cured” or “healed” him.
Beginning with Effaqa, the verbs dianoi,cqhti (to open completely: dia-
noichtheti), hvnoi,ghsan (spoke freely: enoigesan), and evlu,qh (to loose:
elythe) point to the same action, that is, “to open.” These verbs reiterate
that something was made “open.” Was the ear of the Deaf person opened
and his tongue truly loosened?
I also wish to focus on the body parts associated with hearing and speaking.
The ear (w=ta: ota) could be a metaphor, which pertains to “the faculty of
perceiving with the mind” or “the faculty of understanding and knowing.”50
The word glw,sshj (glosses) is commonly translated as “tongue.” However,
glw,sshj (glosses) can also mean “language,”51 that is, an “utterance out-
side the normal pattern of speech, thus requires special interpretation.”52 It
can also mean “antiquated, foreign, unintelligible, mysterious utterances,”53
which is comparable to a performance language or body language, and the
few sounds which the Deaf can produce, as his way of communication.
Nonetheless, for the crowd, this expression was probably something strange,
out of the ordinary or mysterious that necessitated the laying on of hands.
Most scholars agree that Effaqa (Ephphatha) is said directly to the Deaf
person. Nonetheless, will such a take on the word Effaqa (Ephphatha) be
meaningful to Deaf people? Could it be possible to deconstruct our usual
take on this passage? Jin Young Choi sees in this passage a somatic engage-
ment between Jesus and the Deaf man.54 This means that when Jesus touched
the Deaf man, Jesus was likewise touched by the encounter. Hence, Choi
asserts that “With this (Deaf) man, Jesus is and becomes an Other.” Focusing
on the inability of the Deaf to speak, Choi re-reads Jesus’ healing as blur-
ring the boundary and challenging society’s dominant demarcation rules of
184  Kristine C. Meneses
the normal and abnormal. The silent language of the Deaf person strongly
shows that his body is his text, and he thus expresses himself in his own way.
To “open” could allude to an entirely new understanding of the other who
seems different, and this was made possible due to the somatic engagement
of Jesus with the crowd, who were set free from their language barriers and
negative attitudes toward the Deaf person.

Scene 4: Jesus and the crowd; Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but
the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They
were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well;
he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

The crowd was amazed, and affirmed that Jesus did well. Although Jesus
ordered the crowd “to tell no one,” the crowd did otherwise. The crowd’s
ears were blocked, as though with a rock (Tyre). Likewise, their tongues were
“released” because they “openly” spoke about Jesus’ amazing deeds.55 One
might wonder how their tongues could be released, when their ears were
blocked? In reality, one can encounter Deaf people who can speak although
they cannot hear, because they do lip-reading.
Often, when people are caught up with excitement, they fail to listen to
what is told to them, because they are emotionally overwhelmed. This might
have been the situation of the crowd here. Their failure to heed Jesus’ instruc-
tion may have been due to overwhelming amazement. Moreover, when a
sort of healing or miracle happens, there are instances when the one who is
healed speaks, like the woman who was bleeding, the blind man in John’s
discourse, one of the ten who was healed with skin disease. Was the Deaf
person healed, or was it the crowd and Jesus who finally understand the
language, the “tongue” of the Deaf? In order to understand this, I wish to
use another exegetical tool, the socio-rhetoric analysis, in order to “see”
what may have happened.

The Deaf defied disability: a socio-rhetorical analysis

The silence of the Deaf person creates tension and raises questions about his
own take on the actions of the crowd and of Jesus toward him. In this sec-
tion, I will employ a socio-rhetorical analysis to explore this issue. Rhetoric
itself is part of our social reality. Society influences our thought patterns,
gestures, beliefs, perspectives, judgments, and language, often without our
immediate awareness. Language does not only refer to words, but includes
gestures, actions, sound, or anything that communicates. Further, the story
world serves archeological and anthropological foundations for social analy-
sis, where rhetorical devices are present. In addition, geographical boundar-
ies are not mere places but have something to do with understanding the
social reality present in the narrative. In a sense, socio-rhetorical analysis
examines the social referents in narratives with the use of rhetoric. Here, I
 Deafinitely different  185
will work on a three-dimensional rhetoric, namely: (1) the place and space,
(2) the Deaf man, and (3) the point-of-view of characters.56
The place and space mentioned in this narrative are Tyre, Sidon, Sea of
Galilee, and Decapolis. There is more to just the meanings of “rock” and
“hunting” for Tyre and Sidon respectively. In the scriptures, “Tyre and
Sidon” are commonly formulaically combined,57 which depict events of
change because the characters in the narratives listened. For instance, after
a long wait, the fishermen came back with empty nets but were told by Jesus
to go back to catch fish again. They returned with nets filled. They listened,
and the promise happened: They had a great catch. The multitude of people
was filled with bread and fish because someone listened to a call to share. The
man was free from the “possession,” because the unclean spirit listened to
Jesus’ command. It could be that the narrative depicts not physical change,
but transformations in one’s view. The places seem to impress upon us a
depiction and preparation for what will happen to peoples’ points-of-view,
and perhaps even that of Jesus himself.
The Deaf man in the entire narrative never uttered a word, making us
question whether he was physically healed. A careful reading of the text
could suggest that healing was not Jesus’ action. Instead, it could have been
that of the Deaf person. It is worthwhile to visualize how the Deaf person
would have communicated his condition to Jesus, not unlike how a Deaf
person today would tell another person that he or she cannot hear. Imagi-
nation helps in seeing the Deaf person pointing to his ear, and swinging or
shaking his hand to indicate that he cannot hear. He spits, and passionately
holds (that is, expresses) his language (tongue). Then looking up to heaven,
he sighs, as if a gesture of complaint. This he does because he was not under-
stood, or because the crowd refused to open their eyes to understand him.
It could be that when he was passionately expressing himself, people
saw him as different or deviant from the “normal” expression of language
(tongue). For the crowd, this Deaf man’s way of communicating his feelings
and thoughts through movements and facial expressions was strange. Given
that he was not understood, he turned “dull,” lifeless, or expressionless. He
would rather be silent because it seemed useless to express himself. He thus
felt alone and isolated.
Did Jesus see him “eye-to-eye”? Was Jesus sensitive enough to this Deaf
person’s feelings? Would the encounter of the Deaf man with Jesus change
things, not just for himself, but for the crowd and Jesus, who would be
open to listen (see, know, and understand) to his language (tongue)? It is
possible that through his bodily expression, the Deaf man wanted Jesus and
the crowd to “see,” and his sigh was thus a gesture of telling them to “be
open” (Effaqa: Ephphatha)?
In probing the point-of-view of characters, the Deaf man could have emit-
ted a sound, not words, which perhaps astonished Jesus and the crowd. After
an encounter with Jesus, the Deaf man kindled, and passionately expressed
himself through performance, a mime, a body language, which is the native
186  Kristine C. Meneses
“tongue” (language) of a Deaf person. If we read the account as Jesus being
made open and telling the crowd that they needed to “see” the Deaf man
and be keen to the sounds that the Deaf man was making, they would surely
understand him and not force him to be like those who could hear and
speak. When Jesus and the crowd opened their “senses” to the Deaf man,
they finally understood each other. Communication and attitudinal barriers
were finally dismantled. No cure happened to the Deaf man. Rather, a new
understanding of language and expression was made “open” to Jesus and
the crowd.
The possibility that it was not a healing but a change of perspective in
Jesus and the crowd that took place is supported by socio-rhetorical analysis
using three narrative elements, namely, the place and space, the Deaf man,
and the disposition of characters. In addition, the places mentioned here that
depict “plenty” and “change” could indirectly suggest that the characters
(Jesus and crowd) went through a change of disposition. What is the take of
some Deaf people on this story, in which they are directly involved?

C Re-orientation: Deaf in conversation, challenging

the unchallenged
In his article “Deaf Culture and Deaf Church,” Park Min-Seo, a Korean Deaf
priest, strongly suggested an alternative reading of Mark 7.31–37 when he
saw that this narrative is not a healing activity but speaks of the conversion
of the crowd.58 For Park, it seemed that the people did not consult the Deaf
man if he wanted to be brought to Jesus. It was a conscious act of leaving
him out of their decision. The Deaf man is disqualified in the decision mak-
ing of the crowd, and such a situation often happens to the Deaf today. We
often think that Deaf people are unequipped to do something, and conse-
quently we fail to provide Deaf people with the opportunity to present their
perspectives. They are, in effect, silenced. Similarly, Park observed that when
Jesus healed a blind person, he uttered the word “see,” and when he healed
a physically disabled person, Jesus said “walk.” In the case of the Deaf
person with a speech impediment, Jesus did not utter the words “hear and
speak.” Instead, he said “Ephphatha,” which meant “be opened.” For Park,
this seemed to suggest that no healing happened. During the National Deaf
Day in Korea on June 10, 2018, I had the opportunity to ask the Korean
Deaf if they would have allowed Jesus to touch their tongue and ears. All
of them unanimously replied with a “No.” Then I asked what they would
have done if Jesus had kept on speaking when they could not hear him. They
responded that they would have indicated to Jesus that they could not hear
him through gestures such as pointing their fingers to their ears, or showing
an obvious sign.
Similarly, Jommer DeLuna, a Deaf artist believes that no healing had trans-
pired. Instead, it was the conversion of Jesus and the people. It was the “open-
ness” of Jesus and the crowd toward the Deaf man that made the Deaf man
 Deafinitely different  187
“loosen” his “tongue” (language), and he was finally able to express himself
freely. For this Deaf person, the Ephphatha in the narrative was the turning
point when Jesus met the Deaf “eye-to-eye” and looked at the expression of
the Deaf man, thus understanding him. As a sign of understanding and accep-
tance, the Deaf man and Jesus embraced each other. Through body language,
now accepted by Jesus and the crowd, he could communicate in his “native
tongue.” Jesus and the crowd, in turn, realized that the Deaf man had been
expressing himself “correctly.” The crowd only needed to listen with their
eyes, to meet him “eye-to-eye” for Ephphatha to happen.
The perspective of the Our Lady of Annunciation Parish – Deaf Ministry
(OLAP – DM), a church-based Deaf community, is likewise a conversion
story. In both instances, deLuna and the OLAP – DM insist on the expression
of embrace, which means an acceptance of the Deaf identity, language, and
culture. The Deaf man was empowered when he was given the opportunity
to freely express himself. Ephphatha is not an incantation or magic word,
but a word that challenges us to “welcome” the Deaf (together with those
we consider different, deviant and diverse), who in the gospel showed a
welcoming attitude to Jesus and to the crowd. Deaf people welcome hear-
ing people in their world. However, most hearing people have internalized
various attitudes and behaviors that are discriminatory, condescending, and
stigmatizing. My own experiences with various Deaf people tell me that not
one of them has been unwelcoming to me. It is only when we set aside atti-
tudinal barriers against them that we will break free and live harmoniously
with Deaf people who are diversely beautiful.

Conclusion
Despite their experience of exclusion in varied ways, such as information
inaccessibility, the Deaf have been accommodating to the hearing main-
stream who often remain insistent on imposing normalcy upon them because
of a belief that deafness is a medical malady. Aside from being a minority in
a society dominated by hearing people, their numbers are far less than the
poor. In fact, in many cases, the Deaf experience insignificance in society,
because they are often (1) considered a minority; (2) victims of various forms
of abuse; and (3) politically and socio-economically displaced. As a way to
conscientize the hearing, the Deaf frequently use their negative experiences
to assert their Deafhood, that is, the survival of their language and culture.
Opening their doors to the hearing through membership in their community
is a gesture of welcoming others. The Deaf do not expect any favors in return
for the welcoming attitude they extend to the hearing.
Including the Deaf in society begins with meeting them “eye-to-eye” and
being keen to their way of communication to us through gestures and other
forms of body language. Presenting a traditional reading of the passage in
Mark 7.31–37 as a healing story has internalized our fear of disability, of the
different. Such fear is shown in our fixation on Jesus’ activity, which prevents
188  Kristine C. Meneses
us from focusing on the Deaf man, thus keeping him silenced. Such internaliza-
tion has brought about a negative understanding of deafness and the negation
of Deaf people in our theological conversations. Through this means, we have
unwittingly harmed them throughout history. I suggest that an alternative
reading is possible, such as the conversion or metanoia of Jesus and crowd.
An interpretation of Mark 7.31–37 as a conversion story or a paradigm
shift of the crowd and Jesus might raise a question on theological content
of God’s image and divine will. In the passage, the crowd and perhaps
Jesus desire the good of the Deaf man through the restoration of hearing
and speech. A Deaf perspective, however, challenges our standard read-
ing of a God who is “complete,” who desires well-being or wholeness
solely in able-bodiedness. If we consider the Deaf perspective, we can see
that Jesus’ action showed sensitivity, respect, and acceptance toward the
Deaf. In other words, Jesus’ action showed that God loves diversity. In
fact, God’s creation is characterized by diversity. Openness to diversity and
inclusivity demands an attitude that is sensitive, respectful, and accepting.
What does a conversation with the Deaf offer us? The gospel invites us to
dismantle our attitudes of enforcing “normalcy” on the Deaf, to celebrate
their “signature” uniqueness, and be open to what they can teach us about
being truly human.

Notes
  1 See Stanley Porter and Matthew Malcom, The Future of Biblical Interpretation:
Responsible Plurality in Biblical Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVar-
sity Press, 2013), Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible
(St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2012), Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination
and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005),
and Rasiah Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfiguration: An Alternative Way of
Reading the Bible and Doing Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2003).
  2 A notable exception is Louise Lawrence who immersed herself among people
with disabilities, whom I will refer to later in this chapter.
  3 Lennard Davis, ed., Beginning with Disability: A Primer (New York: Routledge,
2018).
  4 It was only in the 1980s that Sign Language was acknowledged as a language
with its own linguistic structures and syntax. See Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as
Culture,” The Atlantic Monthly 272, no. 3 (1993): 37–53.
 5 Audism is a term coined by Tom Humphries in his dissertation in 1975. This is a
form of discrimination against the Deaf. It retains the belief that those who can
hear are superior to those who cannot. Audists therefore are those who devalue
the Deaf.
  6 “Interview with Dexter Filkins and Jean Vanier,” CNN Amanpour, April 6, 2018.
Vanier is the founder of L’Arche, a home and a community of people with mental
disability.
  7 Adrienne Cook, “Fat Pride,” The Washington Post, May 14, 1978.
  8 A world that values physical performance, agility and capabilities (ableism), and
hearing (audism).
  9 Based on Paddy Ladd’s concept of Deafhood, Understanding Deaf Culture: In
Search of Deafhood (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2003). Disablehood
as a form of identity is open to further studies.
 Deafinitely different  189
10 Social constructs extend to other forms of “disability,” unintentionally honing
attitudinal barriers that keep us from seeing the person beyond the physical
dimension. There are other dimensions of the person necessary to his/her whole-
ness or well-being, and physiological make-up is just one of them. See Lennard
J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006),
Justine Anthony Haegele and Samuel Hodge, “Disability Discourse: Overview
and Critiques of the Medical and Social Models,” Quest 68, no. 2 (2016): 193–
206, and Nicole Matthews, “Contesting Representations of Disabled Children in
Picture-Books: Visibility, the Body and the Social Model of Disability,” Children’s
Geographies 7, no. 1 (2009): 37–49.
11 We need to realize that all of us will reach a point in life when our sensory and
physical efficacy will deteriorate. Disability is part of our reality, which many of
us seem to deny. We are all temporary- or temp-abled.
12 James I. Charlton, “The Dimensions of Disability Oppression,” in The Disability
Studies Audience, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 220.
13 Merv Hyde and Des Power, “Some Ethical Dimensions of Cochlear Implantation
for Deaf Children and Their Families,” Oxford Academic Journal of Deaf Studies
and Deaf Education 11, no. 1 (2006): 102–11; John A. Albertini and Manfred
Hintermair, “Ethics, Deafness, and New Medical Technologies,” Oxford Aca-
demic Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 10, no. 2 (2005): 184–92;
Tom and Jacqueline Humphries, “Deaf in the Time of the Cochlea,” Oxford
Academic Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 16, no. 2 (2011): 153–63;
Chijioke Obasi, “Seeing the Deaf in ‘Deafness,’” Oxford Academic Journal of
Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 13, no. 4 (2008): 455–65.
14 Mike Oliver, Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan Education, 1990).
15 Rebecca A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Educa-
tion and the Growth of Deaf Culture (New York: New York University Press,
2012); Mairian Corker, “Deafness/Disability: Problematizing Notions of Identity,
Culture and Structure,” in Disability, Culture and Identity, ed. Sheila Riddell and
Nick Watson (New York: Routledge, 2003).
16 Steven Chough and Kristina Doblins, “How is Asian Deaf Culture Different
from American Deaf Culture?,” in Deaf Way Two Audience: Perspectives from
the Second International Conference on Deaf Culture, ed. Harvey Goodstein
(Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006), 227.
17 In this case, there is a threat to the loss of sign language because children are
taught to speak and not sign. But the reality with cochlear implants is that it is a
devise similar to a hearing aid, and its clarity is questionable. Both hearing and
speech remain unsolved. For further awareness of this case, see Davis, Beginning
of Disability.
18 Berthier was educated at the Royal Institute for the Deaf Paris School under the
instruction of Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc. He was a prolific artist, teacher,
orator, writer, and became the first true Deaf activist. See an excerpt from a two-
part DVD produced by Karen Christie and Patti Durr, eds., The HeART of Deaf
Culture: Literary and Artistic Expressions of Deafhood (Rochester, NY: Roch-
ester Institute of Technology, 2012). Christia and Durr, The HeART. Part of the
transcript is available from https://usdeafhistory.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/
deaf-history-part-2cited.pdf.
19 Paddy Ladd, “What Is Deafhood and Why Is It Important?,” in Deaf Way Two
Audience: Perspectives from the Second International Conference on Deaf Culture,
ed. Harvey Goodstein (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006), 246.
20 Forestier, a Deaf Frenchman once said, “to prohibit sign language would be like
[tearing] out our soul, for it is in our nature, the life of our thoughts . . . the only
and true way to lead our brothers to an understanding of the national language”
available from https://usdeafhistory.com/quotes/.
190  Kristine C. Meneses
21 Lenoir is one among the six Deaf leaders and activists in the early 1800s.
22 The tenets are a direct quote from Paddy Ladd, Understanding Deaf Culture: In
Search of Deafhood (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2003), 111.
23 Jackie Leach Scully, “Deaf Identities in Disability Studies: With Us or Without?,”
in Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone,
and Carol Thomas (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 109–21.
24 Scully, “Deaf Identities,” 109.
25 H. Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray, “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf
Gain,” Deaf Studies Digital Journal no. 1 (2009): 1–10. The article is available
from http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/assets/section/section2/entry19/DSDJ_entry19.
pdf.
26 Bauman, H-Dirksen and Joseph J. Murray, “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century:
‘Deaf-gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, eds. Marc Marshark and Patricia Eliza-
beth Spencer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 212.
27 Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. T. F. Hoad (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 429.
28 Louise Lawrence, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory-­
Disabled Characters, Biblical Refigurations Series (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity, 2013), 27, 29.
29 Cheresh is an adjective masculine word that pertains to deafness.
30 The Hebrew word ~j;a’ (alam) is usually associated with binding.
31 The root term is u’perora,w.
32 The root term is evneo,j.
33 The Greek word kwfo.n is an adjective accusative masculine singular no degree
from kophos: kwfo,j.
34 See George V. Wigram and Jay P. Green, The New Englishman’s Greek Con-
cordance and Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1982), 506–7;
Wigram and Green, Englishman’s Greek; and William Fiddian Moulton and
Alfred Shenington Geden, A Concordance to the Greek Testament According to
the Texts of Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, and the English Revisers, 3rd ed.
(Edinburgh, UK: T & T, 1953).
35 In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Greek term kwfo,j (kophos) is used in
the adjective normal nominative case.
36 Recall the excuse given by Moses to Ya (YHWH) because he resisted to be a
spokesperson for the divine.
37 See John Donahue and Daniel Harrington, “The Gospel of Mark,” in Sacra
Pagina Series (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), 2: 241; and Mary
Ann Beavis, Mark (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 126.
38 Isaiah 35.5.
39 Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001.
40 The author prefers to use the terms “see,” “seeing,” “look,” and “looking” in
reference to the act of listening, as an attempt to remain faithful to making this
study culturally Deaf in orientation, meaning that the perspective of this study,
as well as the use of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics correspond to a Deaf
expression of self.
41 Limited by space, this section acts as a summary of a lengthy exegesis on this
passage. Selected narrative elements are used here, such as narrator, characters
(words and actions), play of words (the interconnectedness of words in the plot),
and point-of-view.
42 “Disorientation” in this case pertains to an indirect critique of our assumed
understanding of Mark 7.31–37 as a healing narrative, while “re-orientation”
pertains to the alternative hermeneutics of the Deaf that offer new perspectives.
 Deafinitely different  191
43 The Greek word Sidw/noj is a noun genitive feminine singular proper from
Sidw,n.
44 The cities identified by Pliny are Damascus, Opoton, Philadelphia, Raphana,
Scythopolis, Gadara, Hippondion, Pella, Galasa, and Canatha (Gill) a region E.
of the Jordan. Most of the inhabitants of Decapolis were Greeks, and were not
on good terms with the Jews. Another is Josephus, who excludes Damascus from
the list.
45 The author will use the uppercase “D” to remain faithful to the Deaf orientation.
46 Kophon (kwfon) is an adjective normal accusative masculine singular derived
from kwfo,j.
47 The Hebrew term vrexe (cheresh) can also mean to plough, and even as a refer-
ence to a craftsman.
48 An example is Isaiah 41.1.
49 Its Greek root word is fe,rw (phero).
50 Frederick W. Danker, The Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 260.
51 Wigram and Green, Englishman’s Greek, 141.
52 Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early
Christian Literature, ed. Frederick W. Danker, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2000), 452.
53 Ibid.
54 Jin Young Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian-
American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2015), 119. Jin acknowledges her appropriation of Amos Young’s use of the
term, “somatic engagement” in “Many Tongues, Many Senses: Pentecost, the
Body Politic, and the Redemption of the Dis/Ability,” Pneuma 31, no. 2 (2009):
167–88.
55 The claim of the crowd serves as a flashback. In a way, this claim also resonates
with the words of the prophet Isaiah in 35.5, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be
opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.” If we observe the description about
the Deaf whose tongue was loosened and spoke plainly, we can see that it was
the crowd, not the Deaf man, that performed these actions. Such a re-reading can
lead us to an alternative understanding of this narrative.
56 The re-reading made here by the author is a result of a meticulous dissecting of
words and seeing the play of words in relation to the entire narrative.
57 Matthew 11.21–2, 15.21, Mark 3.8, 7.24, Luke 6.17 and 10.13–14.
58 Min-Seo Park, “Deaf Culture and Deaf Church: Considerations for Pastoral Min-
istry,” New Theology Review 22, no. 4 (2009): 26–35.
Part IV

Expanding eschatologies
10 Gay eschatology
A postsecular rethinking of
Christian and “Asian Values”
metanarratives in Singapore’s
contexts
Agnes Hanying Ong

The God-Thing
The male is indeed God. A particular “maleness” is deified even beyond
God the Father;1 such is the homosocial, hyper-heteronormative, and ultra-
heterosexual male. Marcella Althaus-Reid sums it up as the “highest phal-
lus.”2 The hysterical male sports uncontrollable erections of schismatic steel
towers of Babel, a silver tongue made for spreading a holy patrimonial
name’s “glad tidings,” and a pair of hands joined in prayer for a kingdom
come sans the sore-thumb middle-class. The highest phallus and his ilk are
the default template of legitimate humanity, the only Ones worthy of occu-
pying public spaces, breathing, reaping harvest of the proletariat’s blood,
sweat, tears and proving Weberian “blessings.”
This is meant to be a reflective process, throughout which I ask for the
grace of “seeing.” “Seeing” does not presuppose a privileging of the “good
spirit” by deflating the “bad spirit.” Rather, it binds together the Ignatian
elements of seeking and seeing God in everything, everywhere, all spirits, all
forms. In ghosts and demons internalized and external, in twinkles of ashes
(Cf. Isaiah 61.1–3). In like spirit, this chapter does not pretend to be a man-
hating piece that indulges in bashing all things that denote the patriarchal,
the masculinist, and the phallic. That said, the use of the word “gay” in
my title does not suggest attempting at home to patriarchy-swap, swinging
from one heteropatriarchy to another homopatriarchy. “Gay” in this con-
text encapsulates (yes!) “happiness,” in a way that gestures toward various
existential and political processes that “want people to be happy and free to
be their full and truest selves” instead of eternal bliss. “Gay” in this chapter
also includes all gender and sexual minorities, all persons who express gen-
dered and sexual selves in ways that are structured around neither scripts
of heterosexual performativity nor heteropatriarchal masculinities. This is
despite the fact that there has been, among the ancients so sainted, a romanc-
ing of the ideals of masculinities, ranging, arguably, from Gregory of Nyssa’s
waxing incestuous on Macrina’s anachronistic traits of masculinities and the
less ancient muscular Christianity that has taken on a momentum of its own
196  Agnes Hanying Ong
by the fin de siècle to justify testosterone-fueled imperialism, to today’s John
Piper. At the risk of sounding man-hating, lovely spirits come in all forms,
all fleshy eccentricities and fleshly embodiments that may or may not come
with some phalli.
Rather, I want to “problematize” (for lack of a less hackneyed word in
our liberal lingo) what makes the “bad spirit” (or some may call the evil
spirit), the bad spirit, as well as – if you too were in a mood for a bit of a
stretch – what, as dualistically opposed to “badness,” makes “blessings,”
blessings, “Christ,” Christ. Richard Rohr is keen to point out, “Your Image
of God Creates You!”3 Keeping this in mind, I am curious about why one
would reify a certain male-like figure of God as the apex of transcendental
blessings and benevolence in the first place, and how this figure is constituted
and reconstituted in mass imaginings.4 While literature has often depicted
God as the “Other” of the great beyond, God is, in the context of my argu-
ment vis-à-vis the Christian archetype of a heteropatriarchal-male-like God,
the phallic Thing upon which all “other” things are drawn out to spin any
meaning-making narrative, though the Thing may not necessarily come with
the label “God.” As I neither attempt to “kill” the “God-Thing” with brute-
force, which I emphasize does not denote heteropatriarchal complicity, nor
do I have penis envy, I seek instead to explore portals that connect both
ends of binaries within conventional eschatological constructions to unplug
sources powering heteropatriarchal dualistic systems. Later, in using the pro-
noun “she” to describe both the female body and the nation’s body politic, I
am not suggesting they amount to one another; rather, such uses stem from
my desire to ponder and navigate through, and “satirize to destabilize,”
vestigial norms rather than nuking them.
Elizabeth Stuart notes that eschatology is important because visions of it
reveal “a great deal about our current values and aspiration,”5 which then
makes eschatology a useful tool to probe into pathological constructions of
non-heterosexuality and establish common grounds across Christian narra-
tives. Building on Stuart and Rohr, my contention is that the image of heaven
creates nationhood. Ideals of heavenly “arrival” are reflected in heteronor-
mative life markers that lay the foundation of national progress, in the way
that – for lack of another analogy – prenatal development may shed light on
human evolutionary history. Nationhood, in this context, is not limited to
the notions of national identity and/or belonging to a certain bordered terres-
trial space; instead, it includes forms of tribalism and communalism that are
sustained by hierarchical spatial orders. This, then, includes the “Kingdom
of Heaven” (hereafter Kingdom) whereby Christ, the Son that eternally “sol-
diers on” despite having been put to sacrificial death by the celestial Patriarch,
is seated at the Latter’s right hand, denoting the Son’s indispensability and
unwavering loyalty to the Kingdom. The Kingdom, though not always, con-
jures up images of the apocalyptic (for the Kingdom is, in a sense, a spiritual
and/or terrestrialized space reserved for saints and thus “bordered” to keep
them from the freeze or fry of sinners). The apocalyptic, according to John
 Gay eschatology  197
J. Collins, could simply mean judgment of persons after death, without any
particular concern with a historical finale, as the historical kind like Daniel
despite its eschatological prototypicality is not “all apocalypses.”6 All in all,
what is noteworthy is that the apocalyptic in most cases, if not all, amounts
to an end to physical and/or spiritual restraints and rationality.
At the same time, what is noteworthy from Daniel is that it shows that,
already, transcendent eschatology and national messianism are intrinsically
intertwined.7 Never the twain shall part. This is interesting considering the
increasingly post-postmodern climate we live in, which is progressively
postsecular and re-headed toward quasi-modernist sincerity like a post-­
deconstructionist prodigal child returned. Across bleak plateaus of post-
modern worldliness where mistrust in metanarratives has left earthlings
rudderless, and to own human and technological devices, divinity has been
making a comeback. Using Singapore as a geocultural point unto which I
ground my reflections, I wish to transpose the theologizing of eschatological
spacetime to Singapore’s Christian, social, political, and legal contexts, and
vice versa. In so doing, I wish to add to the conversation by shedding light
upon what makes certain configurations of both flesh and spirit, particularly
those made visible in forms of queer embodiments, less or not deserving of
national and/or heavenly “blessings,” as well as, on what grounds queer
bodies may be allowed to reap those “blessings.”

Pimping up the purge: stuff that makes heaven

The reason why I use Singapore as an earthbound locus for my theological
musings is that since the 1980s at least, Singapore has been an increasingly
Pentecostal-Christianized island city-state near my current base, the Klang
Valley of Muslim-majority, Southeast Asian Malaysia where Christianity
does not wield a significant whisk for socio-political and various other stir-
rings. While the fact remains that postcolonial Singapore is a multifaith
society, the past decades have seen a powerfully steady growth of Christian-
ity, which parallels renewal movements in other parts of the world, particu-
larly the Americas. In my prelapsarian 1990s childhood, while on a territory
neighboring Singapore, there are nevertheless often talks of miracle healings,
preachers visiting from faraway wonderland, big (mega, and thus “blessed”)
churches next door, and more miracles. In groups that are smaller in scale
than Singapore’s swelling ecclesiastical powerhouses, spirit-filled adults dis-
courage skepticism of any kind or any question asked, dismissing it as a lack
of Christian conviction. “Christ is coming, soon enough,” as it is oft-said,
“So is the Antichrist.” Nomen est omen. In the meantime, an eternity of het-
eronormative picket-fenced heaven booms overhead and bulwarks against
dangerous invocation of the eschatological open question’s “not-yet.”
Since its political independence in 1965, Singapore has impressively
surpassed all Southeast Asian nations in economic performance. This has
not been achieved without putting much of the human and “creaturely”
198  Agnes Hanying Ong
dimensions of play, pleasure, freedom, feelings, and relationalities to indefi-
nite hiatus or sacrifice. Human rights development due to pragmatist policies
has remained wanting. Liberal churches begin to falter around the 1980s,
at the same time when pentecostals and evangelicals pick up pace to reap
“benefits of global capital”8 in the universal arms race against Weberian
demons of material lack. The inward spiritualization of God’s Kingdom,
as has been mainstreamed in more traditional branches of Protestantism, is
subverted and given temporal significance that helps make theological sense
of the global economy’s ebbs and flows. The world religion of capitalistic
heteropatriarchy becomes “glocalized” across the landscape of rapid Chris-
tianization and neo-Confucianism that stew one another’s juices. In races
for plutolatrous graces, the sacred flame of social orthodoxy continues to be
passed to and fro between neo-Confucianism and contemporary Christian-
ity. Scriptures are the go-to pearls, which give fear of the unknown the new
name of “bible-believing wisdom,” superstitions the gloss of “religiosity,”
male chauvinism the dressings of knightly heroism, nouveau-middle-class
hankering the spoils of spiritual warfare, and spoils of spiritual warfare a
salvific sign, a foretaste of eternal heaven.
Biblicism grows super sexy, gaining much of its leverage through dual-
istic contestations between sacred/profane, straight/queer, safety/risk, suc-
cess/failure, moralism/heresy, order/transgression, wellness/illness. The first
of each dualistic pair denotes modernization, growth, and reverence, the
other the old, the decaying, reverse, and irrelevance. Each set of binaries
interlaced with another, is assembled into one large phantasmagoric tribal-
ist tapestry stretched coast-to-coast to uphold a uniform national morality.
The large tapestry, which strings together a retentively methodical chaplet
of nation-building discourses concretized in the endless elevator shafts of
social housing and Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) passages, also happens to
play a part in tunneling the vision of citizenry perfectibility in accordance
with strictly heteronormative elegance. Churches play their part keeping the
tapestry religiously rewoven often enough, so that it is little short of thread-
bare. Most churches in Singapore, with the exception of Free Community
Church, have consistently held strongly heteronormative stances that dictate
obligatory performativity of hegemonic gender and sexual expressions in
line with government policies. Noting Stuart, I recognize Christianity as a
fundamentally “liminal” faith also marked by the paradox of visibly stable
iconicity produced through arbitrary signs and wonders. Now that I think
about it, the Christianity I used to know (and have a consistent love–hate
relationship with) is a constant contradictory state of liminality between the
hypermoralistic theological lectures and adults letting go of their elsewhere
reticent selves, as they leap and thrash about in throes of wild glossolalia and
holy hopes of Christ’s return. Christianness across denominations, though
manifested through different peculiar forms across human time and space,
may simply be an ever-shifting amalgamation of practices that celebrate
 Gay eschatology  199
uncertainties as well as forward-looking possibilities alternative to what
many perceive as normative.
That said, it is interesting how apart from said exception(s), mainstream
Christianity of various forms has (d)evolved into a cult of heteronormativity
that simultaneously dictates “heavenly” expectations of gendered and sexual
normativities. Early Christians while foreseeing an imminent cosmic purge
that precedes an eternity spent with Christ triumphal, pedestalize eden and
eschaton as sexualities-denying prototypes of heavenward piety, as a result
actually overriding obligatory heterosexual expressions. It seems quite fair
and reasonable, in a time and place where medical interventions are lacking
as per today’s standards, and cessations of human lives thought to be subject
to “divine” whims and punishment, to forgo lesser things like sex and most
matters of the flesh heteronormatively expressed or not, when the “ideal
post-apocalyptic world of bodily perfection”9 is literally at hand. While this
eschatological state of sexless perfection does come with a certain pathos, it
also prompts mass exodus from present possibilities of diverse embodyings
to the sterilized, padded jail cells of eternity. The same old could be said of
sex-negative, heteronormative, or de-sexualized and “straight” eschatology,
which, as self-fulfilling prophecy, legitimizes this-worldly heteronormativity,
heterosexism, and heteropatriarchal sex-negativity by continually (re)con-
structing dualistically gendered systems of history-making and organizing
realities for heaven’s sake. Today, while the imminence of Christ’s second
coming remains real for many believers, the focus for many others has turned
to preserving a cultural “ideal” of heaven.
Perhaps to not dwell on the potentially distressing nuts and bolts of
remaking bodies that have turned to cosmic ashes, much of the focus among
believers, not too unlike the pre-Christian Hellenistic and Roman philoso-
phers, has been on ensuring the eternal preservation of “souls,” of the souls’
immortality that is in itself the “spark” of ethereal values; each passing of
life into the next realm the cross-generational (re)transmission of a heavenly
ideal that outlasts the flesh. In line with this logic, if God’s good children
had done the best going through the motions (saving souls) while on this
earthly pilgrimage, God must, surely, do the rest, taking care of the violent
and normatively neglected ruptures between the fragile “now” and the static
“eternity.” As in the complementary relationship between good Christians
and the distant heaven, neo-Confucian ethics and God-sanctioned malefi-
cence of malestream values buttress one another in eternalizing, to a degree,
through bottom-up pathways, Singapore’s normativization of homophobia.
Meanwhile in the mortal world, a necessary simpatico third party is con-
secrated to tend the sacred flame of social orthodoxy. The third party is
made to “hold the candle” (tenir la chandelle) at this rendezvous, which
compulsively repeats and reenacts itself in a quasi-Thomistic space of static
forms, on par with the generous furnishing of Eagles’ “Hotel California”
with claustrophobic sensory horrors.
200  Agnes Hanying Ong
Performative citizenship, mainly responsible for the bottom-up
approaches, is the name of this often unsuspecting third wheel. Derrida
appropriates to his thinking of democracy the biomedical term “autoim-
munity,”10 which originally refers to the immune system of a biological body
turning against itself, as a result (rationally speaking) against immunity’s
intended purpose damaging its own tissues. Seeing it as a force that comes
from within, autoimmunity illustrates how what has evolved for the pur-
pose of self-­preservation against the “profane otherness” of external patho-
gens and internal mutations may lead to a stealthy and mysterious kind of
self-implosion. Performative citizenship that is well-curated also helps keep
the theology of spacetime orthodox and oriented, fixed toward the soul’s
“substance” as a unitary ground of self-agency (as the “self” is otherwise
systematically diminished in the relatively physical world of sociopolitics).
A self-contained moralized existence set in opposition to a “higher” eter-
nity gestures also toward eschatological entrapment of the flesh in austere
confines – evoking images of medieval dungeons – of death, judgment, hell,
and the least unpleasant of all, heaven. Soul-centered Christianity feeds a
sin-centered train of thoughts that religiously patterns causalities, weaves
time into a cohesive narrative stretched thin between a beginning histori-
cized and an end prophesied.
To sustain constructs of “progressiveness,” “order,” and their narra-
tive stability, the third party, while yielding to the this-worldly linearity of
chronological time, alternately and infinitely transposes performativities of
neo-Confucian and Christian norms. Paralleling the route to “eternity,” as
long as God’s children being good citizens have done the part (re)perform-
ing heteronormative respectability, strengthening the nation’s metaphorical
great walls, and thus “solidifying” nation-building discourses, the amor-
phous “grandfather”11 may someday lift the stained glass ceiling that keeps
denizens spiritually starved and deprived of dignified freedoms. Perhaps, the
latter is God’s will and business, thus none of the laity’s.
For many devout believers, it is almost without question that for God
almighty, bodily resurrection will be something very easy to do. When
and how it may be done remains naturally incomprehensible for us who,
mired in mortal spacetime, cannot yet access God’s eternity that is a com-
pletely different magical otherworld. Similarly, Pentecostal-Christianity in
Singapore has espoused a kind of political messianism that seems rather
detached from local politics, while aligning with the government’s opinion.
As divorced from overt participatory politics as the ancient vestal virgins,
the third party “performs” careful guardianship of civilization’s God-Thing,
while the flickering torch of morality is incessantly swapped and shared
among Christianity and neo-Confucianism in national homophobia’s holy
trinitarian dance.
The focus of this guardianship, de-politicized (at least locally), is thus
diverted to the end-time crusade against the overarching, “cosmic” “uni-
versals” of evil, particularly homosexuality, pagan idolatry, and US liberal
 Gay eschatology  201
politics – anything that punctures the glocalized heteropatriarchal Christian
fantasy. Performative citizenship protects society from such visible “vices.”
Simultaneously, continual (re)constructions of “global Christianness” that
adds apparent meaning to the Christian identity, which grants “citizenship”
of the messianic kingdom to come, are not unlike the ongoing constructions
of the notion of masculinities that hierarchically define “real” manhood.
These (re)constructions produce a smokescreen to protect the instabilities
of hegemonic identities from being immediately visible and rendered mean-
ingless. Partly through parasocial relations with renowned preachers, they
create distractions from fragilities of seemingly monolithically impenetrable,
powerful singular-identity-making hegemon(s), and instead direct attention
to various “end time” narratives that privilege heroic moral ends catering
to a sacralized, future-oriented power center. It seems to suggest that many
denizens have resigned themselves to the fate of “soldiering on” in semi-
voluntary self-sacrifice for the nebulous higher glory of the nation’s never-
ending “future.”
This is an important point because even in the process of witch-hunting,
it has been the norm for many of Singapore’s Christians to look to what is
beyond the island-state’s bordered (read: sacred) soil for “otherworldly”
traces of “profane” where one could ascribe spiritual ills to. It does not suf-
fice to blame the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah on local homosexual
behavior; evil has got to have an exotic origin story, or it would not be evil
at all. Like passengers on a voyeuristic city tour, pious practitioners of “per-
formativity” project theologically reductionist, touristy, and stereotyping
“gaze” onto the otherwise nonsensical world “order.” Meanings that may be
made of the “gazed” are thus teleologized and woven into a purpose-driven
“script” that tries to monopolize morality, while negating any detectable
sense of mutual humanness and weakness between the gazer and the gazed.
The gazer is the empowered church militant; the gazed, devil’s pawns that
need snatched out of its bony grasp. New nomistic religious trends (vari-
ous forms of biblicism and fundamentalism) further drive such demands for
universal patent rights to the ideas of human virtues.
That said, to maintain the bell curve as per pragmatist spirits, some people
will be “saved” and thus qualified for resurrection in the Kingdom, only
when non-normative “others” are continually scapegoated and destined for
hell. Tribalistically, this keeps in-group “saints” definable by the existence of
“sinners,” which keeps sin-making in business and salvation in demand and
expensive. Homophobic policing of sexuality, therefore, is like an exhibition-
istic and self-worshipping masturbatory cry that allays castration anxiety of
the in-group “saints” straddling the moral high horse. It keeps their moral
authority relevant, the world dangerous, church exclusive and the finalized
“eternity” a cosmic end that is as thoroughly purged of impurities as the
beginning of genesis. To the moralizing gazer, homosexuals are easily “sized
up” as outliers of the hallowed bell curve, as globalization’s bad side dish
and somewhat also a threat to national sovereignty.
202  Agnes Hanying Ong
It has been theorized by a politician of a neighboring land that homosexu-
ality emanates from the liberalizing West, the monstrous monolithic reich
of Corinthian vices where spirits of “materialism, sensual gratification, and
selfishness . . . diminished respect for marriage, family values . . . single-
parent families . . . incest . . . [and] homosexuality”12 prowl like roaring lions.
Singapore’s Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) curls in like disdain
against the repeal of S337A, a colonial-era anti-sodomy law.13 FCBC states
that “Examples from around the world have shown that the repeal of similar
laws have led to negative social changes, especially the breakdown of the
family as a basic building block and foundation of the society.”14 According
to S337A:

Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the com-
mission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any
male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person,
shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to
2 years.15

A reflection of Victorian segregative norms, S377A, plagiarized from the

Indian Penal Code through The Straits Settlement Law of 1871, is absorbed
into the Singapore Penal Code in 1938.16 The Indian Penal Code is “a rewrite
of the British Royal Commission’s 1843 draft code”17 by Lord Thomas
Macaulay, which does not take account of Indian cultural contexts of the
time. Postcolonialism shows that concoctions of values which almost satirize
reverse orientalist poetics continue to stubbornly reincarnate in former colo-
nies. Take the example of the worldwide Anglican Communion’ reception
of biblical texts; Jay Emerson Johnson points out Philip Jenkins’ argument
that while resisting neo-colonial power, Christians of the global South, as
opposed to those in the North Atlantic, find the biblical realm much more
relevant to theirs.18 On this Johnson writes:

For Jenkins, this makes biblical texts more directly applicable to the
social and economic realities of Anglicans in the southern hemisphere . . .
yet these efforts to contextualize and inculturate biblical theologies do
not usually extend very far into the realms of gender and human sexual-
ity . . . we might expect a reading of Genesis 19 that stresses hospitality
and economic justice to thrive in locations emerging from the legacy of
colonial imposition; but this has not been the case. The definition of
“sodomy,” whether in sub-Saharan Africa or churches in South-East
Asia, still relies on Western European logic and rhetoric, exemplified by
Peter Damian’s medieval text.19

Johnson further clarifies that such exegeses flourish when contextualized,

new interpretations pose little threat to “well-established interpretations.”20
Biblical texts are used to support social values established by past colonial
 Gay eschatology  203
powers, rather than generating new ones.21 I like to link this to the idea
of “postlapsarian nostalgia,” a form of mass escapism from postcolonial
woundedness through, contradictorily, a religious appreciation and romanti-
cization of colonial, or less contradictorily, pre-colonial, legacy and/or resis-
tance to cultural change, to be discussed in the next section.
While in the moment of reminiscing the good ol’ days of simple compul-
sory heteronormativity, one cannot help but be distracted by the occidental
rustlings of “lesbianism,” “gayness” and “transgenderism” sweeping from
across the lake to destroy Asia’s sacred, traditional, and ancient expressions
of correct marital and family life. Straw man, doomsday prophecies yield
the right-of-way to oncoming truth: gender-and-sexualities pluralism exists
before colonial aliens’ arrivals; the latter go hand in hand with Eurocentric
culturo-religious epidemic. What is paradoxical of the doomsday dimension
of the “gay agenda” or “LGBTQIA+ agenda” is that persons who express
gender and sexuality in ways different from the heteronormative ideal are
barred, on legal, religious and/or biblicist grounds, from participation in
certain hegemonic expressions, such as displaying the historical mating ritual
of matrimony even when done in a manner that is made “proper,” homo-
normative, respectable, family-friendly and even passionately procreative.
While the apothegm “the family that swings together clings together” may
ring true, the progeny of the neo-Confucian-Christian-citizenship triune tryst
turns out surprisingly epic. Altogether, thanks to the troika of pious judg-
ment, they have brought the powerful enemy, legions of demons, into the
light of form – there unfolds the tenebrous Gog-and-Magog-esque entities
that set the cosmic ground, upon which spawns the sepulchral “culture of
death” against children, life, family, family life, the good family, the Asian
family, the Christian family, and good “Asian Values.”
Since it rings true that to forgive is divine, to sin human, it should come as
no surprise that like bonbon to battalions of innocent ants, the “LGBTQIA+”
neon sign beats all thunderous churchy warnings out for the luring and reap-
ing of otherwise good, honest heterosexual souls. Such dangerous queer
allure thus becomes melded into the horned entity that confronts the King-
dom’s “sacred” – the ultimate “profane” of otherness, the Antichrist to a
pro-Christ nation that Christ loves back. It is only through defeating this
ultimate “profane” that one may transcend out of Plato’s cave to come face
to face with the ultimate “sacred.” God is purer and “more precious and
lovely than anything ever known of ‘this world’!” screams the preacher.

How to make hate

From lecterns blest – as the second millennium comes to a close – sweet
end-time prophecies run rife and unruly. An eruptive eschatological urgency
begins to hover over everyday life. Rewinding further in the pre-millennium,
the 1990s to be exact, Singapore adopts Asian Values. Coinciding with the
North American nuclear “Family Values” metanarrative, “Asian Values”
204  Agnes Hanying Ong
(hereafter Values) basically euphemize antagonism toward everything that
the government considers as an “other,” an Other that has little place in
the symbolic Kingdom’s earthly reflection. Following Johnson’s lead, state-
and church-sanctioned homophobia can be viewed as a way for authority
to appropriate established colonial values to new national contexts. The
formerly colonized becomes luxuriantly self-colonizing; the oppressor’s
destructive values become rationalized and internalized moral beacons of
the oppressed, eventuating in neo-colonial violence. The result is a feedback-
loop culture of fear of the Other that the state approves.
To devise a pan-Asian identity, the “Values” discourse tunes normativity to
Platonic universalism litanies. Citizenry feels safe, under this sacred canopy
of approaches to doing, and, razing, life’s rich spectrum of subtleties. Easier
than grounding citizens in casuistical virtues, “Values” takes to shielding lay-
persons from all that the benevolent government worries may taint and thus
damn the nation, with the savoir faire and wisdom that non-governing persons
theoretically lack. Its proponents across Asia Pacific cross into the wardrobe,
in search of a vaccine for the health of saccharine despotisms, the right dose
of “Values” “made and located as much in orientalist imaginings in ‘the West’
as . . . in occidentalist imaginings in ‘the far east.”’22 Just like in heaven, where
all things are made safe, intact, and free of all forms of “otherness” under
God’s all-penetrating watch. Or, even on earth: as God’s loving gaze beams
down, through the occasional gaps between steamy-slow caravans of travel-
ing clouds, it gently hovers over mortals’ genital activities or the lack thereof.
Just as many Christians look to “eden and eschaton” for standards of
holiness, form, and order, I too want to emphasize the gravity of this dual
theme and its impact on everyday life. I contend the dichotomies that result
from this absolute temporal duality encourage “postlapsarian nostalgia”
that is similar to the aforementioned “mass exodus” from diverse embody-
ings, leading to exclusion of non-normatively gendered and/or sexual bodies.
This duality stems from temporality being perceived as linear, unidirectional,
as in Old Testament style, and, following Jesus’ resurrection, also always in
the cumulative process of redemption toward the “last things.”
A totalizing “happy end” is thus configured, beckoning righteous believ-
ers, not coincidentally, also over to the “prelapsarian” table that evokes
the “memory” of an unpolluted spacetime origin. The ageless purity story
continually manufactures the fuzzy familiarity with an oft-cited age of inno-
cence that none has experienced. Homophobic expressions that preserve
Singapore’s heteronormative purity are typically not in the form of direct
physical harm, or conspicuous violence, from any single fasces-wielding
ideological apparatus against sexual and gender minorities. The expressions
take more insidious, fragmented, camouflaged forms, such as open, nega-
tive discrimination against gender and sexual minorities across all planes,
visible and invisible, of society’s existence. The said discrimination can be
observed in many Christian circles, where communitarian efforts, framed as
good Samaritan enterprises that sincerely help convert the confused through
 Gay eschatology  205
pastoral care, or invoke divine intervention to miraculously solve the medical
mystery of homosexuality, continue to protect the hegemonic construct of
the society’s neo-Victorian “innocence.”
An example of such negative discrimination can be found in two emails
published on John Shore’s blog under Patheos, which show Christians’ role
in instigating and perpetuating legitimized homophobia in Singapore. 23
The National Library Board, following complaints by a group of Christian
parents, promptly destroys children’s books considered not conventionally
“pro-family.”24 It is quite tempting, as quick counter-ad hominem, to impli-
cate conservative Christians per se in such a banality rather than seeing hat-
ers as the systemic scapegoats that mass political pawns are.

Parousiac pursuit of happiness (and, how to make hell)

A “happy end” prompts an existence that is “upswept” and thus crowded
with spiritual separation anxiety, whereby a post-suffering place of arrival
itself melodramatizes the ultimacy of an “end” to conclude “all sufferings.”
On earth, it could translate into delaying gratification of the human need of
connections, pleasures, and deep friendships until the twilight years of post-
retirement. However, in Singapore, it is hard to miss the numerous denizens
way past the age of retirement driving taxis around the city or wearily plod-
ding through janitorial work in malls and residences. Such a common sight
captures the “human spacetime” of God’s eternity/human spacetime dichot-
omy. Human spacetime/God’s eternity hymenality, which cuts spacetime into
one that constitutes “waiting in hope” amidst the groaning and mourning
and weeping in a unidirectional temporal world, and another, “consumma-
tion” that is the revelation of the final answer to the human condition.
Conventionally, the post-apocalyptic, i.e. what follows either an ahistori-
cal postmortem judgment or the historical grand finale, has been a pivot of
Christianity; both judgment and historical end have everything to do with
individual eligibility for the eventual bodily resurrection. Following Jesus’
early retirement from the world, the theology of his resurrection (thus also
that of his followers) gets developed as “a means of explanation,” and as
Paul says in Acts 26.8, “If it is incredible that God raises the dead . . . then
our preaching is vain.”25 It is worth exploring why certain bodies are to
be raised up the “last day,” while certain bodies are deemed irredeemable,
denied the privilege of resurrection and melded into part-android and/or
part-animal hybrid creatures, specifically in figures of “the Antichrist, the
Beast and Whore of Babylon” (hereafter eschatological monsters).
My contention is that dualistic eschatology (dualistically temporalized and
gendered) renders theoretical “hiddenness” of the queer, the feminine, the
non-phallogocentric as “sacralized” as an otherworldly realm that is often
imagined to be “stabilized.” This is rather insidious. In the fantastic spirit of
dualistic thinking, on the other darker end opposite to such sacralization would
be its extreme opposite, namely postmortem capital punishment, or better,
206  Agnes Hanying Ong
caricatured demonization. While moralistic sermons tend to link Antichrist
to transhuman technology and “unnatural” (non-heterosexual) sexualities,
the Beast according to biblical imagery itself is a sight of mosaic monstrosity
made out of random parts of different carnivorous animal that in most cir-
cumstances do not coexist with proper human civilization (Revelation 13.2).
This begs the question of why bodies that are held to moral standards
higher than those imposed upon male-and-heterosexual bodies are subject
to a much more heinous eschatological fate if they had walked in the foot-
steps of Eve who was then blessed with a no-trial penalty for wanting fur-
ther education from the special tree. How is such a double standard God’s
justice? To think through this question, it is worth emphasizing that both
afterlife judgment and the historical end of the “apocalyptic” share a com-
mon trait, which is that what divides human spacetime and God’s eternity,
flesh and spirit, collapses into a state of unitive wholeness in an atmosphere
of “restored justice.”
As Tertullian, unable to accept the inevitable dissolution of the martyrs’
bodies as a just end for their witness, puts it, “Both [flesh and spirit] . . .
will be glorified together . . . as they have suffered together.”26 In light of
such inherent “fleshliness” of divine “consummation,” the spatio-temporal
process toward this collapse, as well as the apocalyptic event per se, may be
interpreted as neither asexual nor possibly devoid of sexuality. Despite the
“eschatological erasure”27 of the encultured and differentiated “being,” one
may still contend that the theology of spacetime, particularly in the form of
eternity/time dichotomy, remains very much heteronormatively “gendered,”
subsequently so – though not too explicitly – “sexualized.” In other words,
heterosexism is rife, even and especially in the afterlife; “justice” from the
perspective of eternity remains colored with the “Enlightenment idea of his-
tory as a straightforward progression”28 that refuses to die.
Additionally, by the logic of Pauline two-age eschatology, history is pro-
gressively unveiled throughout the scriptures, wherein time of “the already”
is set to end with an apocalyptic bang – the Day of the Lord that pierces
the hymenic veil between the redeemed, feminized, blushing bridal human
spacetime, and the one sonorous eternity (John 3.29) that awaits at the
pearly gates to its boulevard of gold (Revelation 21.21). Any time before
that happens, the mortal world remains to God’s eternity as the Madonna
to the sumptuous whore; a holy harlot, a stud nevertheless! (One little quirk
of God’s gender-and-sexualities justice: “slut” is an anagram of “lust,”
whereas the more glorious term, “stud,” is an anagram of “dust.”) God’s
eternity – the abolition of all time and space – is positioned in opposition to
the numerically codified, unidirectional, and mortal human spacetime Other
that presses toward the eschaton. Never the twain shall meet, lest the former
of each dualistic set wanders off into worldly wilderness. Paralleling this
divide is the spirit/eros dichotomy that de-harmonizes the symbiotic universe
of Godness-creatureliness by making one superficially separate from, and
incompatible with, another. While the spirit propels history, eros dominates
 Gay eschatology  207
“the eternal return of the same,” drawing together “what is above and what
is below, and completes nature’s cycle.”29
In masculinist and heteronormative language typical of Christian ortho-
doxy, Christ is conventionally imaged as the kingly bridegroom who is
engaged to Christians, the latter likened to “a pure virgin to be presented to
Christ” (2 Corinthians 11.2) whereby “He (the bridegroom) must become
greater; I (the bride) must become less” (John 3.30). Never mind, at least for
now, the overt male homoeroticism it denotes and the normativized overtones
of BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasoch-
ism), what I aim to focus on here is that according to this imagery, complex
human realities are essentialized into a monolithic role of (feminized) alter-
ity, wherein injustices are explained away by saying all of the world’s ills are
results of the fall that one now has little control over. Humanity thus takes
on the position of learned helplessness to avoid offending a higher imperial
power. In line with this reasoning, at least a major part of human fallenness
is Eve’s fault; suffering is, by way of gendered dualism and essentialism, thus
in its nature a “feminine,” if not “female” domain.
Having said that, I want to emphasize that I am in no way upholding the
essentialist myth of male homosexuals being “effeminate” (as opposed to
being on the masculine side in heteropatriarchal gender binary), nor the idea
of “feminized” pollution intrinsic to male homosexual lifestyles. Rather, my
stance is that it is precisely because female and/or queer, and gay male bodies
are relegated to subalternity according to heteropatriarchy’s hierarchical spa-
tial orders that they are deemed “feminine,” a description reserved for those
“below” hegemonic standards of masculinities. Humanity’s role of alterity,
which concomitantly produces and perpetuates meaning of suffering, can
only be fully recompensed in the consummation of “time” when saved souls
(damsels in distress that have been “rescued” by the “good news”) will be
received into the lavish wedding banquet. In line with the eschatological
bridegroom/bride imagery, the script of performative citizenship (which I
contend is likewise incredibly gendered) begets an imagined common destiny.
The national destiny is manifested in the collective dumbing-down,
romanticizing, or rather, romancing of the nation as a naïve blushing Bride,
led safely down the aisle, in the amoral church of the global economy, to
ultimately coalesce, at the altar raised above gritty essentials of national
survival, into a certain terminus at Plutus personified as a mimic “God,” the
bridegroom. Strangely, in mirroring heaven, hiddenness of sex and sexual-
ity particularly that of queer and/or female sexualities, is encouraged in like
spirit of buttressing what God is in a phallogocentric eternity. For female
bodies (and “feminized” spaces according to masculinist language, such as
national territories) on earth, the ideal feminine is reflected in a woman,
the “virgo” that is reserved, “godly,” safely ensconced in a domestic realm
whereby her “self” is solely defined in her “being,” a paradoxical combina-
tion of a helpless subordinate and the stable home and hearth. She is there-
fore also “vesta,” who keeps all things warm, pearly, and unchanging, for
208  Agnes Hanying Ong
the greater glory and progeny of the logos that has taken flesh in the phallus,
i.e. the divine Child (to be discussed later).
In God and God’s hiddenness, she paradoxically “reveals” a higher reality
of hidden harmonies guarded and concealed in said form of well-ordered
eternity. In other words, the heteropatriarchal idealization of the female
body (and the nation’s body politic) has caused a surprising outcome of her
“embodying” both suffering’s ephemerality and God’s eternity. She lends
herself to replenishing the latter’s monumentalism, with the offering of her
“self” as earthly food that burns at both ends for a phallic logos. In embody-
ing the earthbound domain of suffering, her bodily sacrifice is before the
throne of a masculinist God like burnt offering and incense (Psalm 141.2).
In a similar vein, queer and/or female persons are reduced into bodily tokens
of heavenly ineffability that take on qualities of godlike sacrifice. In a futur-
istic point of the body politic’s pipe dream, the Bride will be almost like the
Bridegroom, a fully formed, capitalistic-heteropatriarchal Übermensch des-
tined to an eternity of Gotham City aesthetics. The Bride, the holy torch –
emblematic of sanctity and purification respectively, are however mere puppets
behind the shadow play of a mechanized national consciousness that segre-
gates life’s idiosyncrasies into spectral forms, severed from one another and
made to loom over the masses, rigidified and always judging. These specters,
sanitized, quantified, stratified, named and renamed “good,” “better,” “holy,”
and “respectable” with all the trappings of filial piety and familial honor, are
wunderwaffen of enormous potency, against the anonymous blobs of “indi-
vidualistic” “deviancies” that those possessed by these “good” and “holy”
specters kindly push aside. This moralized state of “holy” staticity denotes
an eschatological “twilight zone,” the mass sleep paralysis between the body
politic’s recurrent dreaming and wakeful toils. Time is metaphorically stopped
at the hour of the wolf wherein postmodern slavery tethers human persons to
secular deities of repetitive mass production and gentrification.
This leads up to, as mentioned before, the apocalyptic vision wherein cer-
tain bodies, after lifelong labor of deference to heteronormative propriety,
are to be “raised up” whereas others are reduced into morbid inconveniences
that take on the forms of eschatological monsters. Apart from taking on
these forms, the “original fate” of the “unsaved,” queer and/or female souls
who have fallen short of said prescribed sacrality are conventionally destined
for a complete and totalizing destruction by God in the event of eschatologi-
cal genocide. Similarly, the “world” mirrors heaven’s ideal via the mecha-
nized force of heteronormative history-making that has swept the lives of
most queer and/or females off into the hades of non-history, never-existence.
Pope Francis while highlighting the culture of the ephemeral identifies a
throwaway culture that treats humans and relationships the way the environ-
ment and material realities are treated.30 Building on this observation, gender
and sexual minorities are likewise expendables of a throwaway culture that
judges the value of creation and human beings based on economic, hetero-
normative, and (re)productive capacities.
 Gay eschatology  209
The same godlike history-making force has little mercy on their trans-
gressive embodiments. To illustrate the heteronormative imagery of divine
salvation versus divine damnation, I turn to Lee Edelman who has coined
and articulated the sinthomosexual (drawing on Lacanian sinthome),
linking heterosexuals’ demonization of queer persons to a heterosexual
love fantasy, which is also the fantasy of totalization.31 The fantasy privi-
leges futurism, meaningful closure, and revelation most epitomized in the
romantic ideal of the Child that amounts also to perfect citizenry. Rewind-
ing even further in the pre-millennium way up to the B.C., as most proph-
ecies entrap and thus are bound to be fulfilled – squirming out of Mary’s
body, so begins Jesus Christ’s gooey initiation as human flesh, as stardust
pulled into our spiraling blue vale of tears. What child is this? This child is
both the Lion and the Lamb, inverting reproductive futurism and hierarchi-
cal logic that sustains the imperial-idol-Christ that one may argue is also
quintessential Edelman’s Child. For refusing to remain a balloon caught
in whirlwinds of the cosmic war, Jesus the bambino, like the fallen angel,
unceremoniously exits from the sacred whims of an ancient narcissist. Vis-
tas of truth and freedom open up, as a chasm surfaces from amidst the
illusion of coherence. The chasm – what Edelman calls jouissance – reveals
the fragility of heteronormative “reality” that the universalizing fantasy
suppresses for the good of unity.
In his deconstruction of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Edelman notes
“the fatal fall into the abyss of jouissance”32 is “an endless fall forward
through time to keep jouissance at bay. . . . Thus . . . the escape from the threat
of the death drive . . . can only take place, through a sequence combining the
acts of suspending, annulling, and raising up.”33 He notes the “temporal and
spatial violations,”34 whereby human logic is suspended when the body of
the character, Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) is lifted “from the face
of the cliff [at Mount Rushmore, while wearing red] directly into the upper
berth of a bedroom coach on a train [where she is seen wearing white],”35
signifying the birth of the future via a “dialectic of continuity through discon-
nection.”36 The Rushmore-to-train scene sums up nicely the prolongation of
the reproductive couple’s desire (across the abyss, which according to social
convention is assumed to “naturally” lead to the reification of the Child),
made possible “by means of, a break like that of anacoluthon.”37 Right before
the scene cuts to the end, the train enters the tunnel, conveying, besides its
connotations of being “on the brink” between this realm and the other or the
next, a post-redemptive bridal state and a totalizing heterosexual consumma-
tion entailing penetration by a salvific-phallic force. This scene captures the
quintessence of the universalizing fantasy, whereby heterosexual desirings are
sustained and made legitimate via their association with “future-making” and
“history-making,” only when the surrounds of such desirings are “purified”
of the inconvenient visibilities of the abysmal jouissance.
In the eschatological bridal state, the final God-and-saints-only entou-
rage thrusts through the postlapsarian scourge of sin, free thought, and
210  Agnes Hanying Ong
non-heteronormativity to dive into an eternity sanitized. Existence becomes
“completed,” just as in reaching heaven, in the consummation in, of, and
with the Child divine, which is the orthodox, imperial-idol-Christ. The God-
Thing thus may be interpreted as the default template of bodily resurrection.
As exemplified in Hitchcock’s Rushmore-to-train scene, the eschatological
focus of heteronormative “purification” is merely performative, ritualistic,
and only plausible by “leaping over” the abyss (to fly toward the absolute
sublime) or rendering the abyss unspeakable, and thus not attended to in
temporal heteronormative discourse. Jouissance, if I may suggest, in other
words, marks the fault line of the dualistic divide that must be collectively
overlooked or cemented in order for the heavenward heteronormative fan-
tasy to be endlessly reconstructed and “stabilized” with the widespread
assumption of a moral deep structure where the Child divine marks the very
top of its steeple.
Out of the abyss of jouissance rises the existential manifestation of mean-
inglessness, incoherence, chaos, eros, Dionysian excess, self-agency, and
hedonism that rock the heteronormative illusion. The same abyss is appre-
hensively unmanned by heterosexuals who simultaneously corner and cast
queers, the deviantly sexed and gendered, sex workers, the witches, and the
“fallen angels” into it to become the huddled masses of a singular scape-
goated alterity destined to be annihilated and/or forgotten. One may argue
that, likewise, a nation’s postcolonial wounds are often transferred to the
body politic’s less visible parts.
I contend that it is from the abyss of jouissance, of the rigorous undoing
of illusory meaning-making, that to heteronormative imaginings forms
and rises the mythical hybrid creatures, encapsulated biblically in fig-
ures of the Beast (Revelation 11.7), Antichrist (2 John 7), and Whore of
Babylon (Revelation 17). Apocalyptic and homophobic manifestations of
“the enemy illuminate the question of what counts as human, and what
is relegated as in/human.”38 Eschatological monsters are projections of
the moral majority’s fears of the unfamiliar; fears justify inequality by
essentializing the oppressed into various versions of monsters, which in
turn justify fears.

Martyr complex: between Christ-loving and gay-loathing

Singapore’s new Christian crosses, communion, and glossolalia are, once
upon a time, animistic altars of curb-side tree and soil gods, séances with
ancestral spirits and the neighborhood witch doctor’s curses and charms.
So much for rosy postlapsarian nostalgia; amidst the swift transitioning
from hexes to hallelujahs, the body politic’s moral majority mourns the
incessant loss of “culture” and an imagined “origin” to the overarching
diabolical force of global transformation. As in the theology of bodily
resurrection, which can be traced back to the origin of Christianity as “an
apocalyptic sect confronted with the uncomfortable reality that its founder,
 Gay eschatology  211
Jesus, had been killed,”39 the loss of Christianity’s “origin,” Jesus Christ’s
physical form, has produced and subsequently normativized “infantile per-
secutory and paranoid fears (linked to Klein’s theory of bereavement)”40
which may have something to do with Christian martyr complex. For
Klein, the “destructive mother imago”41 becomes “reactivated at uncon-
scious levels in adult mourning,” which Michele Stephen contends “forms
the basis of the cultural image of the witch regardless of the gender of
persons so accused.”42
Nevertheless, it is not an accident that despite the irrelevance of the
gender of persons accused, the “witch” is first and last a “feminine,” if
not feminized or at least a gender-androgynous archetype that “queers”
the God-Thing’s normative and subverts the phallicity of bodily resur-
rection. The “witch” in common imaginings across eastern and Western
civilizations is often depicted as one with supernatural, demonic powers
that make “self-resurrection” or even immortality impossible. The “witch”
figure incarnates what has tipped over into “fear of the irredeemable, inhu-
man, antichristic, beastly, homosexual and . . . queer,”43 as well as, if I
may suggest, the abiding, pre-Christian free spirit of “Dionysus . . . [late-
antiquity’s] last stronghold of pagan beliefs.”44 The figure is thus “beyond”
salvation, for salvation becomes irrelevant when individuals become abled
with enough self-agency to raise themselves out of the abyss, to rise to
spiritual heights through the personal depths rather than waiting through
unidirectional time to be “raised up” the Last Day. Therefore, the presence
of the “witch” per se is an eyesore to heavenward Christians; it disrupts the
“natural” trajectory toward eschatological purgation by divine consum-
mation of “time.”
According to the logic of heteropatriarchal Christianity, a whore can be
redeemed to become a “pure bride” even though she cannot revert to being
a virgin; what truly troubles its dualistic system is the witch-like “monster”
covenanted with forces that heteronormative imaginings deem “supernatu-
ral” and/or “unnatural.” What is more troubling is that the Antichrist is
thought to be “like Christ” but not the leonine imperial “Christ” himself.
Building on Klein and Stephen, I contend that orthodox Christianity, with
its root as an apocalyptic cult, is borne out of apprehension resulting from
the eschatology/eden dichotomy that becomes sublimated into dateless and
thus protracted “grief work,” which renders in-group hostility, a by-product
of prolonged pining for heaven and/or Christ’s second coming, necessarily
directed toward the “witch” figure(s).
Homosexuality’s “witch-like” qualities, as sized up by the homophobic
gaze, may be evinced in the form of what Erin Runions calls the “pastiche
apocalyptic figure”45 that is the Antichrist twinning “as gay . . . [and] as
political enemy”46 in the imperialistic narratives of national eschatology.
According to Runions, an apocalyptic religious worldview equates “the
threat posed by terrorist”47 with that of “gay marriage.”48 As such, the world
remains a cesspool brimming with moral perils, until one gets Raptured,
212  Agnes Hanying Ong
when Christ appears midair like a thief midday or midnight or anytime
in between, depending on the time zone (Matthew 24.43; 1 Thessalonians
5.2–4; 2 Peter 3.10; Revelation 16.15).

Post-apocalypse
Amidst glossolalia interludes, crossing into the third millennium Anno
Domini proves to be quite an anticlimax. On an earth more intact than
expected, Raptured dust thus settles. While the well-being of the nation and
the universe depends on the lack of gay, LGBTQIA+ visibility, in Singapore’s
context, the extent to which public opinion abstains from demonizing the
existence of overt homosexual bodies is directly correlated with their eco-
nomic worth, linked to the Pink Dollar generated through the rogation of
liminal, non-heteronormatively expressed and “freakish” bodies. Post scrip-
tum, behold, the power of capitalism – in May 2017, the annual “Pink Dot”
rally, Singapore’s first official LGBTQIA+ movement, gets 100-plus local
sponsors and nails its fundraising goal,49 even after Home Affairs Minister
issues a warning against international sponsorships the previous year.50
Considering the benefits gender and sexual minorities bring to the national
economy, the government is consistently capricious, actually ambivalent about
queer visibilities, which would have been “unimaginable”51 as late as early
millennium. While this is partly good news, I assert that a radical undoing
of dualisms that make up orthodox Christianity’s heteronormatively imaged
and genocidal eschatology is key in highlighting the inherent human dignity
of LGBTQIA+ persons and diminishing Christian homophobia. It seems quite
telling that Dante’s “Inferno” depicts satan, frozen mid-breast, sending its
“sinners”-ridden surrounds into deep freeze, which may be interpreted as fear
and reduced conscience. The universalizing fantasy to which “Christ” has been
debased – an eternal heaven distant and whenceforth stabilized that translates
into an earthly existence made insular may not be too different from a “hell”
cryogenically locking erotic life out of itself. It is precisely from the abyss
where queers, the deviantly sexed and gendered, sex workers, the witches, and
the “fallen angels” have been cast into, which emanates the undoing of hetero-
normative meanings that permeates gay eschatological imaginings in multiple
non-dualistic ways, unlike the sharp arrows of linear, historical time conse-
crated to “timeless” forms of predetermined essence and positivist closure.
That said, many politicians speak of the future like it is divine revelation,
the way some scientists talk about the multiverse, of infinite forms and fluid
spacetime. Antje Jackelén puts it succinctly, “For the physicist, the discovery
of relative time may have meant an intellectual revolution; for the mother
and father who have no food for their children, time has always been rela-
tive to the space they have at their disposal.”52 In exploring the subject of
eschatology, there is always this particular risk of not resisting enough the
seduction of “infinity,” of “eternity,” and go down the slippery slope toward
the debauched ways of ethereal values and moral metanarratives.
 Gay eschatology  213
Therefore, to end my reflections, I turn to the scriptures’ very beginning,
which is a reminder that: Humans are continually becoming created and
co-created, site-specifically, through divine eros that subsists not on a heav-
enward vacuum, but rather prevails over the overcoming of isolation among
creatures that are made inherently, diversely, and differently sexual by divine
source itself (Genesis 1.27).

Notes
  1 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press), 1985.
 2 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 48.
  3 Center for Action and Contemplation, “Richard Rohr: Your Image of God Cre-
ates You,” 3:32, January 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEJkg3ndti0.
  4 Staff reporter, “US Christians See God as a Young, White Male,” Church Times,
June 22, 2018, www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/22-june/news/world/
us-christians-see-god-as-a-young-white-male.
  5 Elizabeth Stuart, as cited in Elizabeth M. Edman, Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ
People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Bos-
ton, MA: Beacon Press, 2016), 156.
  6 John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apoca-
lyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,1998), 11.
  7 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 45.
  8 Terence Chong, “Christian Evangelicals and Public Morality in Singapore,”
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 17 (2014): 1, www.iseas.edu.sg/images/pdf/
ISEAS_Perspective_2014_17.pdf.
  9 Candida R. Moss, “Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resur-
rection of the Dead in the Early Church,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 79, no. 4 (2011): 996.
10 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 35.
11 “Sticker Lady Writes ‘My Grandfather Road’ across Circular Road,” Stomp,
November 11, 2016, https://stomp.straitstimes.com/singapore-seen/singapore/
sticker-lady-writes-my-grandfather-road-across-circular-road.
12 Mahathir and Ishihara, as cited in Michael G. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gen-
der Pluralism in Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times,” Current Anthropol-
ogy 47, no. 2 (2006): 322.
13 Tom Benner, “Gay Culture Gaining Momentum in Singapore,” Al Jazeera, June
4, 2013.
14 Ibid.
15 AGC, n.d. .
16 Human Rights Watch, 2008.
17 Douglas E. Sanders, “377 and the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in
Asia,” Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4, no. 1 (2009): 11.
18 Jay Emerson Johnson, “Sodomy and Gendered Love: Reading Genesis 19 in the
Anglican Communion,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of
the Bible, ed. Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher
Rowland (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 423–4.
19 Ibid., 424.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
214  Agnes Hanying Ong
22 Johnson et al., as cited in Michael G. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Plural-
ism in Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times,” 322.
23 John Shore, “Censorship, Threats and Book-Burning: Christians vs. Gays in Singa-
pore,” John Shore: Trying God’s Patience Since 1958, July 21, 2014, www.patheos.
com/blogs/johnshore/2014/07/christians-vs-gays-and-gay-penguins-in-singapore/.
24 Ibid.
25 Margaret R. Miles, “Sex and the City (of God): Is Sex Forfeited or Fulfilled in
Augustine’s Resurrection of Body,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
73, no. 2 (2005): 308.
26 Patricia Beattie Jung, Sex on Earth as It Is in Heaven: A Christian Eschatology
of Desire (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017), 73.
27 Malcolm Edwards, as cited in Elizabeth Stuart, “Sacramental Flesh,” in Queer
Theology, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2007), 68.
28 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 129.
29 Ibid., 12.
30 Francis, The Joy of Love, §93.
31 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004), 73.
32 Ibid., 93.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 96.
35 Ibid., 93.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 96.
38 Erin Runions, “Queering the Beast: The Antichrists’ Gay Wedding,” in Queer-
ing the Non/Human, ed. Myra J. Hird and Noreen Giffney (London: Routledge,
2008), 79.
39 Moss, “Heavenly Healing,” 1000.
40 Michele Stephen, “Witchcraft, Grief, and the Ambivalence of Emotions,” Ameri-
can Ethnologist 26, no. 3 (1999): 712.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Runions, “Queering the Beast,” 79.
44 Albert Henrichs, “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Diony-
sus from Nietzsche to Girard,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88 (1984):
213.
45 Runions, “Queering the Beast,” 79.
46 Ibid., 80.
47 Ibid., 95.
48 Ibid.
49 Kok Xing Hui, “Pink Dot Gets 103 Singapore Sponsors and $201,000: Surpass-
ing Targets,” The Straits Times, May 22, 2017, www.straitstimes.com/singapore/
pink-dot-gets-103-singapore-sponsors-and-201000-surpassing-targets.
50 Kyle Knight, “Anti-LGBT tilt taints Singapore commerce.” Nikkei Asian Review,
November 5, 2016.
51 Benner, “Gay Culture Gaining Momentum in Singapore.”
52 Antje Jackelén, Time & Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science and
Theology, trans. Barbara Harshaw (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foun-
dation Press, 2005), 7.
11 Embodied sexual eschatology
Escaping the cage and dreaming a
world of desire and longing
Rebecca Voelkel

Introduction
My contribution to this volume necessarily comes from the specific and par-
ticular context that has both shaped me and which I inhabit. I will share
more of this later in this chapter. For this introduction, it is important to
say that my work lives in the hybrid space between Academy, Church, and
Movement illustrated in this way.

Given this hybridity, my theologizing is deeply influenced by whether and

how it can be practiced/embodied in both the Church and the Movement. It
also means that the “loci” within systematic theology that often takes promi-
nence in my thinking and acting is that of eschatology. I will say more about
what I mean by an embodied sexual eschatology in the final section but let
me explain with a bit more specificity where I land in my understanding of
eschatology.1
For theologians, eschatology is the systematic reflection on our Christian
hope and what is at risk when we do not attain what our hope holds out to
us. Eschatology has traditionally been focused on the “last things.” But many
Christians recognize that eschatology is more properly about the promised
reign of God in all human experience and in all creation. It has powerful
implications for both the individual and the community. Eschatology is not
primarily concerned with what lies beyond death and outside of history.
Eschatology is a practical and vital hope for the world as it is right now and
in which we are all participating.2
216  Rebecca Voelkel
This “here and now” eschatology fits well with a postcolonial, feminist,
and queer understanding of eschatology. It roots our Christian hope in what
God is doing to create a more just and liberated world. Nevertheless, pre-
cisely because justice is a major part of what we are hoping for, a sense of
the timing and pacing of the eschaton is key.
Here, I am aligning myself with a tradition that celebrates an inaugurated
eschatology as contrasted with a “realized” or “sapiential” eschatology on
the one hand and “futuristic” or “apocalyptic” eschatology on the other.
According to Jesus Seminar scholar John Dominic Crossan, both realized
and future eschatology say “no” to the world as it is. In future eschatology,
the world is negated and the stress is on imminent divine intervention: we
wait for God to act. In realized eschatology, the world is also negated and
the stress is on immediate divine imitation: God waits for us to act.3
By contrast, inaugurated eschatology says “yes” to the world but “no”
to injustice. It recognizes both God’s power and movement in human
history and emphasizes our agency in response to that movement. Inau-
gurated eschatology lives in the tension and interplay of the already and
the not yet.
It is this already and not yet space that this chapter seeks to address.
The already is that we have experienced the incarnation/embodied per-
son of Jesus and inhabit bodies that are sacred gifts (both of which can
rightly be called the Body of Christ). The not yet is that we live amidst
the realities of colonization, crucifixion, and sin which cage, maim, and
seek to annihilate the sacred bodies of all of creation. We have a taste of
the already-ness of sacred sexuality and embodiment and we have not
yet been liberated.

The gifts and the cage: naming the reality

In my contribution to Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolo-
nization, I have played with the prologue of John’s gospel.
In the beginning were Desire and Longing:
Desire for ecstasy and connection, longing for the deepest of communions.

And Desire and Longing were with God.

And Desire and Longing were God.
Desire and Longing were with God in the beginning.

In fact, they were the animators, the prodders, the relentless whispers
which propelled the explosion of creativity:
stars and planets and the whole company of creation. These all came
into being out
of that Desire and Longing and not one thing would have been
without
the promise of ecstasy, connection and communion.4
 Embodied sexual eschatology  217
At the very Beginning of time and existence are the gifts of desire, longing,
connection, and communion. And out of these come the embodiment of each
and all of them found in all of creation. Sex is good, bodies are beautiful,
particularly in their varied and different expressions of practice and ability
and race and age and gender and culture. Creation is alive and abuzz with
biodiversity, adaptability, sheer beauty. Hymns, poetry, books, dances, festi-
vals have been created in honor of the sacred gift of sexuality, embodiment,
desire, and longing. And whole theologies have been written to give voice to
the power of God’s self-revelation in creation.
Recently, I was with a group of friends from seminary as we hiked along
the Oregon Coast. As we stood gazing at ancient sea stacks and watched
waves crash against them, two mating pairs of eagles flew overhead. Amidst
the wind, water, and sun that stimulated our senses and the palpable energy
that was both ancient and future-seeking, we started talking about sex. We
talked about the ways in which being in this landscape was deeply erotic for
each of us. We recounted the times we’d made love outside – at the base of
waterfalls, on logs next to tide-pools, in tents, on islands, at the foot of calv-
ing glaciers. With smiles on our faces that spoke of delicious body memories,
we considered how desire, longing, connection, and communion are writ
throughout creation.
But even as we affirm this sacred gift and blessing, and its omnipres-
ence in all of creation, any queer project must also affirm the reality of
interlocking systems of power and oppression which colonize, devastate,
and degrade through targeted violence and create conditions of despair.
Amber Hollibaugh, a self-described high-femme, lesbian, activist, and art-
ist articulates this reality in the opening essay of her book, My Dangerous
Desires:

The smells here . . . all bring me back to my younger self, a very defiant,
angry, terrified, teenage lesbian stripper . . .
I was dancing in a cage, the go-go stripper kind, dancing to Otis Red-
ding, dancing hard. One man would not stay back, kept reaching into
the cage trying to catch my feet and ankles, kept putting twenty-dollar
bills into the cage. And I kept kicking them out. A set was fifteen min-
utes, no stops onstage; then they would open up the back of the cage
and you’d come hurtling out and down the steep back stairs into the
dressing room. This guy had been out front all night, getting drunker,
waiting for each of my sets, then pushing the money through the bars
as he grabbed for my feet.
I was tired. It was my next to last set, and I’d had it up to here with
him, with his money and his fingers. Finally, I took his money and started
to build it into my routine – rubbing it on my body, moving it between
my legs. He kept putting more twenties on the stage, money he thought
guaranteed him my time, my body, after the music ended. He kept put-
ting twenties there until I had a stack of them in my hands.
218  Rebecca Voelkel
Slowly I ripped every fucking twenty-dollar bill up into tiny pieces
and sprinkled them outside the cage over his head while he screamed
about whores, about cock teasers, about me. Then he left. At least that’s
what I thought.
When I came out for my last set he was nowhere around. I danced
that fifteen minutes so tired I came off the stage not even looking down
to see the stairs. Too bad. He’d broken glass and spread it on each of the
steps leading to the back room. I hit that glass going a hundred. It split
my feet apart before I could stop, pounded it deep inside the creases. I
almost bled to death.
All day I’ve been thinking of that time, remembering being that
young, that tired, that angry, that scared, that lonely. Thinking about
power and about lacking it.5

Hollibaugh’s description of being a cage dancer, performing under the male

gaze of one who understood that he could possess her because he gave her
money and, when challenged, understood he could do violence to her, is an
apt metaphor for the kind of cage that the interlocking systems of misogyny,
racism, heterosexism, and capitalism create. It is a potent metaphor for the
reality and power of colonization. The young dancer is physically within
a cage. The purpose of the cage is exploitive. She is confined, held, con-
tained, and controlled. The stalker is trying to grab, take, and possess her.
He believes he has the right to do so because of all he has been taught. And
when she acts in defiance, dancing her own dance, refusing the money and
then tearing it up – in many ways remarkable acts, given the reality of the
cage of colonization in which she lives – she is cut down and almost bleeds
to death. This story illustrates the colonization itself, the systems of belief
(hegemonies, including theological hegemonies) which support and perpetu-
ate it, and the acts of violence which re-establish and maintain the hierarchies
which are the markers of colonization.
Historical colonization on the North American continent – largely estab-
lished and perpetrated by European, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender,
white, Christian men at the behest of wealthy colonizers (read: royalty, busi-
ness owners, and Church officials) – resulted in a context of colonization
that is still very much present in the United States today. This historical
colonization combined the forces of economic, cultural, and religious power
from Europe that came to the Americas (and elsewhere) to conquer, extract,
convert, and enrich. This onslaught centered power in the colonizer (the
soldier, the priest, the business owner – whose differences became almost
inconsequential in the act of colonizing). The “New World” and its millions
of people, animals, and resources were objects upon which violent power
was perpetrated in order to serve the needs and wants of the colonizer.
This system of dominance and submission, spread by the sword and
gun, was radically different from the cultures the colonizers encountered.
But because it was predicated on a colonizing mindset, the encounter with
 Embodied sexual eschatology  219
difference only served to reinforce the colonizing worldview. Indeed, the
encounter with difference elicited the powerful impulse to compel an estab-
lishment of “proper” hierarchies rooted in dominance and submission. As
one Franciscan wrote in 1775:

Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom
they go about regularly, never joining the men. . . . From this I inferred
they must be hermaphrodites, but from what I learned later I understood
that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. From all the
foregoing I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be
much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are estab-
lished among them.6

Implicit in this system of hierarchies rooted in dominance and submission is

an understanding of binaries. In order to differentiate between that which
is dominant and that which is submissive; in order to establish appropriate
hierarchies, systems of colonization rely upon binaries. In the diary excerpt
above, the Franciscan, Pedro Font, was deeply troubled by what he under-
stood as sodomy. Whether he was encountering a practice of a “third sex”
or “two-spirit,” both the gender and supposed sexual practices of those indi-
viduals constituted “incontinence” for him because they violated the binary
of “men/women” and the hierarchal power that he presumed each connoted.
Additional binaries upon which historical colonization of the Americas relied
included heathen-Christian and savage-civilized. Sometimes the binary was
used against Native Americans, other times against African slaves. But in
both cases, the understanding of the difference between those who were
“savage” or “heathen” and those who were “Christian” later became the
basis upon which whiteness was built.7
It is important to note that these binaries both reinforce one another and
the colonizing hierarchies in intersectional ways. For instance, as illustrated
earlier, the very notion of what is savage is predicated upon a violation
of the male–female binary. And the corollary is that whatever is civilized
vehemently reinforces the male/female binary. Further, these binaries justify
the subjugation, torture, exploitation, and genocide of those over which
the colonizer holds power. In fact, much of the genocide of Native peoples
throughout the Americas was justified by language around establishing the
Holy Faith and the Christian religion, exactly as Pedro Font predicted.
The frame out of which Pedro Font and his fellow business, Church,
and governmental colonizers operated was best articulated in what became
known as the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Between 1452 and 1517, there were
a series of “papal bulls” (letters) sent to various European monarchs in
Portugal, Spain, and England that are collectively known as the Doctrine of
Discovery. They are both theological expressions as well as legal ones.
The first papal bull known as Dum Diversas, was sent June 18, 1452 by
Pope Nicolas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal. It authorized Alfonso V to
220  Rebecca Voelkel
reduce any “Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers”
to perpetual slavery. This facilitated the Portuguese slave trade from West
Africa. The same pope followed this with a second papal bull known as
Romanus Pontifex on January 5, 1455 to the same King Alfonso V. It read
in part:

We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and not-
ing that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among
other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso –
to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and
pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and
the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all
movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them
and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appro-
priate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties,
principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them
to his and their use and profit – by having secured the said faculty, the
said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and
lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands,
lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the
said King Alfonso and his successors.8

There were subsequent papal bulls that were sent to other European mon-
archs. In 1493 Alexander VI issued the bull Inter Caetera stating one Chris-
tian nation did not have the right to establish dominion over lands previously
dominated by another Christian nation, thus establishing the Law of Nations.
Together, the Dum Diversas, the Romanus Pontifex, and the Inter Caetera
came to serve as the basis and justification for the Doctrine of Discovery,
the global slave-trade of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the Age of
Imperialism all of which were rooted in economic, religious, and legal rea-
soning. And the economic, religious, and legal implications of the Doctrine
of Discovery are still very much being felt and deeply impact any exploration
of sacred embodiment and queering of theology.
A powerful example of the enduring power of the Doctrine of Discovery is
that in 1823, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. M’Intosh
that the discovery rights of European sovereigns had been transferred to the
new United States:

The United States, then, have unequivocally acceded to that great and
broad rule by which its civilized inhabitants now hold this country. They
hold and assert in themselves, the title by which it was acquired. They
maintain, as all others have maintained, that discovery gave an exclusive
right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or
conquest; and gave also a right to such a degree of sovereignty, as the
circumstances of the people would allow them to exercise.
 Embodied sexual eschatology  221
Associate Justice at the time, Joseph Story, an active churchman, later wrote:
“As infidels, heathens, and savages, they [the Indians] were not allowed to
possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent
nations.”9
For our conversation about queering theology and an embodied sexual
eschatology, it is important to consider how, because the Christian suprem-
acy and white supremacy of the Doctrine of Discovery are predicated on a
colonized form of embodiment, sexuality and gender, any exercise in liber-
ated embodiment must take seriously an intersectional eschatological vision
that is simultaneously complex enough (and rooted in the communal body)
and specific enough (and rooted in the individual, particular body) in order
to be practiced.

Embodied sexual eschatology grows in me

For the past 20 years, I have presented various forms of a workshop known
as “Sex and the Spirit.” As part of the workshop, my co-presenters and I
have invited participants to gather supplies like butcher paper and mark-
ers and then write/draw/represent their own life’s story, particularly how
their spiritual journey and their sexuality have developed in relation to one
another. Over the years, we’ve added to the experience by asking folks to go
back and add in their experience with race and ability and other pieces of
embodiment. We often get feedback about what a powerful, transformative
experience this is.
Each time I ask others to engage the exercise, I take the opportunity to re-
visit my own narrative. I can still smell the fruity marker aroma and picture
the room at the retreat center where I was when, on the 15th or 20th time
of drawing my timeline, I had a new realization.
Much of my “problem” was that I was a “bad” white, Christian woman.
Let me explain.
The exercise is always a kind of time machine where I’m drawn back into
my own past in palpable and embodied ways. On this occasion, I found
myself alighting at various times in my life.
I saw Mrs. McCash, my elementary church choir director who reacted
with horror when she saw me in pants for our choir’s participation in service.
How she forced me to roll up the pants so they couldn’t be seen below the
choir robe. How I’d gone crying to my mom, who, thankfully, rolled them
back down and told me she’d take care of Mrs. McCash.
I saw my nine-year-old self standing in front of Mrs. Cunningham, my
third grade teacher, as she handed out the YMCA summer baseball league
application to all the boys as they exited the classroom. It took me sev-
eral minutes of begging until she finally relented and handed me one. “Just
remember, those are only for the boys,” she’d admonished as I triumphantly
ran home to share the news. How I completed the form and received a rejec-
tion from the YMCA because the league was, in fact, “just for boys.” How,
222  Rebecca Voelkel
because it was 1978 and post Title IX, my mom responded to their rejection
with a petition signed by many community members and the not-so-gentle
reminder that what they were doing was illegal and she’d sue them if they
persisted. How I was one of about three girls who played in the league that
year and how I played first base for the Dodgers. We lost our first game
44–11 but it didn’t matter to me. I loved every minute of it – including the
polyester pants that went to just below the knee, the polyester stirrups over
my socks, the t-shirt and the YMCA baseball cap. I felt fully alive, exactly
who and what I was meant to be.
I remembered the shag carpeting on the floor of my best friend’s room –
particularly between the bed and the wall where she and I would explore
each other’s bodies out of sight. I can still feel the thrill of pleasure, of inti-
macy, of a kind of connection that warmed my whole being. Even as I knew
her Irish Catholic parents wouldn’t approve, indeed would likely punish us
if they ever found out, I couldn’t resist it or her.
I remember the Diet Workshop meetings my mom took my fourth grade,
husky, sports-playing baby-dyke self. Where I would lose 20 pounds as she tried
to feminize me. And all the positive feedback I got from teachers – for the weight
loss and the more feminine clothing. I remember the mixture of shock that any-
one even noticed, the desire to please, and the discomfort with the whole thing.
And the train ride from Dayton, Ohio to Indianapolis, Indiana. I was
wearing one of my favorite outfits: red, white, and blue tennis shoes, white
tube socks with blue and red stripes, blue shorts with red piping, and a short-
sleeved rugby shirt with red, white, and blue stripes. The conductor, upon
learning about my interest in trains, invited me up to the engine with the
words, “Son, would you like to see how we drive the train?” Without any
need to correct him, I responded enthusiastically, “yes!” It wasn’t but a few
weeks later that my mom took me out and got my ears pierced.
I remember a conversation with my best friend in high school about how
people were starting to talk about the fact that I might be a lesbian. How she
could set me up with her boyfriend’s best friend. How a group of us would
be going to a movie together, but somehow he showed up on his own, his
senior-self picking up my sophomore-self in his car. How we went to Night-
mare on Elm Street, even though I hated horror films, but I’d been taught
well that for dates to go smoothly, the girl needed to do what interested the
boy. And how, as we drove home, he drove to a secluded area and raped me.
I also remembered the times in worship where, lost in one of my favorite
hymns, I sang my heart out, moving with the music. (For her “Queer Clergy
Trading Card Series,” Rev. Dr. Chris Davies asked those of us for whom she
made a card, what our “super power” is. Mine reads “spirited and robust
hymn-singing.”)
But there’s also the multitude of times, too many to count, when I’ve been
told I’m too much . . . too big . . . too loud . . . too intense.
As I completed my timeline exercise in the retreat center with the fruity
smelling markers, it was the request that I map my life story up against the con-
text of the Doctrine of Discovery and white supremacy that the aha happened.
 Embodied sexual eschatology  223
I had always understood that homo-, bi-, trans-phobia, and heterosexism
had fashioned a kind of box that I had spent years getting caught in and
escaping. It was a box of “proper” gender and sexual roles. But I hadn’t
understood the ways in which the rigid binaries of gender and sexuality were
inextricably linked to the colonizing project/“the cage” that is the legacy of
the Doctrine of Discovery, and its white and Christian supremacy.
Much of my life has been about the impact of the legacy of the Doctrine
of Discovery and its white supremacy and colonizing boundaries have had
on my body. When I came out as a lesbian, I was violating the gender binary
which relied upon the clear definition between Christian, on the one hand,
and savage or heathen, on the other. And we know that Christian means
civilized and white. My sensuous times on the shag rug between the wall and
the bed of my childhood friend and the ecstasy I experienced and experience
making love to another woman at the foot of a calving glacier made me not
only a bad Christian woman but also a bad white woman.
The same is true for my gender expression which falls within that of woman
but has enough masculinity in it to have caused such concern in my friends and
my mother. The nervousness they felt, and the actions they took to re-establish
the sexual and gender binaries which “the cage” demanded have created lasting
scars. And my attempts to comply as a dutiful white Christian woman neatly
housed within the cage – particularly going on the date in which I was raped –
have inscribed in my very flesh the power of the cage and its enforcing violence.
But even as the legacy of the colonizing cage is powerful, it isn’t ultimate.
We were created out of desire and longing for connection and communion.
In the beginning were Desire and Longing:

Desire for ecstasy and connection, longing for the deepest of

communions.
And Desire and Longing were with God.
And Desire and Longing were God.
Desire and Longing were with God in the beginning.10

This reality has consistently and persistently urged, nudged, and beckoned
me toward healing and resistance which are the markers of liberation.
This is my story. It may not be everyone’s story. But many of the women,
men, trans*, and genderqueer folks that have engaged the queering project – in
church, in movement, in the “Sex and the Spirit” workshops – have echoed a
similar connection between hearkening to the sacred longing and desire, and
experiencing individual and communal healing and resistance which begin
to constitute liberation.

Constructing an embodied sexual eschatology

When I speak of sexuality, I am deeply influenced by queer and embodiment
theologians who speak of the Divine invitation to find our destinies not in
loneliness, but in deep connection and that the love we make is God’s own
224  Rebecca Voelkel
love.11 In these understandings of sexuality, there is an implicit weaving of that
which is spiritual and that which is sexual. There is also an implicit weaving
of that which is loving and that which is justice-seeking. And there is a broad
understanding of sexuality that includes and celebrates genital sex as a sacred
and holy expression of sexuality. But this understanding of sexuality is not lim-
ited to genital sex and it celebrates the erotic, sensual, embodied pull toward
connection and communion which is woven throughout all of creation.
As we move to construct an embodied sexual eschatology, this weaving of
the sexual, spiritual and justice-seeking is critically important. In particular,
any eschatological visioning needs to root itself in the blessing of sacred long-
ing, desire, connection, and communion that resists the cage of interlocking
forces of colonization. In other words, if our embodied sexual eschatology
isn’t rooted in the creation of liberation-love-justice, it isn’t an embodied
sexual eschatology.
A second important piece of constructing an embodied sexual eschatology
is the spiritual practice of dreaming and visioning. An inaugurated sense of
eschatology necessarily moves between the future and the present. It relies
on the ability to dream another world is possible and then, rooted in that
dreaming, act in ways which build the future in the here and now. In the Sex
and the Spirit workshops, after we have done work around the blessing of
sexuality and embodiment, and acknowledged the context of colonization’s
cage in which we live, we focus on the role of creativity, play, and dreaming
in order to begin to vision the future we want to build sexually and in healed
and healing bodies. We sometimes ask folks to envision what sex, sexuality,
and healing bodies look, feel, taste, smell like in heaven.
Third, any embodied sexual eschatology has a nuanced, complex sense of
time. Because our reality is the already-and-the-not-yet, we do not celebrate
that justice, wholeness, liberation have fully arrived here in chronological
time. But we take seriously the distinction between chronos and Kairos –
chronological time and “God’s time.” There are moments when justice/love/
healing break into history. There are periods that the Realm of God is made
real in the here and now. There are many powerful biblical examples such
as the disciples’ experience with Jesus in the Transfiguration.
Finally, any embodied sexual eschatology understands a direct connection
between our own, individual ability to dream a world of embodied, liberated
sexuality for our particular bodies and our particular desires and the collec-
tive body’s ability to dream a world of collective liberation. Put another way,
I want to posit that individual and collective embodied sexual eschatology
are necessary for collective liberation.
Given these four criteria, what might some examples of an embodied
sexual eschatology look, feel, smell, and taste like? I share two here, but I
encourage us as individuals and as communities to take the time to dream
and vision, and begin to call our embodied sexual eschatologies into being.

***
 Embodied sexual eschatology  225
In the Fall of 2016, I travelled on three different occasions to the Stand-
ing Rock Sioux reservation as Standing Rock youth, elders, tribal council
members were joined by thousands from around the country as they sought
to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from cutting across tribal lands
and endangering Lake Oahe, the source of their drinking water and the
drinking water for millions more downstream. As part of their efforts, Stand-
ing Rock youth had literally run from the reservation in North Dakota to
Washington, DC to try to convince the Army Corps of Engineers and other
governmental authorities to block DAPL. When they returned to Standing
Rock, they and others created a camp, rooted in indigenous practice, that
slowly drew hundreds of First Nations and indigenous representatives from
around the world. I was there at the invitation of Rev. Marlene Helgemo, a
HoChunk elder, pastor, and Executive Director of the Council for American
Indian Ministries of the United Church of Christ who has asked me and
other non-Native pastors to be “witnesses and interpreters” upon our return.
The camp, known as Oceti Sakowin, was nestled on the north bank of
the Cannon Ball River, just west of Lake Oahe (part of the Missouri River).
Its name means Seven Council Fires which is the proper name for the people
commonly known as the Sioux because the original Sioux tribe was made
up of Seven Council Fires. It sat on lands which were outside the bounds of
the current Standing Rock reservation but which are ancestrally Standing
Rock land and which hold the bones of ancestors. As we approached from
the south along Highway 1806, we crested a hill and looked down upon
hundreds of fires, teepees (and many “tarpees” – teepees made from tarps)
and a road lined with flags representing dozens of indigenous nations.
When we entered the camp, we had to pledge that we didn’t have any
drugs or alcohol, and that we weren’t going to consume any while on the
sacred grounds. We were also told where to park and then were directed
where the sacred fire was and where to find the kitchen, school, clothes
swap area, and medicine tent. On a subsequent visit, later in the Fall led by
tribal council members, we met with Dallas Goldtooth, one of the visiting
activists who was filming and sharing the story of Standing Rock. He shared
with us that this camp was a vision of the promised dream – a place where
healthcare is free, food is available for all who need it as are clothes. School
is free. Everything is rooted in ceremony and prayer. And all of it was done as
a community, collectively protecting the first medicine, mni wiconi (water).
My first stop in this space that was a dream-come-true for indigenous lead-
ers was the Sacred Fire. (As a non-Native person, I had needed to ask and
follow protocols so that my presence at the sacred fire would be respectful
and appropriate.) The first thing we encountered was a song being sung, in
Lakota, by all who knew it at the invitation of a Lakota elder.
“We are alive. . . . We are alive. . . . We are alive,” the singers proclaimed.
The song brought me to tears. In the face of over 500 years of attempted
genocide, broken treaties, concentration camps, forced marches, board-
ing schools, cultural genocide – most of it perpetrated by my fellow
226  Rebecca Voelkel
Christians – this was a gathering of resistance, of creating here and now the
dream of what could be.
At one point, we were all invited down to the riverside (a movement that
wasn’t lost on me as I contemplated John the Baptist and the writers of
“Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”) to welcome representatives of several
Pacific Coast nations who had paddled across Lake Oahe and were coming
up the Cannon Ball River to bless the water and stand in solidarity with
Standing Rock. As they paddled past us, people shouted out blessings and
one child in particular greeted each new canoe with “water is sacred.”
On a third visit to Standing Rock, I brought my then-nine-year-old daugh-
ter as part of the Clergy Call at Standing Rock. During our time there, I
asked, her “What lesson did you learn from today?”
“I learned that Christians did and still do some terrible things to indig-
enous people and we have to help change that.”
She pretty well summed up the reason that I and 523 other clergy showed
up at Standing Rock this time. We were part of the larger struggle against the
Dakota Access Pipeline. But our first action was, denomination by denomi-
nation, to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. If we, as Christians, were to
stand with Standing Rock with any degree of integrity, we had to first be
clear where we stood in relation to our collective history. It was Christian
theology that encouraged, directed, and literally baptized and blessed the
genocide of indigenous people. It was Christian theology that undergirded
broken treaty after broken treaty. It was Christian theology that created the
Boarding Schools, many of whose missions were explicitly to “kill the savage
in order to save the man.”
And as my daughter so wisely said, this is not past history. The Doctrine
of Discovery is alive and well in the Dakota Access Pipeline.
So, as part of our participation in this sacred Oceti Sakowin, we needed
to say no to genocide, cultural degradation, and raping of the land. It was a
public confession and collective repentance. As Father John Floberg said to
a group of deputies guarding the Dakota Access Pipeline, “you are protect-
ing a pipeline that was put in place because of a Church doctrine and we are
here to say that we were wrong.”
But this confession and repentance didn’t mean anything unless they were
accompanied by genuine repair. Helping stop the DAPL was a place to start.
Indeed, it was an important place. But it was only the beginning of our
faithful action.12
As the evening closed, we were invited to a pipe ceremony. The invitation
alone was an act of deep honoring. I knew that as a white, non-Native per-
son, this was sacred space that is not mine. And I couldn’t help praying as
the pipe came to rest in my left hand, that I would do justice to the honor
bestowed upon me as a witness and interpreter of this sacred, revolution-
ary space.

***
 Embodied sexual eschatology  227
In 1993, my then-partner and I travelled to Washington, DC for the “March
on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.”13 First
called for by Urvashi Vaid, Executive Director for the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, March organizers agreed upon seven primary demands,
each with further secondary demands. The primary demands were as follows:

• We demand passage of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil

rights bill and an end to discrimination by state and federal govern-
ments including the military; repeal of all sodomy laws and other laws
that criminalize private sexual expression between consenting adults.
• We demand massive increase in funding for AIDS education, research,
and patient care; universal access to health care including alternative
therapies; and an end to sexism in medical research and health care.
• We demand legislation to prevent discrimination against lesbians, gays,
bisexuals, and transgender people in the areas of family diversity,
custody, adoption, and foster care and that the definition of family
includes the full diversity of all family structures.
• We demand full and equal inclusion of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and
transgender people in the educational system, and inclusion of lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender studies in multicultural curricula.
• We demand the right to reproductive freedom and choice, to control
our own bodies, and an end to sexist discrimination.
• We demand an end to racial and ethnic discrimination in all forms.
• We demand an end to discrimination and violent oppression based on
actual or perceived sexual orientation, identification, race, religion,
identity, sex and gender expression, disability, age, class, AIDS/HIV
infection.14

When the March happened on April 25, 1993, over a million LGBTQ people
and supporters participated. My partner at the time and I flew in from Seattle
in order to march with the United Church of Christ delegation.
As we moved about the city, it seemed as if the whole world were queer.
On the Metro, in the streets, on the mall, rainbow flags and public displays of
queer affection were everywhere. There was a protest in front of the National
Museum of Natural History in which 1500 couples were wed by dozens and
dozens of clergy – many of them my friends. There was a protest in front of
the IRS protesting the ways in which same-gender-loving couples were kept
from the legal protections of marriage – this, too, held a symbolic “interfaith
ceremony of commitment.”
During the dyke march the night before the larger march, a gay man was
accosted by a protestor who called him a “faggot.” Without missing a beat,
he struck a pose and with as much affectation as he could embody, intoned
back, “that’s DR. faggot to you!” The gales of laughter and applause flipped
any power dynamic that would have given the protestor an advantage. We
were here, we were queer, and we were powerful.
228  Rebecca Voelkel
The Sunday of the March dawned a perfectly sunny day and we had to
stand and wait for five hours before we stepped off. The waiting was filled
with music, entertainment, laughter, hugging, and all-around celebration.
The atmosphere was abuzz and giddy. As I looked around at all my kin-
dred religious folks, some in clergy collars or yarmulkes, some in drag and
adorned with rainbow boas, of all races, genders, orientations, and expres-
sions – and I considered that I had come from volunteering at the Bailey
Boushee AIDS hospice the night before I left – I couldn’t help but alternate
between weeping and laughing.
That night, my partner and I had some of the best sex of our relation-
ship in which I continued my weeping and laughing. The longing, desire,
pleasure, and connection of the day seemed to have imbued my very cells
and the orgasms I experienced in love-making had everything to do with the
fact that I had communed with a vision of a queer-positive world in ways I
couldn’t have dreamed of even the day before, at the height of the virulently
homophobic climate that marked the times.

***

These two stories articulate some of what I believe constitutes an embod-

ied sexual eschatology. In both, there is a weaving of the sexual, spiritual,
embodiment of justice-love that is connected with both affirming desire,
longing, connection, and communion, and is consciously resisting the colo-
nizing cage of interlocking oppressions. In both, there was a dream that
preceded the gathering – there was an intentionality that invited others to
glimpse the vision. At Standing Rock, it was the youth runners who inspired
their elders and the vision sparked a long-buried dream in hundreds of indig-
enous communities that was strong enough to draw thousands. At the March
on Washington, it started with Urvashi Vaid but dozens joined her early on –
including Lani Ka’ahumanu who both shared and expanded the dream to
make it better and more inclusive.
In both there is a nuanced sense of time. Although Standing Rock lasted
for almost a year and the March on Washington was only for a weekend,
both were temporary in-breaking experiences. Neither completely changed
anything. In fact, there continues to be much pain and suffering; and colo-
nization continues to hold sway. But many indigenous folks with whom I’ve
spoken since Standing Rock have told me about their experience of driving
north on Hwy 1806 and cresting that hill. With tears in their eyes, they’ve
recounted that they were completely overwhelmed. “I’m home,” is what
wove itself into their bones. And even as that manifestation of Oceti Sakowin
no longer exists, the fact that it did and they experienced it continues to
inspire and convict a generation of indigenous activists and many non-Native
co-conspirators, including me. Likewise, I left the March on Washington
in 1993 with a certainty about what I had to do with my life that hadn’t
existed before, and a certainty of what was possible. And the larger LGBTQ
 Embodied sexual eschatology  229
movement has used the platform for that March as a guidepost for much of
what has been realized in the 25 years since.
In both stories, there exists the interplay between the individual and the
collective. But here, it becomes more complex, too. Given the complicated
ways in which colonization and oppression function, our social locations
differ and our roles in the act of dreaming and embodying the eschatological
vision are also different. At Oceti Sakowin, my social location as a white,
non-Native, Christian pastor meant that my role had more to do with my
responsibility as an heir to the conquest. Mine was to follow the dreaming of
indigenous leaders, knowing my place. I was participating in an eschatologi-
cal practice, but it was not fully mine to enter the dream.
Lutheran seminarian and activist Korla Masters articulates this critical
role of co-conspirator well when she speaks of her involvement as a white
woman in the Movement for Black Lives:

I’m working on the essay for my next step in the ordination process. As I
write I realize again and again how DEEPLY indebted I am theologically
to the Movement for Black Lives. I really don’t think I understood much
about salvation or eschatology before I stood in the street and shouted
that I believe we will win – and meant it, despite all evidence to the con-
trary. I don’t think I understood incarnation with as much depth, either.
And the Holy Spirit has rarely moved in my life the way She has in the
street and in quiet conversations about the movement and the future in
my living room. I don’t love living with debt and I don’t have a brilliant
idea yet for paying this back/forward. But acknowledging it feels like an
important part in the meantime.15

I imagine that the same was true for my straight, cisgender colleagues who
marched beside me at the March on Washington. Although there was an
eschatological project that we shared, the world we created, if only for a
moment, was more properly for me and my kindred queers.
In both cases, the embodied sexual eschatologies contributed to a collec-
tive liberation that I believe ultimately belongs to all of us – in the not yet
time. But, given colonization’s cage, the already time means that the experi-
ence has primary and secondary foci. This is not bad. But, perhaps it forms
a fifth piece of wisdom as we seek to embody more fully the Justice-Love to
which we are all called.
In her address to that 1993 March on Washington, Urvashi Vaid said the
following:

We, you and I, each of us, we are the descendants of a proud tradition
of people asserting our dignity. It is fitting that the Holocaust Museum
was dedicated the same weekend as this March, for not only were gay
people persecuted by the Nazi state, but gay people are indebted to the
struggle of the Jewish people against bigotry and intolerance. It is fitting
230  Rebecca Voelkel
that the NAACP marches with us, that feminist leaders march with us,
because we are indebted to those movements.

When all of us who believe in freedom and diversity see this gathering, we see
beauty and power. When our enemies see this gathering, they see the millen-
nium. Perhaps the Right is right about something. We call for the end of the
world as we know it. We call for the end of racism and sexism and bigotry
as we know it. For the end of violence and discrimination and homophobia
as we know it. For the end of sexism as we know it. We stand for freedom
as we have yet to know it, and we will not be denied.16
Vaid was speaking into a particular moment. Standing Rock leaders were,
too. Neither is the same moment that I encounter at this writing and that
you, the reader, encounter in the reading. But the power of embodied sexual
eschatological dreaming is that it allows us to build on one another’s dream-
ing. And, perhaps, that is a sixth quality. Embodied sexual eschatology has
an expansive quality to it. When people who have been wounded, in-caged in
colonization’s trauma, claim their particular, beautiful, bodacious, desire-for-
connection, longing-for-communion self and selves, they release a vision and
dream that transcends time and can inspire those who might live decades or
even centuries later. Embodied sexual eschatology is one way that the bless-
ing and gift of creation breaks the cell-bars of colonization’s cage – even if
only momentarily.

Conclusion
For those of us who are about the task of queering theology, the work is both
daunting and delicious. The cage of colonization makes the very notion of
queering difficult, given its roots in rigid hierarchies, oppressive binaries, dis-
embodying violence and its mission of crushing resistance and silencing the
hope on which resistance is built. But creativity and dreaming are particular
charisms of queerness (not in a determinist way but rather creativity and
dreaming are woven into the DNA of the queer endeavor). This makes the
task of queering theology delicious. Queering theology demands of us a big
enough vision to heal bodies, reclaim sacredness/fabulousness, bust binaries,
embody resilience and resistance, and kindle-into-a-dancing-fire the hope
which is strong enough to inspire. All of this is delicious.
Within the task of queering theology, the work of eschatological dream-
ing is central for all of the previously mentioned reasons. It is my hope that
these reflections on an embodied sexual eschatology give you a glimpse of
the deliciousness of the task. I also hope that the suggestion of the six mark-
ers of embodied sexual eschatology gives us all a place to start. I hope that
beginning with the ways in which sexuality, spirituality, and justice-seeking
are inextricably woven and then engaging the spiritual practice of dreaming
connect with a nuanced, complex sense of time. I hope that the ability of
the individual to dream a world for particular bodies is deeply woven with
 Embodied sexual eschatology  231
the collective body’s ability to dream collective liberation – even as there are
both a primary and secondary foci of this dreaming. And finally, I hope the
power of embodied sexual eschatological dreaming is that it allows us to
build on one another’s dreaming; that embodied sexual eschatology has an
expansive quality to it.

And then, as now, Desire and Longing were threatening to the forces of
destruction, dis-connection, dis-memberment and death.
But then, as now, these did not prevail and what came into being
because of and through
Desire and Longing
were
Life, and Life abundant.17

Notes
  1 This chapter is a deeper dive and re-examining of some of the thinking I did
around eschatology in my book, Carnal Knowledge of God: Embodied Love and
the Movement for Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017).
  2 Monika K. Hellwig, “Eschatology,” in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic
Perspectives, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1991), 2:349.
  3 John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images
(San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 8.
  4 Rebecca Voelkel, “For God So Loved,” in Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experi-
ments in Decolonization, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Altona, Canada: Mennonite
Church Canada, 2018), 216.
  5 Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way
Home (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 1.
  6 Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition, trans. and ed.
Hubert Eugene Bolton, vol. 4 of Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley, CA: Uni-
versity of California, 1930), 105, as quoted in Katz, Gay American History, 291.
  7 Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Rec-
onciliation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 52.
According to historian Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Histori-
cal Origins of Racism in the United States (London: Oxford University Press,
1974), 52, from the initial contact until the mid-1600s, the terminology the
English most often used to describe themselves was “Christian.” “Christian”
became the identity category distinguishing the English from the “heathen” and
“savage” (African and Native peoples). Heathens and savages were considered
inferior “others” who might therefore be legitimately treated as such from the
perspective of the colonial-imperialists making such determinations. From the
mid-1600s to 1680, however, Jordan claims that the English began to refer to
themselves primarily as “English” and “free.” This is notable because during the
same period a shift was taking place in the social milieu. At first, though oppres-
sion ran rampant, it was so unwieldy and complex that who was master/servant
and in what kind of labor and economic situation was not entirely predictable
based on physical differences. But the lifelong chattel enslavement of people of
African descent soon became justified and institutionalized through a variety of
legal codes, prolific rhetoric, and powerful ideology. . . . Finally, and most signifi-
cantly, the unequivocally racial apex of this story came at the end of the century.
232  Rebecca Voelkel
Jordan writes: “after about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of
self-identification appeared – white [emphasis in the original].”
  8 Doctrine of Discovery Study Group, “Papal Bull Dum Diversas 18 June, 1452,”
Papal Bulls, https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/.
  9 Unitarian Universalist Association, What is the Doctrine of Discovery: The True
Story of the Colonization of the United States of America, Unitarian Universalist
Association, www.uua.org/multiculturalism/dod/what-doctrine-discovery.
10 Voelkel, “For God So Loved,” 216.
11 James B. Nelson and Sandra P. Longfellow, eds., Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources
for Theological Reflection (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), xiv,
and Carter Heyward, Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right: Rethinking What
It Means to Be Christian (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 156.
12 Rebecca Voelkel, “Collective Confession and Repentance was Our First Action,”
Auburn Seminary Blog, entry posted November 3, 2016, http://auburnseminary.
org/standing-rock-collective-confession-and-repentance-was-our-first-action/.
13 Organizers worked as a committee and although “transgender” was voted by
the steering committee to be added to the title, it lacked the two-thirds vote from
the whole committee. Additionally, it took a successful campaign led by Lani
Ka’ahumanu, a bisexual activist, to have bisexual added to the title.
14 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights Organizing
Committee, “Platform of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and
Bi Equal Rights and Liberation Action Statement Preamble to the Platform,”
Queer Resource Directory www.qrd.org/qrd/events/mow/mow-full.platform.
15 Korla Masters, post on Facebook, comment posted September 15, 2017, www.
facebook.com/korla.masters.
16 Urvashi Vaid, Speech at the March on Washington, April 25, 1993, http://gos.
sbc.edu/w/vaid.html.
17 Voelkel, “For God So Loved,” 216.
Afterword
Erotic dreams, theology, and the
word-(re)made-flesh
Joseph N. Goh

Iconoclastic (but rational and heartful) locksmiths

Our anthology endeavors to act as a matchmaker between the theological
and the human, and between the human and the human. Moreover, Robert
E. Shore-Goss – Bob – and I are aiming for a collection that can bridge the
theoretical, the pastoral, and the personal, although we realize that the per-
fect balance is often difficult, if not impossible to achieve and maintain. We
reached out to thinkers from around the world and we were blessed with
responses from Argentina, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines,
and the United States. We were particularly pleased to hear from several
Majority World contributors whose (queer) theological work often remained
hidden, ignored, or dismissed.
In this book, some offer wisdom with transgressive tones, while others
convey ideas through more measured means. Some write from more queer-
and trans-friendly locations while others pen their thoughts from contexts
of continual struggles with state-authorized oppressions that can trigger
total human diminishment. Contributions range from queerings of theol-
ogy, scripture, and church to theological and pastoral views on marginalized
identities. We want to be inclusive without pretending to be exhaustive.
Both editors and authors do many things in this volume, even if we do
not and cannot do it all. We underscore ecclesiastical shortcomings and ill-
judgments in “Provoking Church.” In “Repainting Saints,” we harken to
history to show that Christianity has always had non-normative rhizomes
that are no less Christian, and we look concomitantly to the present and the
future for God’s strange fingerprints/palmprints/footprints in “Expanding
Eschatologies.” Although we are aware “that human sexuality is disorderly,
potentially chaotic and ambiguous”1 and that “Eros/God has been perverted
by human sin, especially patriarchal logic and heterosexism,”2 we repeat the
imperative to listen carefully to the operations of the flesh in “Liberating
Flesh,” because we are convinced that “there is room potentially to recon-
sider an erotic economic model beyond dualism and power drives, while still
encompassing love.”3 In common and not totally unexpected queer theoreti-
cal/theological fashion, we interrogate assumptions and preconceptions. We
234  Joseph N. Goh
look at intersectionalities, although admittedly we cannot incorporate every
detail in “the reality of structural injustices by dominant power and major-
ity”4 in our work. We refresh our call for radical inclusion but we are also
aware that we are writing and working within limitations, often country-
specific restrictions that stifle human thriving. At many junctures, we find
ourselves musing on the following questions:5

• In deploying an iconoclastic edge to queer theologizing, how do we

shatter exclusive cordons, delineations, and familiarities so as to mine
from, befriend, and reap the wisdom of unconventional, uncommon,
and unorthodox theological conversation partners?
• What are the false images and idols that tether us to traditional theo-
logical securities and comfort zones, and how can we negotiate them
in order to pursue greater theological inclusion for those who are
traditionally excluded?
• How do we build into a particular contextual queer theology an
iconoclastic edge that includes humility and the boldness to challenge
other systems?
• How do we hold “radical traditionalism and shocking iconoclasm”6
in tension so as to engage in the act of tensioning theologies? By the
same token, how can we find constructive and life-giving methods of
tensioning that keep our theologies on the edge in order to keep our
theologies dangerous, mischievous, watchful, humble, pliable, and
porous? Furthermore, how do we tension theology into productive
social change and transformation, as well as ongoing traditionings7 of
queer theology that maintain an apophatic complexion?
• How do our various “cultures” form and shape our queer theologiz-
ing? In other words, how do we bring our contextual queer and trans
hybridities to theological endeavors?
• How do we keep from colonizing other theologies while challenging
orthodox narratives?
• How do we “disturb” our own theologies “with God” and recognize
our own limits before the apophatic God?
• How do we negotiate a theological path between infinite relativism
and absolutizing our theologies?

In responding to most of these complex questions, we try to become lock-

smiths who have been, borrowing from Richard Rohr’s words, “educated
inside the system in order to have the freedom to critique that very system.”8
We are reminded by Gerard Loughlin that “queer theology – like queer
theory – reprises the tradition of the church in order to discover the queer
interests that were always already at play in the Spirit’s movement.”9 As
purveyors of radical traditionalism and shocking iconoclasm, we are not
doggedly trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Instead, guided by a simulta-
neous desire to act from the mind and the heart, we decide to prolong our
 Afterword  235
positions at the margins and the corners where pertinent. We unlock theo-
logical systems from the inside by offering insights, critiques, suggestions,
and lived experiences, venting frustrations, smashing falsehoods, and equip-
ping ourselves with a readiness to say “entah” – “we do not know.” Yet. It
is true that we do not have all the answers, but we are happy to continue
thinking and reflecting and praying beyond the volume, rather than allowing
ourselves to be trapped in an obsession for (unachievable) total certainty and
clarity in one humble book.
And personally, I want to continue dreaming.

Dreams
Much has been written about dreams in so many areas of study. Biblical
studies, for instance, are teeming with the exegeses of dreams. I would, how-
ever, like to briefly reflect on some simple translations of “dreams” in Bahasa
Malaysia10 and the multiple meanings that are harbored therein, and explore
how they might speak to me of life, theology, and God.11
As mimpi, or the odd conjurings that sometimes blossom with sleep,
dreams can be baffling, encouraging, and/or upsetting. When my husband
died in 2016, all I wanted during those God-awful tearful nights was for
him to come back to me. Or at least to dream of him being happy in his new
life. And for a few months, I dreamed. Did my beloved appear to me in an
“immaterial form” to reassure me of blissful life after death? Or was it just a
conjuring of my tired yet overactive and severely anguished mind that helped
me meet my deepest psychological needs of the time?
I am not sure if I will ever have as much faith in dreams as my biblical
namesake from the Hebrew scriptures had (Genesis 37). Dreams can some-
times lead to the murder of sanity and logic due to grief, unless they are seen
as REM byproducts or as latent desires. To contradict Freud, sometimes a
dream is just a dream.
Yet dreams can also be impian. As aspirations, and as fantasies, they can
excite, propel, empower, even if partially so. They can help replace the void
of depression, desperation, helplessness, and hopelessness with some kind of
meaning and purpose in life. When I transitioned from almost two decades of
what I now think might have been a promising career (or was it a calling?) in
Roman Catholic religious life and ordained ministry to the Great Unknown
of Life-After-Rome in 2010, I was terrified of dreaming a different but more
fulfilling life with a steady income, a house, a car, and a nice man to hold my
hand for better or for worse. Today, and I say this with gratitude rather than
hubris, I am gainfully employed with/ministering in a supportive university,
I have my own home and vehicle, and I have vivid memories of love that
occasionally comfort me on painfully lonely days. I am part of an inclusive
and affirming church but I find God mostly in the chapel of my heart and
the kindness of people. These are partially fulfilled dreams that have buoyed
my life. I do not think dreams will ever cease to be partial because in some
236  Joseph N. Goh
ways, dreams cease to be dreams when they reach perfect and complete
attainment. Some dreams come true in varying degrees, others do not. But
dreams need to at least begin to become, for to cease dreaming is to cease
becoming human.
Dreams are also nubuatan and wawasan. Were these versions of dreams –
“prophecy” and “vision” respectively – what inspired the minor prophet
Joel to eschatologically pronounce in the name of God, “I will pour out my
spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old
men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (2.28)?
Initially, I found it tempting to solely embrace these “respectably prophetic”
interpretations for this Afterword. But a few events in Malaysia’s recent past
made me halt in my tracks.
In 1991, then (and current) Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Moha-
mad announced his vision for a politically, economically, socially, intellectu-
ally, and psychologically superior Malaysia which he named as Wawasan
2020 (Vision 2020). In 2016, former Prime Minister Najib Razak disclosed
his plans for Transformasi 2050 (Transformation 2050), a 30-year plan with
similar goals as Wawasan 2020, perhaps even to usurp the role of the former.
But the fate of this vision remains to be seen, given Najib’s epic defeat in the
2018 General Elections (GE14) and current investigations into his dubious
financial dealings.12
I do not think that the change in government that occurred in GE14
and which saw Mahathir’s triumphant return to power has been living up
to its manifesto for – its prophecies of – Malaysia Baru (New Malaysia),
chiefly in relation to the welfare of gender-variant and sexually diverse
Malaysians. I know now that the nubuatan and wawasan of Mahathir
and Najib were mere political platitudes that also lined the pockets of a
select few.
Highly romanticized prophecies and visions, especially politically moti-
vated ones, can ring hollow and turn into mimpi ngeri or mimpi dasyhat or
nightmares. For instance, the post-GE14 administration stood by and did
nothing when a political aide named Numan Afifi “voluntarily” resigned
due to protests over his brazen LGBT activism.13 Or when the Minister in
the Prime Minister’s Department Mujahid Yusof Rawa ordered the removal
of queer activist Pang Khee Teik’s and trans activist Nisha Ayub’s portraits
from the George Town (art and culture) Festival in the Malaysian state of
Penang.14 So many nightmarish prophecies. So many disrespected visions.
So many shattered dreams.
In an attempt to stretch my dreaming, I asked myself something I had
never asked before: What does theology itself dream of when it tries to gather
in its arms the lives of kathoey, waria, hijra, tóngzhi, two-spirit people, peng-
kid, masculine-of-center individuals, pillow princesses, drag kings, demi-
romantics, queer straights, intersex people, polyamorous partners, BDSM
practitioners, skoliosexuals, ahrar el jins, and baklâ, to name but a few
rainbow hues from around the globe?
 Afterword  237
I think theology experiences a whole gamut of dreams, aspirations, fanta-
sies, prophecies, visions, and nightmares. It dreams of possibilities, it hopes
for more inclusive and affirming futures, it predicts happier endings, it proj-
ects a greater flourishing of human lives, it shudders when it thinks of its own
extinction due to death-dealing misapplications and spiraling impotence. I
have suggested elsewhere that “theology truly meets its demise when it no
longer proves to be a source of empowerment and capacity building for
people who rely on it in their greatest hour of need.”15
Theology cannot but be embroiled in these complexities, because theol-
ogy is (and should be if it is not already) ontologically connected to human
realities in their utter diversity. M. Mani Chacko posits that “theology arises
from human experience and is a human articulation of God and God’s work
in the created order . . . there is the need to go beyond a particular experience
and understanding of God to experiences of other people and their articula-
tion of God.”16 Mary Cecilia Claparols takes this thought further in discern-
ing that “to know God is to know and experience God through our bodies . . .
thus body language is inescapably the material of Christian theology.”17
I am grateful that numerous theological forms abound that choose and
continue to take the path of the eroticized and the gendered, that affirm
possibilities of living out concomitant lives of sexuality, gender, and faith,
notably in queerphobic and transphobic societies. Such theological forms
may evoke abhorrence for some, as in the case for instance, of those who
see sexuality solely in terms of dirty little secrets, embarrassing stains, scan-
dalous exposés, and shameful carnal un-inhibitions. I have proposed in an
earlier work that sexuality acts as “that which constitutes the core force
and deepest expression of relational human persons in their lived corporeal
experiences.”18 Sexuality, akin to gender, is the ability for human beings to
connect and relate in life-giving ways, and includes a broad range of friend-
ships, romances, and/or genital activities. Every form of theology is thus
sexual and gendered because every form of theology emerges from human
experience,19 and the need of human beings to connect with the “Profoundly
More”20 and fellow human beings in order to self-actualize in worthy ways.
In this regard, Kwok Pui-lan says it well when she says that

sexual theology is not just the specific concern of queer, gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgendered [sic] theologians – as it is often assumed
to be – but a project that all theologians, [and I venture to add, faith-
inspired students, educators, activists, ordinands, clergypersons and pas-
tors], whether consciously or unconsciously, participate in.21

Theology must rely on sexuality and gender to stay alive.

Therefore, I do not see theology fleeing from the inevitabilities of Gordian
knots. Instead I see theology attempting to embrace and enfold them into
its own dream, its erotic dreams to be specific, because pleasure and pain
are but two dimensions of one reality. Mimpi ghairah or mimpi berahi is
238  Joseph N. Goh
an involuntary, deeply physical phenomenon experienced by sexual persons
that incontrovertibly demonstrates their human fecundity: their capacity to
connect and even experience enormous pleasure with other persons in just,
egalitarian, and loving ways, and their ability to collaborate with God in the
generation of love and life. If theology is about human understandings of
reality, theology must have erotic dreams.
Perhaps theology is aware that despite the many tribulations and obstacles
it must endure, it can remain sufficiently fertile to give birth to the flourish-
ing of life, again and again, but it also knows that it must listen to bodily
storytellings that come from the heart. Perhaps theology is even humming
softly with one of the (seemingly LGBT-supportive?) Malaysian pop-R&B-
jazz crooner Sheila Majid’s earlier single that delightfully echoes the Song
of Songs:

Di manakah engkau, sayangku? Aku rindu belaianmu . . .

Ku tak ingin kesepian di hari depanku . . .
Tidurlah, sayang, pejamkan matamu manja;
Datanglah sayang, ke dalam mimpiku s’lalu.
Hentikan rintihan lalu, tak ingin ku telan lagi . . .
Where are you, my love? I long for your caresses . . .
I don’t wanna spend my days ahead in loneliness . . .
Lay down my love, close your eyes my sweet;
Appear in my dreams, my love, forever and ever.
End these tears, I just can’t take it anymore . . .22

Could it also be that theology is searching for love from those who have
never thought of it as an avenue for love? Might it be that theology is eager
to demonstrate its ability to give love, to embrace, to caress, to accompany,
and to end tears? I believe that theology groans in pleasure when it becomes
cognizant of its proclivities for (a)sexual and (a)gendered thrivings, especially
for the seemingly alien. Theology experiences erotic dreams when it closes its
eyes and contemplates possibilities of its G-spot being unlocked and accessed
by those who do not shy away from its most tender and vulnerable regions in
order to revel in life, and to revel explosively. Theology performs best when
it finds itself disrobed and stimulated for optimal satisfactions.

God’s erotic dreams and the imperative to act

incarnationally
If I can imagine theology as capable of undergoing mimpi, impian, nubuatan,
wawasan, mimpi ngeri and mimpi ghairah or mimpi berahi, surely I can
also do so with God? For this purpose, I turn to Andrea Bieler’s and Luise
Schottroff’s premise that “theologically speaking, human imagination can
be conceived as the point of contact between divine revelation and human
 Afterword  239
experience.”23 What I am effectively trying to accomplish through dreaming
is a re-establishment of that point of contact, which is concomitantly the
act of queering God. Heeding Michael Sepidoza Campos’s caveat that “the
pitfall of any subversive effort is the danger of merely replacing one form of
hegemony for another,”24 I understand queering God as a perpetual disman-
tling of theological grand truths, chiefly those that oppress human beings.
I am mostly persuaded by Susannah Cornwall’s assertion that “what is
disturbed by queering God is not solid theological truth, but a heteronor-
mative distortion of theology,”25 but I am not certain if there is really any
“solid theological truth.” Instead, theology is perpetually in flux. Any form
of solidity is in fact a gesturing toward theology’s temporary roosting in
order to allow itself to be grasped, deployed, and reshaped. A problem, or
at least it appears to me as such, is precisely this idea of “solid theological
truth” – the tendency of many to label temporary roosting as permanent
nesting, therefore ascribing an arrogant and condescending metanarrative
to their version of solid theology. Queer theologies are not exempted from
fait accompli inclinations. Seen in this light, I believe that queering God is
an act of justice that must never allow compromise or termination, but find
fresh incarnations that speak to the people of a particular time and space.
Queer theologies must never give up dreaming.
Treading rather gingerly on “maybes,” “why not’s,” and “if’s,” I imag-
ine God dreaming of and envisioning a world where human beings fore-
ground their (a)gender and (a)sexual identities as important means, rather
than onerous obstacles to achieving fuller humanity. I fantasize about God
prophesying the emergence of new theologies in which God is liberated from
the fetters of cisnormativity, transnormativity, heteronormativity, and homo-
normativity. I see God inviting and inspiring more and more communities
to grow increasingly open and affirming as God’s aspiration. I think of God
aching in slumber because human beings have learned to effectively and glee-
fully dehumanize each other due to differences in sexuality, gender, and sex.
Still I imagine God enfolding and integrating all these processes as God’s
own anticipations of erotic dreams, in which God will shudder with intense
pleasure at the thought of the radical goodness that may/will emerge in
humanity. God is excited by possibilities of a new world in collaboration
with human persons, in which God can moan with enthusiasm and satisfac-
tion, “See, I am we are making all things new” (Revelation 21.5; sous rature
and emphasis added). I find it exhilarating to think of God’s eagerness to
share God’s erotic dreams with us.
Sebastian Kappen visualizes a God who “comes to us, to everyone of good
will, in the form of an unconditional challenge to shake off our shackles and
to fashion a new home for the human family, a new society in which the free
development of each and every one will be assured.”26 Perhaps Kappen’s
words constitute a more pastorally accessible articulation of what I am try-
ing to get at in terms of God’s desire for human beings to share in God’s
own erotic dreams, which will never materialize unless human beings are
240  Joseph N. Goh
willing to take up this “unconditional challenge” to become better versions
of themselves.
As such, this book is fundamentally about opportunities to participate in
God’s erotic dreams. These opportunities are within the reach of students,
educators, activists, ordinands, clergypersons, pastors, and theologians – all
those who are serious about creating a more just, equitable, inclusive, and
affirming world for all through implements of faith, and who are willing
to succumb to “the urge to trespass, as a metaphor for the need of drastic,
improvised changes.”27 These opportunities are within the reach of those
who humbly acknowledge that “God is present in multiple ways in the gen-
erations of shifting, porous, and diverse conditions of humankind, not in
exhaustive religious taxonomies.”28
As this book intends to act incarnationally or to spur the continuous word-
(re)made-flesh, it echoes Bob’s insight that “there is a profound linkage of
God’s incarnation in Christ and the Spirit’s incarnation in the world of created
life,”29 and Patrick S. Cheng’s idea that Christ’s incarnation was a project of
“bridging the gap between the divine and the human, but . . . also . . . about
bridging the gap between sexuality and spirituality.”30 I prefer to see incarna-
tion as a synonym for continuous collaborative efforts between the human and
the divine in the everyday actualization of meaningful human life, not unlike
Thomas Bohaches’s elucidation of incarnation as a fully embodied “accep-
tance that we bear Christ within us – the part of God that is instilled in us to
bring forth from ourselves the offspring of Christ-ness: self-empowerment,
creativity, awareness of creation, joy, love, peace and justice-making.”31
The incarnation teaches humankind that in the pursuit of knowing God in
each other and knowing each other in God, material-secular and spiritual-
theological dichotomies are false. It is truly in the deepest recesses of “doing
human” that God is revealed and concealed. Hence, this anthology strives
to provide incarnational revelations of a God who resides in the doings of
humanness, including the doings of odd flesh.
To act incarnationally is to assist theology in daring to dream and to mak-
ing those dreams come true, to float courageously in the clouds yet resolutely
planted on terra firma. To act incarnationally is to encourage theology to
look toward the promise of a new day, the pledge of a better world, and
the realization of the word-(re)made-flesh for all. To act incarnationally is
to motivate theology to reproduce the embodiedness of God in radical and
even unprecedented ways, so that the face of God is repeatedly visibilized
in creation, even peculiar creation. To act incarnationally is to (re)animate
theology to participate in the privilege of enabling God’s erotic dreams to
become a recurring reality for God.

Notes
  1 Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Sexual Strategies in Practical Theology: Indecent The-
ology and the Plotting of Desire with Some Degree of Success,” Theology &
Sexuality 4, no. 7 (1997): 50.
 Afterword  241
  2 Thomas Bohache, “Can We Sex This?: Eroticizing Divinity and Humanity,” in
Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, ed.
Robert E. Shore-Goss et al. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 140.
  3 Althaus-Reid, “Sexual Strategies in Practical Theology,” 50.
  4 Wati Longchar, “Church, Homophobia and Heterosexuality,” in A Theological
Reader on Human Sexuality and Gender Diversities: Envisioning Inclusivity, ed.
Roger Gaikwad and Thomas Ninan (Delhi, India: ISPCK/NCCI, 2017), 349.
  5 These are some of the questions that Bob and I crafted at the nascent stages of
this book’s gestation.
  6 Rohr, “Prophets: Self Critical Thinking.”
  7 A nod to the work of Orlando O. Espín, Idol and Grace: On Traditioning and
Subversive Hope (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014).
  8 Rohr, “Prophets,” para. 4.
  9 Loughlin, “Introduction, 9.
10 I would like to thank Stephen Suleeman, Muhammad Hafiq AR and Adrian Y.
T. Yao for helping me with the Bahasa Malaysia translations.
11 I use the singular term “theology” in this chapter to designate the multiplicity and
plurality of theologies.
12 See Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Former Malaysia PM Najib Razak Faces New
Charges Over Missing $681m,” The Guardian, September 20, 2018, www.
theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/20/former-malaysia-pm-najib-razak-charges-
missing-628m-1mdb-corruption-court; Umi Khattab, “Wawasan 2020: Engi-
neering a Modern Malay(Sia): State Campaigns and Minority Stakes,” Media
Asia 31, no. 3 (2004): 170–77; Marc Lourdes, “Prime Minister Najib Razak
Ousted as Opposition Scores Victory in Malaysia,” CNN, May 10, 2018,
www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/asia/malaysia-elections-results/index.html; NST
Online, “PM Najib Announces TN50, a New 30-Year Vision for Malaysia,”
NST Online, October 21, 2016, www.nst.com.my/news/2016/10/182377/
pm-najib-announces-tn50-new-30-year-vision-malaysia.
13 My use of the limited term “LGBT” here reflects its popular usage in the Malay-
sian news media, but is meant to encompass various forms of diversity in sex,
sexuality and gender.
14 See Mei Mei Chu, “LGBT Activist Numan Afifi Quits as Syed Saddiq’s
Press Officer,” The Star Online, July 9, 2018, www.thestar.com.my/news/
nation/2018/07/09/lgbt-activist-numan-afifi-quits-as-syed-saddiq-press-officer/;
Thasha Jayamanogaran and Cadence Cheah, “Man Nabbed for Assaulting
Transgender Woman,” Malay Mail, August 17, 2018, www.malaymail.com/
news/malaysia/2018/08/17/man-arrested-in-seremban-for-alleged-hate-crime-
after-assaulting-transgende/1663424; Loshana K. Shagar, “Mujahid: Portraits of
LGBT Activists Removed from George Town Festival on My Orders,” The Star
Online, August 8, 2018, www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/08/08/mujahid-
portraits-of-lgbt-activists-removed-from-george-town-festival-on-my-orders/.
15 Goh, “Practical Guidelines for SOGIESC Theologising in Southeast Asia,” 200.
16 M. Mani Chacko, “A Word of Appreciation,” in Theologizing Tribal Heritage:
A Critical Re-Look, ed. Hrangthan Chhungi (New Delhi, India: ISPCK & ISET-
ECC, 2008), xi–xii.
17 Mary Cecilia Claparols, “The Body: A Testimony to Discipleship (John 19.25–
27),” in Body and Sexuality: Theological-Pastoral Perspectives of Women in
Asia, ed. Agnes M. Brazal and Andrea Lizares Si (Quezon City, Philippines:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), 155.
18 Joseph N. Goh, “Sacred Sexual Touch: Illness, Sexual Bodies and Sacramental
Anointing in Rural Bidayŭh Villages,” Rural Theology: International, Ecumeni-
cal and Interdisciplinary Perspectives 12, no. 1 (2014): 44.
19 See Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology.
20 Goh, Living Out Sexuality and Faith, 128.
242  Joseph N. Goh
21 Kwok Pui-lan, “Theology as a Sexual Act?,” Feminist Theology 11, no. 2 (2003):
151.
22 Amli Hussin, “Sheila Majid: Datanglah Ke Dalam Mimpiku,” YouTube Video,
04:49, February 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fc2OaoW1oM.
23 Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, & Resurrec-
tion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 24. Original emphasis.
24 Michael Sepidoza Campos, “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in
Filipino Cultural Spaces,” in Queer Religion, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay
Emerson Johnson (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 2:185.
25 Susannah Cornwall, Controversies in Queer Theology (London: SCM Press,
2011), 149.
26 Sebastian Kappen, “Orientations for An Asian Theology,” in Theological Reflec-
tion on Asia’s Struggle for Full Humanity, ed. Virginia Fabella, Jack Clancey, and
John Ma (Hong Kong: Plough Publications, 1982), 117. Original emphasis.
27 Althaus-Reid, “Sexual Strategies in Practical Theology,” 50.
28 Joseph N. Goh, “The Word Was Not Made Flesh: Theological Reflections on the
Banning of Seksualiti Merdeka 2011,” Dialog 51, no. 2 (2012): 150.
29 Robert E. Shore-Goss, “Grace Is Green: Green Incarnational Inclusivities,” in
Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, ed.
Robert E. Shore-Goss et al. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 71.
30 Patrick S. Cheng, “Cur Deus Homo(Sexual): The Queer Incarnation,” in Queer-
ing Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, ed. Robert
E. Shore-Goss et al. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 60.
31 Bohache, “Embodiment as Incarnation,” 28.
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Index
Abram, David 18
ACT UP 3, 10
Ahmed, Sara 35, 37, 40
AIDS 3, 129, 130, 133, 169
Alison, James 45
Almodóvar, Pedro 161, 162
alternative orthodoxy(ies) 8, 9, 115
Althaus-Reid, Marcella 1, 6, 9, 11, 13,
15, 17, 19, 53, 56, 124, 126, 129,
135, 154, 159, 160, 161, 170, 253,
257, 259
Anglican Church 59
Antichrist 19, 197, 205
Ascended Christ 17, 116, 123, 124,
131, 133
Ascension 16, 116, 130, 131, 133
asceticism 16, 137
Balthasar, Hans von 157
baptism 35, 38, 41, 153, 165
Baptiste Metz, Johann 10
Bataille, George 142
Batumalai, S. 65
BDSM 124, 128, 129, 137, 138, 139,
140, 141, 143, 146, 148, 150
Beguines 15, 110, 252
Bell, Catherine 140
Beltran, Michele 83
Benedict XVI 95
Bernard of Clairvaux 99
Berthier, Jean-Ferdinand 177
Bevans, Stephen 53
Bhabha, Homi 125
Bieler, Andrea 238
Blanchard, Douglas 127, 129, 130
Boelz-Webber, Nadia 38
Bohache, Thomas 122, 132, 240
Boisvert, Donald L. 59, 119
Borg, Marcus 4
Brintnall, Kent 17, 142
Brown, Lea 17, 143
Brownstein, Carrie 37
Buechel, Andy 95, 97, 15
Buenting, Julianne 140
Butler, Judith 35, 36, 40, 164
Bynum, Caroline 118
Cahana, Jonathan 140
Campos, Michael Sepidoza 9, 239
Carrette, Jeremy 137, 144, 147, 148, 149
Catholic Church 105
Chacko, M. Mani 237
Cheng, Patrick S. 9, 10, 12, 60, 120,
122, 240
Cherry, Kittredge 130, 131
Choi, Jin-Young 183
Christ 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14,
16, 17, 18, 28, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37,
38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 60, 65, 67, 73,
74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 99, 103,
104, 105, 108, 109, 115, 116, 117,
118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132,
133, 138, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149,
152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 165, 166,
167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173,
196, 197, 198, 199, 203, 207, 209,
210, 211, 212, 216, 220, 225, 227,
240, 246, 247, 248, 250, 252, 255
Christianophobia 14
cisnormativity 239
Clifford, Jo 131, 132
Copeland, Shawn 119
Cornwall, Susannah 9, 56
Corpus Christi 131, 132
Cotter, Holland 87
Council of Vienne 99
Crossan, John Dominic 216
264 Index
D’Costa, Gavin 157 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172,
Dakota Access Pipeline 226 188, 195, 196, 199, 200, 203, 205,
Daly, Mary 157 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 215, 216,
Damian, Peter 202 223, 224, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237,
Deaf 184, 185, 187 238, 239, 240
deafness 175 Godad, Enrique 161
Debroise, Olivier 77 Goh, Joseph N. 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15,
DeLuna, Jommer 186 21, 51, 22, 233
Diego, Juan 73, 81, 84, 85 Gracias, Virgencita de Guadalupe 83,
Dinshaw, Carolyn 98 84, 85, 86
divine lavishness 13, 51, 64 Gregersen, Miels 117
Doctrine of Discovery 20, 220, 221, Gregory of Nyssa 8, 195
222, 226 Grimes, Ronald 140
Donohue, William 131
Dum Diversas 219 Halberstam, Judith 43, 44
Hammers, Corie 141
ecclesiology 167 Hanying, Ong Agnes 20, 196
ecclesiophobia 14 Hao, Yap Kim 12
Ellis, Havelock 139 Heinrich of Halle 104
el otro lado 121 Helgemo, Marlene 225
eschatology(ies) 19, 216, 223 heteronormativity 5, 8, 20, 51, 54, 55,
Espinoza, Robyn Henderson 9 58, 61, 155, 170, 199, 203, 210, 239
Eucharist 138, 143, 146, 149 heteropatriarchalism 158
Evangelium Vitae 156 heteropatriarchy 155, 171, 195, 198, 207
Hing, Ng Moon 58
Farley, Wendy 3, 8, 39, 100, 101 Hoffmann, Larence 140
Federation of Asian Bishops’ Hollibaugh, Amber 217, 218
Conferences (FABC) 57 Hollywood, Amy 99
Fierce Tenderness 168 Holy Spirit 10
Flowing Light of the Godhead 100 homopatriarchy 195
Font, Pedro 219 Howe, Delmas 16, 127, 128, 129,
Forestier, Claudius 177 130, 259
Foucault, Michel 140, 164 Hsing, Chen Kuan 56
Francis of Assisi 8 Hunt, Mary 168
Free Community Church (FCC) 3, 12,
27, 31, 33, 198 incarnation 11, 115, 116, 123, 124, 127,
Freud, Sigmund 139 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 169, 240
Frida Kahlo 89 inclusivity 3, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 22, 29,
30, 31, 33, 32, 34, 116, 117, 118,
Gebara, Ivone 159 176, 189, 257, 259
George, Karimpumannil Mathai 61, 70, Indecent Theology 160
156, 159, 190, 236, 251 Inter Caetera 220
God 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, intercarnations 11
14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 32, 33, 34, 35, intersectionalities 234
36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, Irigaray, Luce 157
47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, Isherwood, Lisa 9
59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 74, 81,
87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, Jackelén, Antje 212
101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, Jakarta Theological Seminary 6
109, 115, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, Jantzen, Grace 157
127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 143, 144, Jenkins, Philip 202
147, 148, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, Jesus 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 19, 46, 60, 73, 74,
158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 81, 100, 115, 116, 118, 120, 127,

130, 131, 133, 143, 167, 181, 183,
184, 185
John Paul II 95, 156
Johnson v. M’Intosh 220
Johnson, Elizabeth 14
Johnson, Jay Johnson 202
Jordan, Mark D. 2, 3, 9, 14, 80, 81, 117,
120, 121, 134, 152, 157, 172, 191
Joseph, Jake 3, 4, 7, 3, 6, 7, 20, 79, 190
Joshua, Langreaux 132
Index  265
National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force 227
Neo-Mexicanism 75, 76, 77
North by Northwest 209
Noyes, John K. 140, 146, 147
O’Murchu, Diarmuid 4
Ong, Pauline 6
Orellana, Margarita de 82
Our Lady of Guadalupe 14, 15, 86

Ka’ahumanu, Lani 228 Pacheca, Cristina 80

Kalbian, Aline H. 156 Pentecost 16, 115, 116, 125, 191
Kappen, Sebastian 239 Playing with Redemption 133
Keller, Catherine 11 Pope Alexander VI see Inter Caetera
Kelly, Michael Bernard 9, 65 Pope Francis 95, 106, 107, 108
King Alfonso V of Portugal 219 Pope Nicolas V 219
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 139 Pope Mackenzie 128
Kröndorfer, Bjorn 118 posada 126
Kushner, Tony 3 Preston, James 42
prophetic performativity 39, 40, 41, 42
L Épée, Abbe de 177 Psychopathia Sexualis see Krafft-Ebing,
La Mala Educación 17, 18, 161 Richard von
La Mala Education 154 PTSD 6
Laccetti, Nicholas 17, 143, 144 Pui-lan, Kwok 237
Lakeland, Paul 47 Pulse Nightclub 37
Langreaux, James 132
Lenoir, Alphonse 177 queer: church 34; ecclesiology 13,
Leung, Elizabeth 9 34, 46; failure 13, 34, 35, 44, 45;
Liew, Tat-Siong Benny 127 hermeneutics 142; phobia 15;
Loughlin, Gerard 9, 11, 234, 253 theologians 6, 7, 9; theology(ies) 12,
18, 166, 239
MacKendrick, Carmen 16 Quero, Hugo Córdova 11, 17, 53, 127,
Macrina 195 154, 162
Majid, Sheila 238
marriage equality 7 Rawa, Mujahid Yusof 236
Masters, Korla 229 Rieger, Joerg 5
McNally, Terrence 16, 131 Rika, Avem Tenjou 17, 141, 142,
Mechthild of Magdeburg 15, 98, 100, 101 151, 152
Mendoza, Manuel Villaobos 120 Rivera, Mayra 122, 123
Meneses, Kristine C. 18, 180 Rodríguez, Ignacio 161
Methodology: Asian Christian Rohr, Richard 5, 9, 96, 115, 196, 234
Theology 56 Roman Catholic 51
Meyers, Robin 125 Rosenau, Sara 13
Miles, Margaret 115 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 156
Milk, Harvey 130 Russell, Letty M. 45
Min-Seo, Park 186
Mohamad, Mahathir 236 Sabia-Tanis, Justin 9, 14, 73
Mok, Bryan 17, 137 Schneider, Laurel 123, 124
Muñoz, Jose Esteban 76 Schottroff, Luise 238
Muñoz, Manuel Villaobos 126 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 74
My Dangerous Desires 217; see also Shepard, Matthew 126, 130
Hollibaugh, Amber shibari 17, 141, 142
266 Index
Shore-Goss, Robert 3, 9, 115, 163 transnormativity 239
Siew, Miak 3 Trexler, Richard 118
Silverman, Kaja 142 Turner, Victor 140
Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence 4, Turo, Pilar 87
125, 126
Society of Mary 105 United Church of Christ 4, 7, 225, 227
Sodom and Gomorrah 201 United Methodist Church 12, 42, 43
Song, C. S. 52, 56 Urvashi Vaid 227, 230
songsang 14, 15, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58,
64, 65, 262 Veritatis Splendor 156
St. Paul 95 Viego, Antonio 77
Standing Rock 225, 228 Vilchis, Gerardo 77, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90
Stations of the Cross 128 Villarreal, Jaime Moreno 79
Stoller, Robert 140 Virgin Mary 14, 73, 74, 81, 84, 126
Stonewall Riot 125 Virgin of Guadalupe see Virgin Mary
Stuart, Elizabeth 38, 144, 168, 196 Voelkel, Rebecca 19, 56, 214
Suleeman, Stephen 5, 6 Volf, Miroslav 5
synaesthesia 18
Warner, Sara 126
Tanner, Kathryn 35, 41, 47 Weiss, Margot 146, 147
Teena, Brandon 130 White Jr., Kendall O. 63
Teik, Pang Kee 236 White, Daryl 63
Tertullian 206 Wilcox, Melissa 125, 126
Tetragrammaton 158 Wilson, Nancy L. 63
The Gospel According to Jesus Queen Wong, Pearl 17, 137
of the Heaven 131 Wright, N. T. 16, 115, 116, 133
The Laramie Project 126 Wu, Rose 9, 56
The Psychic Life of Power 164
Todd, Julie 42 Yip, Lai-shan 62
Tonantzin 14
Tonstad, Linn Marie 4, 16, 116 Zenil, Nahum 16, 73, 75, 77, 86, 87