Queer Soul and Queer Theology (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9780367820497, 9780367743970, 9781003011637, 0367820498

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Queer Soul and Queer Theology

This book takes up the question of Christian queer theology and ethics through the contested lens of “redemption.” Starting from the root infinitive “to deem,” the authors argue that queer lives and struggles can illuminate and re-value the richness of embodied experience that is implied in ­Christian ­incarnational theology and ethics. Offering a set of virtues gleaned from contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and ­asexual (LGBTIQA) lives and communities, this book introduces a new framework of ethical reasoning. Battered and wrongly condemned by life-denying theologies of redemption and desiccating ethics of virtue, this book asserts that the resilience, creativity, and epistemology manifesting in queer lives and communities are essential to a more generous and liberative Christian theology. In this book, queer “virtues” not only reveal and re-value queer soul but expose covert viciousness in the traditional (i.e., inherently colonial and racist, and thus ungodly) “family values” of dominant Christian ethics and theology. It argues that such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large, including the redemption of God. This book will be a key resource for scholars of queer theology and ­ethics as well as queer theory, gender and race studies, religious studies, and Christian theology more generally. Laurel C. Schneider is Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt ­University, USA. She is the author of Re-Imagining the Divine (1999), ­Beyond ­Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (2007), and co-editor of Polydoxy: Theologies of Multiplicity and Relation (2010) and Awake to the Moment: An Introduction to Theology (2016). Thelathia Nikki Young is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender ­Studies and Religion at Bucknell University, USA. She is the author Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (2016) and co-­author of In Tongues of Mortals and Angels (2018).

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and ­Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and ­research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. The Use and Abuse of the Spirit in Pentacostalism A South African Perspective Edited by Mookgo S. Kgatle and Allan H. Anderson Active Hermeneutics Seeking Understanding in an Age of Objectivism Stanley E. Porter and Jason C. Robinson Proclaiming Holy Scriptures A Study of Place and Ritual David H. Pereyra Queer Soul and Queer Theology Ethics and Redemption in Real Life Laurel C. Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young Multilateral Theology A Twenty-First-Century Theological Methodology Timothy T.N. Lim For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/religion/series/RCRITREL

Queer Soul and Queer Theology Ethics and Redemption in Real Life

Laurel C. Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young

First published 2021 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 © 2021 Laurel C. Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young The right of Laurel C. Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-82049-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74397-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01163-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Prelude

1

1

Introducing queer redemption

5

2

Talking to the dead

17

3

Queer creativity

34

4

Embodied beings and desires

49

Interlude: the spaces

67

Interlude: the fence

71

5

Scandal and improvisation

75

6

Queer relations

90

7

Queer transformative epistemologies

110

Postlude

123

Index of names and subjects Index of biblical references

127 133

Acknowledgments

We have so many people to thank in the evolution of this project. Our early conversations with Josh Wells at Routledge led to a series of wonderful conversations with Mark Jordan as we found our shared passions for writing about queer life in ways that most reflected the experiences of our own lives, and that of our various queer communities. The support of our institutions, Bucknell University and Vanderbilt University, made all the difference in our ability to meet and write together over the course of a year. Thank you to Erin Parks for reading the manuscript and helping us with the index. Our families, especially our spouses, Emilie Townes and Benae Beamon, deserve our undying gratitude. The greatest gift of a collaborative project is the way it can deepen friendships, even through the trials and tribulations of deadlines, pandemics, and family tragedy. We are grateful for the queer virtue of friendship that this project created!

Prelude

“No matter where you go, or what you do, I will always love you.” His voice was deep, gentle. On the nights when he didn’t miss bedtime because of meetings or events at the church, my father would lean over each of us, perched on the side of our beds, and kiss our foreheads. “Goodnight.” Those words were a magical shield, spoken night after night into a darkened bedroom where childhood fears might lurk behind doors or under beds. They wrapped each of us in turn in a simple truth. Their repetition was like the layering of a foundation, each one settling and cementing in the last—“no matter where you go, or what you do…” He was a quiet man, too philosophical and interested in difficulty to be edifying in the pulpit, but he had an ability to be with people in their struggles that gave them confidence, made them realize they could lean on him and make it to the next day. One night at dinner the phone rang, as it often did. Someone was in trouble. He had a gun, he said. He was going to kill someone, he said. He was going to kill my father, he said. “Wait for me,” my father said into the phone. “I’ll be right there.” Over the years, the church became less prosperous, peopled more with trouble and restlessness than with wealth. Sex workers, runaways, alcoholics, lost hippies, and the desperately poor knew his door was open to them—somehow they knew. My mother would cull our clothes for the children. The living room couch sometimes had an occupant for a day or two. The basement housed a small, fragrant band of Hare Krishnas, for a while. One day a college student burned himself to death on the town common to protest the war. My father was shaken by that, talking late into the night with my mother about what he was doing, and not doing, to help. He felt inadequate, always. He had no words to preach that were sufficient to the world’s agony. I was in the front yard, 6 or 7 years old, and with my mother’s help I was trying to teach the stray dog to sit and stay. My father came around the corner of the house, and when my mother turned to him he said “I had two visitors in my study just now, two men.” She didn’t answer, perhaps knowing that he was not finished. “They want me to marry them.” There was a pause, perhaps they were glancing at my back. “What did you say?” my

2  Prelude mother asked. “Absolutely not,” he replied. “I cannot.” There was something in his voice. Pain, perhaps, and something else I’d not heard before. It was unsettling, and as they disappeared into the house, I wondered what it meant that two men would want to marry. When I was 17, the church’s gradual impoverishment had become a problem at higher levels. There was a trial of sorts, a visit from a church official who would hear from the members of the congregation about my father’s fitness for the position. By then, there was tension at home about it all. My mother was angry that there should be any questions about it. Hadn’t they both devoted themselves to the poor and the troubled; how was that not the path of faith? It was decided that she should not attend, that her anger would not help things. I asked to go. He looked heavily at me and said, “you know that you cannot say anything, that nothing you say will have any weight because you are my family.” I did not understand that, but I agreed. The trial was a long torture. It was a large circle of church members, people I had known most of my life. The riff-raff of a mostly prosperous college town. Person after person spoke of my father’s care for them, his life for them. They each were raw, unfinished, stumbling, and full of gratitude. The church official was silent throughout, unmoved. My father sat, his head bowed, knowing all along what I suddenly knew, that this circle of exposed and flayed hearts would make no dent in the edifice of the visitor. After that, after they left the church for good, my parents started a small organization for families in public housing and did odd jobs to make ends meet. Their world was populated with a widening range of people in their town, and my father seemed to always be at the front of understanding and accepting them. When I came home after college with my first girlfriend, however, I discovered the brick wall at the end of his open arms. For the first time in my life, my father could not stay in a room with me, could not look me in the eyes. He said nothing to me, except once he walked through the living room where I was seated alone, muttering, “I cannot, I cannot accept it.” “No matter where you go, or what you do, I will always love you.” It was a pit I stared into, an abyss opening up at the small, silent end of that statement. I never thought there was a period on the sentence. But there it was. My mother understood, and she came around more quickly than him. It was less work for her, for a lot of reasons. But my father and I suffered apart over this. I wrote him an angry letter, throwing the lie of his words back at him, announcing with all of the wounded drama of youth that I would choose my lover every day over him, even if I were dying. There was a long silence, and then a very long letter, 35 pages of nostalgia, struggle, pleading, and his failure to understand. His attempts to tell me he still loved me were shredded by his efforts to explain away my life. It was a terrible, ridiculous tome, exposing his helpless need to have been a good father at war with every moral fiber of his immigrant parents’ religious teaching.

Prelude  3 My love was misguided he wrote at length, a disability, born of my own care for the outcast, broken and maimed. I loved him for the herculean contortions of it even as I folded the pages and thought of burning them. I turned away, decisively, from him. Never again that quiet, nighttime voice. It took years for him to come around, years for me to see that he had, and to turn back. My parents’ home sat in the middle of a liberal college town, with anti-war Quakers who stood silent with their signs on the town common every Sunday, with rainbow bunting that began to bloom on churches and businesses across the valley. Slowly, almost without notice, he accepted that I was a lesbian, even though no one ever heard him use that word. He took in my lover when she was outed and lost her job with youth. He awkwardly but willingly shared his basement hive of non-profit work with her while she slowly put her world back together. My own rigid hurt softened at the edges. An unspoken agreement between us slowly spun a thin web across the abyss. He began to show signs of memory loss around the time that the state I lived in made gay marriage legal. More and more, his normal, gentle quietness hid confusion. I read an article about elementary school teachers trying to save arts programs in their schools by using brain science and the power of music to aid in cognitive development. My brother found my father’s old clarinet and fixed it up for him. I gave him a book called This Is Your Brain on Music. He read it like a bible, dog-earing the pages, taking notes. He started playing his clarinet for hours at a time, most days. His tone on the instrument was beautiful, soulful. When I married at last, he played in the ceremony, Simple Gifts. He kissed my spouse, danced with my mother at the reception. Eventually I had to find a way to insert my name each time I saw him for the first time. I went to live with my parents for a period when my mother became ill and they could no longer manage alone. As I worked with my sisters and brother to find a solution to their care, he would take my mother aside, ask who that nice young man was who sat in their living room on the phone or computer. He stayed gentle. He was still good at faking understanding during a conversation. He had a way of laughing at his growing dementia and giving people room to laugh with him, easing their awkwardness with his own. He spoke, at times, of the failure he had so often felt himself to be, especially when he could not ease my mother’s physical suffering. He began to return more and more to the farm and family of his childhood. To the young student burning on the town common. To a train ride his family made when he was 16, with all of the animals and equipment, after selling the farm in Wisconsin for a new one in California. We visited him in the dementia ward recently. “Dad!” I said loudly, to orient him to his relation to me, and he smiled broadly. It was a good day, he could place me. He came in for a hug, so glad to see me. I could feel the bony frame of the very old, his arms still strong. I kissed his stubbled cheek. “We can’t stay long, this time, dad, but wanted to stop and see you.”

4  Prelude He looked from me to my spouse, and I knew he did not recognize her. “This is my wife, dad.” Though we don’t usually like that word for ourselves, I knew it was a shorthand he could more easily grasp. His face went still. He looked at me then, uncharacteristically sharp-eyed. It happens with dementia, a sudden return to clarity. “No.” He said it quietly, his eyes shuttered. He looked away. I was silent. She hadn’t heard him say it, hadn’t seen the turn. He would never be impolite. For that I was grateful. He had forgotten. I had been prepared for our names and faces to become thin tissues, easily dissolved in the rainfall of memory loss. How we had to cut new ones out every time and hold them up for him to see. But I had not prepared myself for this forgetting, this disappearance like a house sliding into the sea. What he had built on top of his own old foundations to make his goodnight promises true again, was gone. He sat then in his wing chair, looking away from us and out the window of his room in the dementia wing, a quiet old man cared for by a staff who loved his gentle manner and his occasional philosophical riffs. The sharp moment already forgotten. We put on our coats. I leaned over his bald head and kissed it. “No matter where you go, or what you do, dad, I will always love you.”

1

Introducing queer redemption

This book came to life in the months before the human world was stopped in its tracks by a virus called COVID-19. We watched from our two perches in Pennsylvania and coastal Massachusetts as the spring came early and wet, ensuring what would become an unusually lush early summer that provided abundantly for animals on the ground and in the air. From indoors, people watched the animals come more and more out of hiding, showing a vitality to the earth that human presence and industry normally forces into the shadows. Even the world’s dwindling bees seemed to make something of a comeback. Local clammers and farmers began reporting unusual abundance among the bivalves, asparagus, and summer squashes. Surely, a few short months of forced retreat by humans could not account for that or for the great blue walls of hydrangeas or the extra height of the sunflowers. But it seemed more than a metaphoric reversal, with humans watching from the shadows as wildflowers grew extravagantly, and moose, deer, otters, wolves, and geese walked, trotted, waggled, and loped down city streets. A closet door, of sorts, opened in the world when the power of a virus briefly dampened the noise and grip of human dominance. This book matured as the United States erupted in protest over another brutal killing of an unarmed Black man. The video of a policeman’s knee on George Floyd’s neck made the fact of racist police brutality come home to millions of white people who had avoided the truth over centuries of black and brown killings and deepened the grief of black and brown people the world over. We heard Mr. Floyd call for his mama, rasping that he couldn’t breathe, as the officer slowly squeezed the life out of him, and we absorbed the cold reality of state-sanctified murder before our eyes. There was a horrifying irony in the masked protests that exploded in the wake of that video and the murders that continued. We were protesting a death by asphyxiation just as a virus that steals breath was sweeping the world. Could there be any possibility of a queer redemption in this broken and soul-sick time? We have to think so. The catchphrase “new normal” has become standard since the pandemic arrived. But it refers prematurely to a normal that has not yet arrived, and so masks uncertainty over the deadly loss of efficacy in the old normal/s. In fact, humans face a future stripped of

6  Introducing queer redemption whatever certainty we had. But there is also always the possibility of something unfamiliar emerging, even as we experience a momentary stumble in the familiar hegemony of white heteropatriarchy as it has been wielded in Washington and other centers of power. It is a queer time for sure. Perhaps even a time for queerer thinking that is long used to uncertain futures, nimble course changes, and, of course, animals of all stripes coming out into the open.

Why redemption? In this book, we take up the question of queertheology and ethics through the contested lenses of “redemption” and “virtue,” theological terms that, in Christian use, have often oriented Christian ideas of each in opposition to the lives, experiences, and communal formations of lesbians, gay men, transwomen and transmen, and other genderqueer people.1 Non-normative sex or gender self-understandings and their consequent embodiments have historically condemned LGBTIQA people to a theological condition of lack or perversion. According to Christian heteronormative logic, queer folk lack virtue on the one hand and stand in need of divine forgiveness and redemption on the other. Attainment of both is made possible only by renunciation of queer life and acceptance of the divine status of heteropatriarchal social and sexual relations. The fact that heteropatriarchal social and sexual relations are also always configured in a modern global context of racism means that the virtues and redemption demanded of queer people by a dominant Christian theology and ecclesia are also—regardless of the racial profile of the churches that issue it—a demand rooted in and shaped by the deep formations of white supremacy. However, despite the ways in which the concepts of redemption and virtue have been wielded against those whose gendered and sexual desires do not conform to traditional Christian heteropatriarchal norms, both terms have rich potential for describing the survival and healing wisdom of heteropatriarchy’s exiles, those about whom the gatekeepers of the status quo may stomp and rage, complaining “nevertheless, they persisted.”2 Reimagining individual and communal life gleaned from hard-won experiences of persisting nevertheless is, we believe, one of the healing arts so desperately needed in a human world that sets individualism, greed, and social dominance as virtues at the expense of livable life for the 99 percent. What signposts exist that can guide us onto more healing pathways for the human and non-human world? There are multiple exiles in the world, living with flair under the radar of white supremacist heteronormative surveillance and discipline, which means that there are multiple options for reimaging virtuous lives according to the native symbols and horizons of multiple traditions. Because we come from Christian backgrounds and our areas of expertise lie specifically in theology and ethics, we pick up the threads of our own tradition, believing

Introducing queer redemption  7 that we can contribute a revaluing of some important Christian concepts. We have taken up the concepts of virtue and redemption specifically so that we, who are children of that tradition, may move more gracefully into a future in which our spiritual practices and healing arts affirm a more whole embodied and sexual goodness in human diversity. We believe also that this thinking work is our piece of a wider challenge before all of us who are children of the earth regardless of religion, practice, or place, who seek virtues of good living that are no longer structured on the oppression of others. We work hard to avoid Christian supremacy just as we battle white, heteropatriarchal supremacy, but know that our own tradition of Christian images and terms are ever vulnerable to covert universalization. What we hope is that the wisdom we have gleaned from queer lives in this project may serve to nourish a larger spirit of liberation, creativity, and generosity within Christian circles. We are also glad if this work is of use to others on similar journeys in other traditions, though we do not assume it. Redemption is a peculiarly Christian term, one developed to describe the ecstasy and fulfillment of a life purified of sin, or more specifically, of a life given over “to Christ.” Linked to a persistent but thoroughly unscientific model of the universe in three tiers—heaven, earth, hell—for Christians who maintain that cosmic model, redemption is a kind of safety suit in an otherwise hostile environment. It is a ticket out of hell. As such, its power is primarily negative, focused more on the sins it eschews and the punishment it avoids than on affirmations of embodied life and living. The same is true of many Christian virtues, to the extent that virtue lies in the avoidance of sin. In general, this means that redemption has lost its etymological grounding in the verb “to deem” or value, having become more of a norming agent dependent upon pseudo-virtues that ostensibly purify the flesh (with sex functioning as a prime pollutant). Redemption in this sense is an empty and shapeless concept without the skeletal structure that (hetero)norms provide. Norms in turn are habituated practices that become rules for living, the basic building blocks of theological and social judgment such as sin and salvation, good and bad. It is no surprise then that the overall, dominant shape of Christian beliefs about redemption and its supporting cast of virtue, vice, sin, and salvation now reflect the long thrall of imperial Europe: Roman, Constantinian, and Protestant. Parochial ideas of gender, sex, race, human being, and the very constitution of the world filled the sails of Christian European conquistador and settler ships, resulting in a global colonialism that imposed the same logic of lack and perversion on cultures whose relational and aspirational norms were unfamiliar to and therefore most often despised by the colonists. Redemption, it is clear to us, now stands in need of redemption and that is the primary aim of this book. By seeking a redemption of redemption (and of the God behind it) we do not intend to resuscitate a morbid theological concept for its own sake or to gloss over its role in so much harm. Instead, we think there is more to the practice of redemption than a penal

8  Introducing queer redemption structure of reward and punishment. To re-deem, quite literally, means to rethink, re-imagine, and revalue the worth and existence of something or someone. Having been deemed worthless, queer lives are in a constant process of re-deeming ourselves, but this is not always understood to be divinely inspired or in accordance with “God’s plan” for humanity and the world. We therefore think about redemption less in terms of its negative association of escape from harm and more in terms of re-valuing the racialized sexual, erotic, and fully embodied dimensions of life. To accomplish a revaluing of redemption we must start with lived experiences out of which new and better norms are emerging. To do so, we introduce “queer virtues” as hard-won principles and experiences that not only re-imagine and re-value queer lives and spirits but reveal covert viciousness in the traditional (colonial, racist) “family values” of dominant Christian ethics and theology. We aim not only to outline a theological redemption for queer communities, but believe such re-imagining has redemptive potential for Christian life writ large.

Virtues In Western moral philosophy, there are a couple of ways that the term virtue has meaning. In one sense, to have virtue (good character) is to be, or at least have the capacity to be, morally excellent. Such an understanding situates virtue as a kind of tautological and ontological reality: one is excellent if one is good, which depends, of course, on how “good” is defined. In another sense, virtues can be described as essential elements, perhaps even the building blocks, of moral excellence. If moral excellence is the quality of being oriented toward what people understand to be morally good, based on systematized ideas of “right” and “wrong,” as well as the capacity to recognize, value, and ultimately practice such goodness, then virtues are the features of character that underwrite said quality and capacity. This understanding of morality tends to be singularly focused, with attention on the moral subject and the agency that she exhibits through choices, actions, and habits. Comparatively, in some African moral philosophies, morality and ethics emerge from and speak back to a fundamentally social reality wherein duties that contribute to “the whole” supplant rights that only benefit the individual. 3 In such frameworks, virtues are based on the relational foundation of the human experience and describe dispositions that support and enhance collective human flourishing. A significant and positive feature of virtues is their usefulness in pointing us toward lives of flourishing, happiness, and joy. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum regards virtues as helpful for cultivating practices and affective postures that foster lives without limit and that usher others toward the same kind of freedom and possibility.4 Another important feature of virtues is their ability to support and encourage individual and collective efforts towards those realities and possibilities by pointing to the traditions

Introducing queer redemption  9 from which they emerge and through which they gain wisdom. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in discussions of the goodness embedded in lives with narrative coherence, suggests that virtues provide a singleness of purpose and an awareness of location within tradition, thus allowing people to become moral agents as they develop and practice virtues with others in the tradition. 5 Virtue theorist Iris Murdoch writes that human lives exist in a context in which there is a concept of the Good that grounds our humanity and that can unify our experiences.6 For her, attention and proper orientation to the Good breeds morally excellent practices and experiences of freedom, while virtues act as roadmaps, pointing us toward the Good.7 As we attempt to discern virtues in our admittedly idiosyncratic handle on lived queer experiences we understand that we are thinking within the grain of Western virtue theory. But we are also attending to the social and communal elements of morality and virtues in our own lives that have been forged against that grain in order to survive the demonic significations placed upon us. We understand, in other words, that for those who have been exiled from the realms of virtue by virtue of their bodies, lives, and loves, the very morality that cast them out comes into question. For example, as Katie Geneva Cannon points out in her groundbreaking work Black Womanist Ethics, Black American women have had to “live out a moral wisdom in their real-lived context that does not appeal to the fixed rules or absolute principles of the white-oriented, male-structured society.”8 Much as we aim to do here, Cannon proposes a set of virtues crafted and perfected in African American experience. Those virtues, invisible dignity, quiet grace, and unshouted courage speak directly out of and to that experience, revealing a mode of moral reasoning that can instruct us all.9 In order to highlight some of the practices, traditions, and orientations found in queer spaces and lives toward a better understanding of what virtues may exist therein, we need a variety of tools with which to work. We therefore aim to merge virtue discourse with queer theoretical perspectives and analysis. Of course, as a pair of theologically motivated, queer-oriented moral thinkers, we admittedly approach the subject of virtues with caution. At times, when we have mentioned the use of virtues or virtue ethics to our queer theorist friends or religious studies colleagues who employ queer theory, we have been met with eye rolls or, worse, side-eyes. Such expressions of disdain are meant to remind us that the space between virtue theory and queer theory is like a valley worn wide by the waters of social constructionism and the idea of “nurture” that chisel the rocks of essentialism and “nature.” Inasmuch as virtues and virtue ethics are traditionally steeped in notions of a stable and properly ordered self that bears the capacity to ultimately be good, they epitomize the very thing that queer theories try to deconstruct and dismantle. Because they seem to be stable and essential qualities and point to a static eudemonistic future, queer theorists have not necessarily been

10  Introducing queer redemption fans of ‘the virtues,’ as espoused by Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum. The very alterity and diverse subjectivity from which queerness emerges and to which queerness points shuns notions of selfhood that essentialize and orient our character to an externally determined telos.10 Aristotelian moral thinking (on which much of Western moral philosophy is built), and its resulting discourse, is in one way or another deeply invested in understanding and evaluating hexis (disposition).11 This notion of disposition is inextricably linked in modern thought to essential qualities of character which become essential judgments of persons. This tendency can make it difficult for queer thinkers doing the work of queertheology precisely because of our efforts to articulate the fluidity and multiplicity of queer dispositions, as well as our goal of affirming profound embodied capacities for change. In writing Queer Soul and Queer Theology, we therefore think about virtues less in terms of their associations with character and more in terms of praxis (motivated action) and poiesis (creative transformation). Beyond troubling the notion of essentialism in discussions of morality, putting queer discourse in conversation with virtue ethics and exploring the possibility of queer virtues does the powerful and transformative work of questioning the placement of queer life in a context formerly rendered “beyond moral redemption.”12 For us, acknowledging virtues within marginalized existences is not only an ethical task, but it is also one that debunks the myth that only certain subjectivities have a repository for—or exemplify—features of ‘goodness’ toward which we might direct ethical action.13 In this book, we get to assume that queer folk have and exhibit moral excellence, and we have the opportunity to acknowledge and learn from the grit of surviving and grace of thriving that bespeak queer existence. Even more, we have the chance to lift up virtues that highlight queer complexity and that shape and redeem queer lives. This work also provides counterpoint to explanations of and narratives about Christian virtues that are often told through stories of heteronormativity or with the motivation of maintaining cis-het contexts and social relations. We understand virtues not as stable components of a transcendently and divinely determined “natural” self that lead individuals toward an externally derived ultimate good or set of goods. We describe and employ them, instead, as a series of orientations that speak to human efforts to create and understand ways for communities and individuals to arrive at fully embodied and diverse human flourishing. For us, flourishing is contextually, socially, and politically motivated while it is also cosmically grounded.

Introducing queer redemption  11 The framework for these virtues is a world that exists within the material and the ethereal, within the created and the imagined context. The idea of virtues for us, then, is that they help individuals and communities create the kinds of lives and relations that point to forms and expressions of self and community that reflect the complexity and possibility of an ever evolving and relationally structured cosmos. Pointing beyond the scope of this book, we see theological implications stemming from it that result in new estimations of God and more complex understandings of God’s relation to the world. Even more, if queerness helps us better understand God through a lens of loving possibility embedded within divine energy, then the virtues we have gleaned become a platform for ethics in which we create, improvise, and retell our individual and collective experiences through moral imagination. In our passion for healing and healed planetary life therefore, we are not so secretly interested in the ways that re-deemed virtues can help us to re-value and so re-deem God. That is, we are not as much concerned about how the God figure coordinates virtues and cultivates them in our practices. Instead, we are interested in what our deepest values and the implementation of those values say about how we understand divinity and what is divinely present within the cosmos. For us, this interest is a queer orientation. It is a turning of virtues on its head. Rather than suggest that there is an alternate Good toward which we might cultivate habits and for which we might produce best selves—rightly ordered selves, that is—we suggest that the cultivation of self is a practice of returning to a fundamental notion of one’s own connection to and expression of divine existence within the cosmos. Further, this cultivation is a practice that redeems what has been demonized. It is a process of lifting out of the fray what has been squashed into stultifying and diminished ideas of otherness. Our work in this book is to examine how, in order to experience “the good life,” queer cultivation of habits and practices (or cultivation of queer habits and practices) makes us understand anew who and what God might be. Therefore, our queertheology is not ultimately a projection of a specific God; instead it is a re-estimation of what God has meant, does mean, and may mean for those of us seeking our own redemptive posture in the world. In terms of creative process, we are trying to write through and toward three meta-virtues. For us, they act as the barometer of our writing, measuring our attention to what matters most to us as authors, collaborators, and queer scholars of theology and ethics. As such, they act as our very own spiritual guides, reminding us as we write that our purpose for this work moves beyond the treatment of the specific virtues that we discuss in each chapter and toward a broader cultivation of values and possibilities that sustain our individual and collective flourishing. Thus, we operate with a silent but powerful virtue of “no.” In the creation of each chapter, we ask ourselves what we are refusing or disallowing in the conversation. What are we purposefully rejecting in order to make room for what has not been

12  Introducing queer redemption previously allowed? This intellectual truth-telling leads us easily toward the next meta-virtue in our writing process: a guiding trio of accountability, humility, and self-criticism. We understand the need to check ourselves in relation to our expressive, conceptual, and theoretical limitations. Who are we speaking to? Who are we ultimately leaving out, and why? What is our relation to whiteness, colonization, Christian supremacy, and queerness? (How) are we being honest about our motivations in this process? Lastly, we are propelled in this work by the prime meta-virtue of pleasure, which we take to be an epistemological position and a thread of affirmation of body, sex, sexuality, senses, and laughter that we hope to feel and read as we produce the work. For us, pleasure ought to refract all other virtues worth exploring.

Chapters We begin our journey toward a queer notion of redemption with the dead. Sexual outsiders, especially same-sex lovers, have often been associated with perversion and death. In Chapter 2, we discuss the multiple levels of social and physical death that have resulted for queer people, as well as ways of living and thriving while relegated to social realms of death. There is much going on in the shadows of heteronormativity and much to learn from ancestors whose voices and spirits remain with us. Especially poignant in the multiple and unequally deadly “wakes” of the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics, we recognize the queer dead among us (the ostracized, demonized, racialized “other”) and the deceased among us (ancestral voices and imagined traces of queer ancestry). Talking to the dead has been an important part of queer spiritual healing in the face of religious and social harm. In Chapter 3, we take up creativity as a feature of all human life and its particular importance in queer persistence, community building, and embodied thriving. The creative energies of human communities emerge in response to context and are shaped by the challenges and opportunities of specific times, places, and cultures. This means that the creative expressions of same-sex and genderqueer people have as many iterations and forms as there are human cultures and geographies. Given this universality, however, there are some specific ways that contemporary queer people have manifested creativity in the face of overwhelming oppression and erasure. Coming out and testimony take many forms, especially when self-erasure is seen as an option. Moral adventure results when all of the licit avenues of normative decency are closed but loving and relating in terms of love are still possible “against the grain.” Furthermore, such affirmations, testimonies, and adventures in moral invention require and inspire alternate choreographies and cartographies of life lived under the pressures of (and in spite of) unrelenting oppression. These forms of creativity we identify as having particular queer resonances that suggest redemptive value in the “outsider art” of queer life.

Introducing queer redemption  13 One of the principal conduits for queer oppression runs through “the body”: social, material, erotic, gendered. It is this theme that Chapter  4 engages. Queertheologies have consistently taken stands against a traditional Greco-Roman bifurcation of spirit and body that has manifested in a hierarchy not only of genders (male over female) but of races, religions, and all orders of nature. Hellenistically trained St. Augustine of Hippo, among others, codified the relationship of rightly ordered desires (for God over and—importantly—against the body) in such a way that Christendom evolved into a generally sex-phobic (and so sex-obsessed) religion. The control of sexuality, connected to the patrilineal (and thus patriarchal) control of women, servants, and racial “others” became a religious enterprise, one that still distorts Christian communities in relation to unwed mothers, queer lovers, and the sexual jouissance of just about anyone. Being oneself fully and erotically in one’s body is a virtue that queer folk have had to embrace in spite of the overwhelming censure and often familial and religious exile. Living “out” and “proud” in the gay, lesbian, or trans body, radically affirming sexual attraction and the “good” of queer sex is both political and theological affirmation even as it is a deeply personal refusal to die. This chapter is organized in terms of enfleshed body erotics: skin, breath, touch, orgasm. While Chapter 4 focuses on the centrality of body-selves in queer life and the virtue of materiality and desire, Chapter 5 complicates any tendency toward simplicity in thinking about embodiment by taking up the importance and virtues of performance, improvisation, dissimulation, code-switching, drag, and masks that also mark queer life, survival, humor, and resistance. Queerness has always disrupted essentialized visions of human life, not only in terms of gender and sex but also in terms of boundaries between the diverse orders of being in the cosmos. Queer erotics is about scandalous relations under the normative regime of cis-heteropatriarchy. Queer communities have nurtured strategies of resistance and courage in the face of relentless ostracization through camp, biting humor, and the cultivation of scandal. Scandal, when it expresses a form of resistance to heteronormative and racially inflected oppression, exposes the structure of those vicious social histories and habits. It helps queer folk to organize and form coalitions of shared concern with others whose lives are constricted by oppression. Humor is also a resistant mode of learning that, when it exposes racist and heteronormative norms allows for a generous reworking of value. This combined set of virtues: resistance in the form of scandal or humor, says “no” to pompous seriousness in thrall to the status quo, and dares to create scandal in the service of illumination and transformation. Same-sex loving and gender non-conforming people have always had to say no to heteronormativity and its moral requirements for family and community, at least at some level, in order to live fully embodied lives. The degrees of intimate and communal violence that still dog queer lives includes rejection by biological families, churches, schools, and communities, and

14  Introducing queer redemption mortal danger in the streets. In the context of overwhelming heteronormative ubiquity, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transmen and transwomen, and others have had to create familial structures for themselves that defy rejection of their given families and communities. The story/ies of queer people around the world are full of creative expressions of “chosen family,” passionate friendships, and loyalties that do not conform to standards set by biological norms or modern conceptions of the nuclear family with limited notions of monogamy, reproduction, and patriarchal family structure. Chapter 6 explores the virtue of experimental relations among queer folk that expand, transgress, and allow new forms of relational flourishing. These are relational possibilities that draw out and enhance altruism and a broader responsibility for communal health. The new relational possibilities that exist in queer forms push back on restrictive conceptions of sexual morality and remain critical of homonormative collusion with patriarchal values. As a theological notion, “right relation” is revisited in a queer vein, open especially to familial structures that support the whole community of beings regardless of sexual interest, of polyamorous attachments that challenge narrow binary norms, as well as a breaking down of the “ownership” culture of heteronormative sexual relations. The result of these virtues, lived with intention and care, is an inevitably transformed mode of knowing and being in the world. Queer virtues demand an openness to social change and emergent relational structures that do not always conform to traditions or expectations. This is what we take up in Chapter 7. What counts as knowledge is related to ontological and cultural assumptions about bodies and materiality. Furthermore, the queer virtue of “knowing” is by necessity constructive and imaginative, engaging in something like what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” to establish open postures of learning. The queer virtue of transformative epistemology is, for us, still an open question—how shall we learn from one another enough to recognize the possibilities of redemption when they occur? Old modes of discerning and knowing are not enough to allow us all to recognize the new shoots of a queerly vibrant world so that we may participate in its emergence.

An Ethicist and a Theologian Walked into a Gay Bar… When we decided to write this book together, all we knew was that we wanted to work together on a project in queertheology. As we talked, and met, and ate together, we found that the amazing erotic energy of thinking together bloomed in the words we shared, sparking idea after question after new idea, with many a “yes, I can see that!” and “oooh oooh oooh that makes me think of” and “hmmmm, I don’t know, say it again so I can think about it more” and “what about….” Because we were not yet hampered by the pandemical limitations of travel and social distancing, we met when we could—at the edge of professional meetings, in one or the other’s home,

Introducing queer redemption

15

in an old inn and not in a very scary cabin. Sitting across whatever space we had, laptops open, we dreamed the virtues we wanted to write about, called into words the redemption made of queer lives that we sought for our world so wounded by the mad and cruel machinations of rampant racist, heteropatriarchal, religiously legitimated powers. Each chapter is truly co-written. We decided to write by picking a chapter, writing a “first half” and sending it on, so each of us started half of the chapters and each of us treated the half we then received as if we’d written it ourselves. Rather than tack on a second half, we talked into the half we were given, inevitably growing it to a full chapter. We delighted each other with images and stories. We found deep pleasure in the beauty of each other’s writing and ideas. We surprised each other by breaking stereotype in our images and illustrations. This was the best sort of collaboration, one in which neither felt the weight of having to carry the other for long (a rare collaborative feeling, to be sure!). The writing itself became a friendship. As life (and death) raged around us, as family and global tragedy took us to our knees, as madmen made the world ever more vicious and as we each sought pathways of hope through it all, our partners held us tight, reminded us of the power and importance of this work, fed us and made us laugh, and helped us to return to it and to each other, throughout. So thank you, Benae and Emilie, for seeing us, and so this work of spirit and love, all the way through.

Notes 1 Throughout this book we prefer the compound name “queertheology.” Although we decided to leave the book’s title with queer and theology separated in order not to confuse search engines or potential readers, we will avoid that separation in the text because we have difficulty thinking of “queer” as a modifier of a prior, more original theology, as if queer is simply a style that can be taken on and off like an item of clothing. To assume the latter erases the narrow cultural, even parochial structure of the “theology” that is generally assumed to be neutral and prior to its modifier. Queertheology makes plain not only the inseparability of the compound terms, but also the interstructuring of those terms in every case. 2 As an example, we point to Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to isolate and silence four “freshmen” Representatives— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (MA)—in July 2019. Warning this group known as “the squad” about making public statements against the party, Pelosi tried to admonish those women of color and curtail their proposals, which were deemed “too left” by her and other members of the Democratic Party. The group banded together and continued to speak out against policies that disadvantaged their constituents and that maintained the political status quo. 3 John Mbiti offers the now-famous phrasing of this point. “The philosophical formula about this says ‘I am because we are, and since we are therefore I am.’” John S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, Second Edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2015), 108.

16 Introducing queer redemption 4 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 82–83. 5 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 205, 186. 6 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 54. 7 Ibid., 56 and 69. 8 Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 4. 9 Ibid., 17. 10 Thelathia “Nikki” Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 124. 11 Aristotle and W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1022a–b. 12 Nancy L. Wilson, “Queer Culture and Sexuality as a Virtue of Hospitality” in Robert E. Goss and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart, eds., Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship (New York: The Hawthorn Press, 1997), 23. 13 Ibid.

2

Talking to the dead

Death and life are in the power of the tongue… – Proverbs 18:21

In 1890, Isapo-Muxika/Crowfoot, a Kainai-born chief of the Siksika Blackfoot First Nation, is reported to have said in his last hours “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”1 Life, he says, is a disappearing flicker, with only stories left to tell of its memory. In the history of the world, and in these kinds of moments, each human and other-than-human life is—or seems— inconsequential, especially when taken by itself. No matter how remarkable a life may be, its utter uniqueness and temporality render it fleeting, disappearing as it appears and always in a state of ambiguous existence. Whatever life is, it spends itself like energy, and its impact, however minute or mute, is measured in the multiple effects of its having been; it is accessible only through witnessing and remembering, through testimony and evocation. This is one tautological element of a life: it bears within it the irrevocable necessity of participation in life, to be felt and so on some verbal or nonverbal level to be recognized, told, engaged, and, perhaps even talked to. Every being has its own communicability, its own conjuring in memory that is larger than cognition. There is a felt, embodied, or storied aspect to every existence, a way or ways of continuing to be long after death. This self-evident and yet mysterious reality calls each one who is or has been to a consistent resurrection through connection to something(s) or one(s) other than itself. In this way every life poured into the living is a kind of holy ghost. On the other hand, death and life are not, according to the wisdom collator of Proverbs, free expressions of something ephemeral, but both are subject to the power of speech. “Off with their heads!” demands the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s satirical jab at the power of rulers to kill or let live. 2 In his philosophical treatise on what he calls “bare life,” Giorgio Agamben traces this power to distinguish between sovereign, or recognized life, and bare, or killable life.3 The power of the ruling tongue is the power

18  Talking to the dead to adjudicate who lives and who dies. Proverbs 18:21 also points to a more subtle reality: namely, that death and life are subject to recognition—life and death are what we say they are. Which means “the tongue” has the power not only to kill or let live, but to determine the deadness of the dead. However if, as the poet Birago Diop declares that “Le Morts ne sont pas morts” (“the dead are not dead”) we can ask whether it is only under the power of the tongue—in this sense under the limitations of what we have been told—that we think the dead are both dead and gone.4 Taking this a step further, Judith Butler suggests that, to the extent that an other can affect me, that other also effects me—causes me to exist—and the failure to be affected is also the failure to exist, which is to say, to be a life.5 Life and death are therefore each constituted by relation, which means that the living and the dead may both be much more complex and communicative aspects of what we call life. Life, in this sense, is an effect of communication in the broadest sense, which means it need be neither logocentric nor anthropocentric. The uniqueness of the buffalo’s breath, the utter irreplaceability of this firefly, of that child at play is always passing away, but always affectively communicating beyond itself and so causing others to exist through that relation. When we can recognize life as a collective of interweaving and coconstitutive relations, each life becomes all life and, far from being swamped in indistinction, is consequential in and as its own individual life. All life, or just “life,” sustains and makes each life intelligible, draws energy from and recharges the earth, and encompasses, reflects, and participates in the cosmos. Life understood in this deeply participatory way serves as an enfolding principle of existence that transcends particularity but irrevocably and only exists as particular. So life, while we must treat it here as a concept, should not thereby become overly abstract. Perhaps life can only be expressed in the transient particulars of each one who lives. And death, then, is the erasure of relation and the refusal of encounter. Those exiled from the book of life (the tongue, the recognition, the felt effect) are the dead. Butler puts it another way. There are lives from whom the communal or political status of the living has been stripped, reduced to Agamben’s bare life. Those lives—human, animal, planetary—are expendable, which means that their deaths are neither notable nor grievable.6 Such expulsions from the living are legitimated by pseudo-ethical mythic divisions that distort and colonize the world. Such pseudo-ethics, which produce and are produced by a constructed and signified line between life and death, develops from thinking (and acting) in terms of singular, separable lives in a competitive logic of scarcity, rather than bountiful, intersubjective, and interdependent life. The pseudo-ethics that results depends upon cosmological division and myopia. By paying attention only to parts and siphoning off key elements and eternal connections, mythic divisions emerge that support hierarchical social orders that in turn (dis)miss sacred entanglement and the meaningfulness of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.”7

Talking to the dead  19 Talking to the dead is an attempt to correct such a dismissal and to bridge the divide between what is and is not recognized as having life within the cosmos, between what can and cannot affectively or intelligibly exist herein. Drawing on research with seven black women from the South Carolina low country, LeRhonda Manigault describes talking to the dead as an “ongoing exchange between those of us who are living and those [of us] who are deceased.”8 She notes that this “talking” may take place through customs typically considered religious, as well as cultural activities, acts of remembering (like storytelling), and more. The practice of talking to the dead facilitates relationships to the past but also renders the past timeless. It shatters linear concepts of time to bring connections into the simultaneity of “now.” Time, in other words, becomes dependent upon the contexts of relations, exchanges, and tellings. Stepping outside of the narrow confines of linear time helps us make sense of our limited perceptions, drawing us into the possibility of more generous meaning-making systems and ways of being that are better attuned to the largess of the universe and all its inhabitants. In 2001, a group of black women joined other men and women who gathered in South Africa for the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The trip to South Africa was a first for a number of the American participants, and some of them felt a strong urge to commemorate their “return” to the continent of their ancestors by creating a nighttime ritual of invitation and prayer. Although more than half a continent away from the lands from which most of their ancestors had been stolen, a large number of the American group gathered on the rocky shore of the Indian Ocean for the ritual. They each held a small candle and once the circle was complete they began to pray, inviting any ancestors to join the circle. One member of the circle, who later said she was present to support her sisters, was familiar with the power and dangers of invocation from her experiences in the Condomblé tradition and felt some discomfort because, she said, “we didn’t know whose ancestors were there, and they probably weren’t ours.” As the ritual began, she suddenly heard “clear as a bell” her deceased grandmother’s voice ordering her to blow out her candle, “NOW.” Startled, and without thinking, she obeyed. Her neighbor noticed and whispered “why did you blow out your candle?” She whispered back “Nana just told me to!” Immediately her neighbor did the same, and soon several others blew out their candles. When she asked her grandmother what to do with the candle, her grandmother once again spoke clearly, “Throw it into the water.” She passed the word to others who were waiting to hear what they should do next. She then led the way over the rocks and down to the beach where each woman threw her candle into the ocean and offered a word of apology and thanks. The entire group gathered for the ritual was already attuned to a wider horizon of possibility for the deceased; they were open to the communicative presence of their unknown ancestors whose names and lives had been

20  Talking to the dead brutally amputated from their own memories. The ritual came from a yearning for connection to a severed past, to those marked for social and physical death by enslavement and a colonial industry that spanned half the globe. But perhaps no one in that circle was prepared for the arrival of someone’s well-known, well-loved ancestor, a grandmother not long deceased who showed up to protect the women from themselves, or at least to get her granddaughter out of harm’s way, whatever the harm getting ready to step off that night might have been. The fact that her granddaughter obeyed the familiar voice without hesitation is noteworthy, but perhaps the fact that others trusted the message second-hand, as it sped in whispers around the circle is even more so. Ancestors are not gone—such holy ghosts know things; however their presences flow into the present through energies and folds of time yet mysterious. It is best to listen.9

The (queer) dead Talking to the dead suggests modes of knowing as well as practices that are open to those who are deceased, understanding that they can and do communicate with some of us and that some of us can and do communicate with them. While this boundary-crossing communication ought to make us question the validity of a “natural” and polarized division between what is and is not alive, it also allows us to consider the categories of “the living” and “the dead.” For our purposes, talking to the dead encompasses communications with and through both the deceased and especially those marked as dead, who are dead by the tongue. Boundary-crossing communication illustrates a need for us to pay attention to who and what we place into those categories and the mechanisms that underwrite such placement. This attention is at the heart of queer genealogy, the teasing apart of narratives and frames that render some of us livable and others of us perpetually dead. As writers of queertheology, we believe that processes of talking to the dead destabilize both the notion and impact of boundaries and open us all up to the reconceptualization and subsequent praxis of engaging a wider scope of living entities, identities, and cosmologies. It may already be clear that there is a necessary distinction here between “the dead” and “the deceased,” both of which have ongoing access to life within the cosmos. The deceased are entities that once shared physical, emotional, rational, and geographic space and time with those of us in what we know as “the world.” They lived and moved among us, interacting in “real time” through materiality and other validating mechanisms of earthly existence. Having been alive—in a normatively recognizable and reliable sense—and then discontinued that life, the deceased occupy a space of transition, however complete or incomplete we understand those transitions to be. They no longer participate in our shared physical and material realm in collectively recognizable or validated ways. Without commonplace materiality, the deceased are marked by a no-longer-ness, a used-to-be-ness,

Talking to the dead  21 a was-ness—grammars that point to a kind of finality that renders them occupants of the also-deceased past. The dead signify a different category of existence that includes but is not limited to the deceased. The similarity between the two is in the cessation of universally recognizable and valuable participation in our shared physical world. The difference, however, is that while the deceased occupy a position of having lived, the “dead” are dead as a result of persistent systematic and intentional denial of their livability within the sphere of the living. In the historical context of modernity’s colonialism and slavery, or rather in the still-tumultuous global wake of those long torments, the meaning of civilization became (and still is) normatively parochial. The rational “free” modern subject in the colonial and plantation context was defined by gendered (masculinized) domination and ownership, wholly dependent upon a brutal demarcation of those whose lives mattered, and those whose lives did not. The 60+ million African dead in the Atlantic Ocean and 90+ million Indian dead across the native lands of North and South America alone bear witness to what J. A. Mbembè calls “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence” either for exploitation or for extermination.10 In the long and enduring colonial moment, the racialized, gendered, and sexualized marks of civilization (borne by decent citizens whose lives matter and so warrant protection) became narrowly tied to the religion, manners, and idiosyncrasies of Christian Anglo-Europe. The dead, therefore, are those erased, ignored, signified upon, oppressed, and dehumanized: byproducts of a global effort to colonize and instrumentalize the world. It is also necessary to say here that no one is now immune from the effects of this process. We collectively engage in this dehumanization process by marking people as expendable other. These expendable others are other than us, and more importantly, other than what they are. They are thereby theoretically, spiritually, and materially kicked out of the ‘realm’ of subjectivity where ‘livable’ existence occurs. Through this distinction between the deceased and the dead, we can notice a line between cosmological understandings of life and death (including the living and the dead) and socio-political, material ones. Even if, cosmologically speaking, death and life are one, with life and existence encompassing those no longer participating in the shared physical realm in collectively recognizable ways, socio-political realities illustrate that death is a technology of division that is both product and producer of de-humanization and objectification. And, because many who construct and then narrate cosmological notions based on their experiences within the socio-politically operating world—with those experiences often being ones of power and privilege—dominant and normative cosmological framings emerge in the form of necropolitics, sanctioning practices that support a belief that some lives are more viable, and therefore livable, than others.11 For this reason, many of us—queers and other minoritized, marginalized, and devalued entities—were dead long before we died.

22  Talking to the dead In 1987, what we now call the AIDS crisis was still “that gay disease.” The virus, HIV, had only been identified months before and within two years over 27,000 had died in the U.S. Gay men, the group most affected in the early years, became a touchstone for widespread hysteria and a new round of demonization of homosexuality. In Boston that year, a young lesbian seminary student started her required clinical pastoral education unit in a local hospital. Hospital Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) units are designed to be intensive, supervised learning experiences for future ministers, whose work and calling would inevitably lead to sites of trauma and death in hospital rooms and emergency departments. She remembers only one case of AIDS in that hospital that summer. Students were under strict instructions to follow medical staff directions, her supervisor reminded them repeatedly. The head nurse on the ward she was assigned to one day was a brusque, efficient woman who liked to talk about “that gorgeous Tom Selleck.” She ran a tight ship and tolerated the CPE students only because she “went to Mass on the weekends and God knows some of these patients need His love, poor dears.” The seminarian came in that morning to find a curtain of plastic across the entrance to a hallway of four patient rooms just off of the nurses’ station. The head nurse told me I could not enter, that I didn’t have protective gear and ‘besides’ she told me, ‘it’s only one of them down there anyway.’ I wondered what she meant by ‘one of them’ but since she did not take kindly to questions I didn’t ask. The student set about her assigned task of visiting patients on the large ward and writing up her notes for supervision. Once she noticed the call light at the nurses’ station blinking, and as the head nurse was elsewhere she went up to see that it displayed a room number from the plastic hall. Someone down there was calling for help. When she asked one of the junior nurses about the call light, she was told not to notice, “it’s probably broken.” “What does the patient have?” she asked, gesturing to the plastic. “We don’t know, exactly,” the nurse replied. “Just that he’s got that gay disease.” She knew just enough about AIDS at that point about it to feel some alarm about this unknown killer, but asked why she had seen no medical staff checking on the patient. The young nurse said she’d been told to leave him to the head nurse, and special hazmat gear was needed, anyway. “Don’t you have some here?” the student asked. “Sure” the nurse replied, “but it’s a hassle to put on and off.” The student went back to her seat, now knowing that a gay man was in a room by himself at the end of an isolated hall, with no contact by a doctor or nurse the whole day. It was 1988, and the disease was still nearly universally deadly, but the medical world knew by then that it was sexually transmitted and had become somewhat confident that it was not airborne.

Talking to the dead  23 The seminarian began contemplating the consequences of disobeying the nurses’ order to keep out of the plastic hallway, just as a new nurse walked onto the ward. She was tall and tough-looking, and my suspicion that she was also a lesbian was confirmed when she caught sight of me looking at her – I must have had a small smile on my face. She looked me in the eye for a full moment, as we do, and then winked before turning to the head nurse. What happened then has stayed with me all of the years since. The new nurse asked specifically about the patient beyond the plastic, and to see his chart. When she saw that no notations had been made that day, she demanded to know why. “We saw no need to do so” the head nurse sniffed. “It’s one of them, there’s nothing we can do, and I won’t endanger my ‘girls.’” The newcomer blew up. The seminarian doesn’t remember exactly what she said, except that he was one of their patients, not an “it,” and if none of the staff assigned to his care would touch him, she would come from her ward and do so. Furthermore, she said, she would be making a full report of this negligence to the hospital administration. With that she walked through the plastic curtains toward the patient’s room, protected only by a small facemask and pair of latex gloves. The head nurse turned to her stunned staff nurses and said “Just as well. Let those people take care of each other and God will rid us of them all.” The seminarian stood, shaking with anger and faced the nurses, mustering the courage to say “God doesn’t work for your hatred.” She turned and followed the nurse behind the plastic. I had no mask or gloves and could already hear the dressing down I would get from my supervisor. From the doorway, I saw a slight young man on the bed, with beautiful deep red hair and dark brown eyes. Tears were running down over the lesion on his neck, as he grasped both the nurse’s hands. The nurse turned to me and smiled. She dug out some gloves and a facemask from her pocket and handed them to me with the words, ‘To protect him from us. Meet James. His family has disowned him, but he’s a sweetheart, and he’s ours.’ The AIDS epidemic is one example of the connection between queerness and death, as the religious, social, and political discourse surrounding the disease during its onset and proliferation from the 1970s onward suggested that AIDS was a result of (and punishment for), immoral and amoral sexual behavior. Illustrating a supposed lack of moral fortitude on the part of people engaged in illicit or indecent sexual acts, the tragic and traumatic outcomes of death from the effects of the virus actually highlighted the public’s juridical sexual ethics framework. In such a framework, AIDS was the proper sentence for the appearance and demonstration of queerness and

24  Talking to the dead the pursuits of queer life. And, thanks to its nature as a blood-borne virus and subsequent over-representation in poor communities, especially black communities, the lack of institutional, governmental, social, political, and religious responses to the health and safety of persons living with the HIV virus meant that the epidemic quality of the disease was of no importance to the mainstream population, at least not beyond the protection of cisheteropatriarchal purity. So it was and continues to be in relation to the violence visited upon queer people at startling rates within the context of the United States. Queer youth, queer people of color and especially black trans women experience higher rates of homelessness, poverty, inadequate or inaccessible healthcare, bodily and sexual assault, and death (by violent homicide) than any other demographic in the United States.12 Because of rampant fatal violence against trans women of color in the U.S., lives are more consistently cut short at a very young age. We cannot ignore the implication that queer people are supposed to die and, even more, that queerness represents what is and ought to be unlivable. In essence, we are saying that queer death is not notable, because the two terms are practically synonyms so long as cisheteronormativity is, well, normative. It is not that normativity is impossible for sexual and gender minorities, it is more the question of what must be erased, excised, or killed to squeeze into those marriageable modes. Those whose pink socks still show like Armand’s in La Cage Aux Folles, or whose bodies and desires cannot, will not, conform, are killable. The motto that the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power chose for itself over 30 years ago in 1987 was silence = death. Did ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer know that his group was updating a biblical proverb? If livability points to a capacity to survive and possibly thrive within our shared physical world and to be recognized as both living and worthy of life, then un-livability is a state and experience of having those possibilities constantly threatened and ultimately foreclosed. Gay, lesbian, trans people and all of us marginalized under the rubrics of queerness face this unlivability as a part of our experience of being, which means that many of us who are alive in the shared physical world are often completely reduced to a state (and sometimes, a reality) of familial, communal, religious, and even physical death. If we can agree that deep relationality is one of the most essential qualities and aims of the universe and death is the excision of relation, then “speaking life” and “talking to the dead” are ethical practices. Speaking life into something or someone is on one hand a kind of resurrection and on another hand a prophetic conjuring and enlivening. One example that illustrates both elements and is widely known in Christian contexts is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11). Jesus’ close friend Lazarus has died. Rushing to his tomb Jesus refuses to accept his friend’s death and declares him to be alive (v. 4 and 23) and speaks directly to him (v. 43) to raise him back to life. The magic of the moment for us is not in Jesus’ declaration, against all proof, of Lazarus’ state of aliveness;

Talking to the dead  25 nor is it in Jesus “command” to Lazarus to get up. We find that the significance of the scene lies in Jesus’ admonition to the gathered witnesses to “Unbind [Lazarus] and let him go.” Jesus’ words to the community show that Lazarus’ shift from recognizable death to life is located both in and beyond Lazarus’ singular experience; the transformation also occurs in the community’s necessary response to Lazarus’ renewed being. When Jesus invites them to perceive and interact with the dead Lazarus through touch (“unbind him”) and through release (“let him go”), Jesus encourages a new orientation to a member of their community. Doing so, they too are unbound, able to perceive Lazarus in a way that was inconceivable moments ago, when they had cast him out to an existential position wholly other than their own. It is certainly difficult to read Jesus’ words to the community as something simultaneously practical and metaphoric. Regardless of what happened at the tomb that day when Lazarus stumbled blinking out into the sunlight, we can certainly say that Jesus freed his friend’s confinement in the community’s categorization and limited perception. This release, the implementation of freedom, is a necessary component of Lazarus’ livability, just as a brave nurse’s touch was a necessary component in James’ livability. Lazarus is returned to life through Jesus’ words as well as the community’s recognition. Talking to the dead is a queer virtue partly because it recognizes “life” in what is not (or no longer) livable. It affirms livability in all that exists in the cosmos, particularly in those whose deaths have served and continue to serve globalized regimes of power. Even more, talking to the dead testifies and prophesies to the ongoing life of the queer dead while also attending to our collective responsibility for rendering them dead in the first place. It is a way of holding ourselves accountable to the oppressed and for the oppressions and experiences of erasure and othering that have resulted in the physical, spiritual, and social death of our fellow creatures. And, because we believe that the dead are not dead and instead live still within our shared cosmos, the practice of talking to the dead allows and perhaps forces us to disavow the idea of death as punishment for perversion.

Queer boundary transgressions Disavowals, dismantlings, deconstructions, and other transgressive works are a significant feature of queer analysis and conceptual production, and they offer an important contribution to our discussion of queertheology. As a norm-critical epistemic position attendant to and emerging from samesex desires that challenge sex and gender binaries and their effects on social and political life, queer theoretical innovations propose liberative possibilities and modes of thought and expression. The goal of queer orientations to thought and action, through relational and otherwise political upheavals, is not a unified or specific future; it can’t be. Instead, queerness and queer theory turns us toward technologies that can undo the foundations and

26  Talking to the dead scaffolds of “normalcy” that erect and hold structures of oppression. This is of particular import since normalcy is attached to—in symbiotic ways— limited (Western) cosmologies that underwrite binaristic worldviews and locate entities and experiences only within discrete and oppositional axes. For our work in this book, queer theory and queerness as affective, spiritual, and bodily expression, instigate the failure of binaries and normalcy through ongoing and unapologetic transgressions. Such transgressions depend on practices of “troubling” enacted through conceptual shifts, performative action, speech, relations, and more. The troubling leads to destabilization and disintegration, which make way for new possibilities and lenses through which to understand those possibilities. Since binaries produce oppression, and oppression creates entities situated as queer—and dead, in our estimation— the work of queertheology involves more than troubling alleged gender and sexual dichotomies. Of course, since we understand that queerness does the work of denaturalizing gender, sex, sexuality boundaries—rendering them false and useless and also pointing out how they are mechanisms for oppression, we find queer discourses and theoretical perspectives useful for transgressing boundaries of other sorts, including denaturalizing what seems to be a hard and “natural” boundary between life and death. Queer transgressors who talk to the dead show us that the “natural” boundary between life and death is a mechanism of self-division. The boundary divides the self, the body, and “the whole,” ultimately suggesting that we are isolatable, easily cut off from one another and from life. The power embedded in this suggestion sanctions the socio-political hierarchies that structure our relations in the physical realm and attempt to deny us participation in the cosmos. Most of the queer ancestors we would invoke and honor didn’t use the term “queer”—indeed the words, the names, and even the sexualities themselves morph and change over time with cultural meanings and social frames, and it is important to remember that, and respect it even as we make use of one word to gesture toward a vast horizon of difference. Yet, when we break the death grip by recognizing and touching each other, or when some of us talk to the queer deceased and tell their stories, or when some of us invoke Aztec traditions related to the deceased by lighting candles for and placing marigolds on and around the ofrenda; or when some of us vogue on the ball floor and hit a “death drop” like Willi Ninja; or, when some of us articulate the magical act of the Christian God enfleshing the Holy Spirit through the Incarnation, we all testify to a divine breaking of the life-death/living-dead boundary and give voice to God’s disidentification with the “limits” of death. In so doing, we attempt to put ourselves and all our relations back together.

Incarnation and Christian Séance Christian theology often situates the Incarnation as evidence of God’s participation in the material world. But we actually already have evidence of such participation. After all, God creates the material world. Christians

Talking to the dead  27 understand their God to participate in the world in continuous ways, so the incarnation must be something more than God’s participation. It is more than an expression of divine power to make and influence; it is a disruption of the opposition-making boundary between materiality and non-materiality, between flesh and breath. This kind of disruption is not merely a dissolution of the difference between spirit and matter, though in a way it is that—an implication of incarnation that for two millennia has troubled Christian theologians invested in maintaining an absolute boundary between God and the world. The early creeds of the Church expose this anxiety over and over, resulting in a doctrinal package that restricts the incarnation to one person, Jesus, who is the product of sexless conception. But despite the theologians’ ongoing attempts to bind the incarnation and minimize its real materiality and fleshy—dare we say sexual—expression of divine desire for relations in the world, the claim of incarnation defeats those attempts to curtail it. Bodies are fundamentally unruly; they seldom stay constrained. The divine flesh of Jesus is not bound to a single man. So in queertheological Christian terms, we are saying that incarnation is a troubling of the intention, technology, and stability of the binary opposition between God and world. When God invokes divine agency and praxis in relation to the created world, thereby doing another “new thing,” God illuminates the place of possibility and creative infinitude. That is, God’s own flesh shows that the process of creation is always under review, always in motion, and that the creature has as much room to participate in divine creative processes as the creator. Jesus’ personhood exemplifies a questioning of life and death. It is a troubling of the distance between finitude and eternality manifested in a collapse of body into being. Furthermore, the incarnation taken seriously exposes the fallacy in the linear, progressive, and compulsory complementary notion of existence that has dominated Western heteronormative thinking. The idea that the foundation of human existence is a system of binaries that situate each entity and their accompanying categorizations into oppositional, non-overlapping, but complementary parts becomes incoherent in a creation that is in motion, structured by movement and deep relationality. The incarnation illustrates the hypocrisy and desperation undergirding a heteronormative orientation. In fact, it illustrates that existence is like the concept of queerness: indefinite, elastic, and so necessarily amorphous that attempts to fully grasp it are futile. The incarnation elucidates the possibility of being, showing how one’s being cannot be captured or fully understood in terms of static qualities. God-in-Jesus, for example, shows that our being is transmutable and thereby qualitatively indefinable. Thus, attempts to define, capture, and regulate our being call for a divine response so magnificent—so radical—that it shatters the very lexicon that we use to make meaning of our existence. In terms of its cosmological meaning-making contribution, the incarnation can act for Christians as an invitation to pay attention to what we did not think could or should live and interact with us. It can be a means of finding divinity in all the flesh of the cosmos and so speaking life, rather

28  Talking to the dead than death, in our dealings with its many and varied inhabitants. But in those Christian theologies that seek to shore up a constructed boundary between God and creation and minimize the effects of incarnation on this boundary, the world is characterized fundamentally as “fallen,” prone to unruly behavior, and unable to pull itself out of its disreputable state. In this persistent, juridical framing that we can call necrotheology, God condemns the world to death and the incarnation is merely a transaction on the part of God to enact that sentencing and execution as payment. Or in a medieval, feudal sense, God carries out an honor killing, recouping an originary slight incurred by the first humans who were too stupid to work out the terms of their loan of life when they followed their desires instead of the law. This time, the tongue was God’s. It is important to see that the Christian story of incarnation has radically different possibilities of interpretation, all based on what the interpreters wish to emphasize, or what they see as vital. Queertheology looks for the nodes of power in any interpretation. Based on a theological position informed more by the biblical story of exodus in which a God leads an oppressed people out of bondage than by concerns about an omnipotent power in a distant heaven, queertheology looks for clues to the meaning of incarnation in the ancestral stories of Jesus’ own boundary-crossing recognition of the exiles, the reviled, and the declared-dead, rather than medieval theological constructions of feudal lordship and judgment upon which so much oppression of sexual and racial minorities has been based. We can also look to the more ancient Jewish story of God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush for insight. The story reveals a remarkable, even campy, display of divine presence and communicability. It is certainly an incarnation of sorts. Moses is a great liberator narrated in the Hebrew Bible; his story of triumph and tragedy hinges on his participation in leading the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage into a new communal life unbound by Pharaoh’s laws and no longer indebted to Pharaoh for previous dependencies and provisions. For Christians, the broad narrative of Jesus’ life and ministry echoes the Moses story in important ways and recalls the seemingly impossible expectations that God has for those in divine service. Readers of the biblical texts can observe this impossibility in the narrative of God’s peculiar encounter with Moses. As the story goes, Moses is ambling about in the wilderness and comes upon a bush that was on fire, but the flames were not consuming it. If that wasn’t weird enough, a voice emerges from the bush saying, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses was afraid—as one would be under those circumstances—but this voice continued, declaring that God had not forgotten God’s people in Egypt and that the people would be rescued and taken to a special land that flowed with milk and honey. This God further informed Moses that Moses himself was to be the delegate who would speak to Pharaoh and ultimately free the people. After they enigmatically discussed God’s name, the two of them eventually

Talking to the dead  29 went back and forth about whether or not Moses was the person for the job. Among other things, what is intriguing about this scene is that Moses is having a conversation that bodes heavily on his own and his people’s existence while talking to a bush. That God chose a thing that would have been alive (a plant) but that inexplicably resists expiration (burning without being consumed) seems intentional in the narrative, and important. In fact, it seems like a purposeful and meaningful illustration of the livability coursing through entities that are thought to be dead, or at least killable, within the created world. Even more so, in thoroughly modern vernacular, Moses’ instruction from a flaming bush has camp, queer, and feminist possibilities for interpretation that are not hard to see, rich with divine humor and pedagogical depth. We have to say that, although the oracular and theophanic appearance of gods in mountains, trees, rivers, and temples in the ancient near east was not unheard of, there is something about this one God flaming out in a wilderness bush, at least as the story has survived and been told down the centuries, that is rich in possibility for queer affirmation and resilience. God’s presence in the burning bush—God-voguing-as-bush—becomes evident in the moment that Moses hears his name and answers back. In a sense, then, Moses’ talking acts as a practice of enlivening through holy recognition. Yes, the bush is alive and imbued with sacrality, divine lifeforce, and communicability, but it is also brought to life in conversation with Moses. In this way, talking to the dead (including what is supposed to be dead) becomes a spiritual practice of resurrecting, giving each of us power to call things ‘back’ from non-existence and/or recognize existence in the first place. The reason that incarnation (along with creation and resurrection) is so important in Christian frameworks is that it blends life and death by allowing communication between and among entities in the cosmos. And, inasmuch as life and death are the frames through which Christianity and Christian discourses can establish time and generate notions of relation, politics, justice, freedom, survival, and even flourishing, then talking to the dead disentangles those notions from polarized conceptualizations. Despite ecclesial and theological attempts over the centuries to harness and contain it, the incarnation idea has proven resilient in its potential to “slip the surly bonds” of imperial control.13 One life, 2,000 years’ past, cannot contain the flesh of God, especially if that enfleshment is founded on desire for the world. As the gospel of John famously declares, “For God so loved the world…” Incarnation, the theological claim of divine flesh that transcends all normative dualisms, thus entangles life and death in ways that better fit our growing understanding of planetary and cosmic existence. We might describe this queerly framed Christianity among other religious traditions as an ongoing séance, a challenge to death-dealing forces and a conjuring of the dead into (recognizable, communicable) life, a re-calling of one

30  Talking to the dead another into shared space and a hope that lessons can still be learned. Over and over again, the stories of Jesus that survive in the scriptures reveal a divine insistence that the ‘unlivable’ are not dead, and are called, again and again, to live. The Eucharistic meal at the heart of Christian ritual, when it is not overly sanitized and domesticated, is a gathering of flesh and blood in hunger and desire for touch, food, life, other bodies. It is an invocation of life in the broken body, the exiled body, even the dead body. It is not a stretch to recognize in this ritual a celebration and invocation not only of the queer life of our ancestor Jesus, but all of our queer exiles.

Learning from the dead Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-woman, internationally acclaimed a capella performance ensemble, adapted Birago Diop’s poem “Les Souffles” (breaths, or spirits) in one of their most popular songs entitled “Breaths.” The world is alive with ancestral spirits. “Listen more often to things than to beings” Biop and the Sweet Honey ensemble instruct us. Things, like fire, water, rustling trees, the wind in grass are “the ancestor’s breath” and they are present in stones, a mother’s breast, and throughout home spaces. Although they have died, ancestors are neither gone nor uninvested in the well-being of the living. They “have a pact with the living.” 14 We are instructed to remember that everything in the world contains their presence, and it is important that we pay attention. This makes the whole universe oriented toward relation, especially beyond an anthropocentric sense, but in terms of all things. Studying the physical world and the cosmos gives us the opportunity to “listen” to ways that the universe talks back and interrupts our assumptions about what is and what is not alive, including “the dead,” as we have already said. Most human cultures in the world have had, at one time or another, assumptions of wider spheres of life than the post-industrial present tends to allow. A number of Shakespeare’s plays, written on the cusp of modernity but not yet constrained by it, touch on the communicability of the non-human world. In As You Like It, the duke who has been exiled to the Forest of Arden exclaims “And this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”15 Increasingly, queer theory and contemporary quantum physics overlap in their attention to “spooky science” on the one hand, and insistence on non-linear concepts of time, relation, space, and desire on the other. “Sermons in stones” is more than a poetic riff for those of us looking for more generous sources of wisdom about our connections to the earth, to what lives, and what has been relegated (like stones) to the unliving. This means that the lessons that we can glean from listening “more often to things than to beings” are ethical ones inasmuch as they teach us how to positively relate to ourselves, one another, and other creatures in our shared context. By generating narratives about how we ought to relate,

Talking to the dead  31 these lessons produce and uncover ethical histories that collapse time and contexts into moments no longer limited to “the past.” In so doing, the past gets queerly reframed not as a new period within time but as a time now no longer fettered by the requirements of heteronormative reproducibility. It turns into a present that folds time and links us with the dead. Even more, it calls us to rupture the notion that knowledge and wisdom are only conceptualized by repeatable experience alone, narratable only through their positioning along a linear axis. Some lessons, talking to the dead shows us, transgress those boundaries and give us access to epistemic growth that surpasses the meanings and machinations of our world. Many stories of coming out are not linear and display a kind of folded time that reframes the past and brings to life a whole life newly storied. The one who was straight (or trying to be) is not gone but is no longer the past. The one who was cis (or trying to be) has transformed into a trans who was always there but denied life. The past is not gone, the dead are not under the earth, but the complexity is enlivened. Two-spirit traditions in those nations of native North America have always understood this. Another element of lesson-oriented ruptures in linear time is the continuing of “historical” events (and their impact) on atemporal understanding of historical realities. Take, for example, the way that American chattel slavery still manifests in black folks’ experiences of social death and fungibility. The emancipation of our ancestors from the system of slavery may have marked a new state-driven socio-political position, but it did not quite provide the liberation (and certainly not the freedom) that emancipation promised. Instead, emancipatory projects produced new dynamics and metaphors of captivity and dehumanization that evince ongoing cycles of enslavement and ongoing struggles for freedom. Our connection with our ancestors’ experiences through our own experiences of the same systems exists within a time loop that shows the uselessness of chronology for those of us continually made “dead.” Yet, we learn primarily of our ancestors’ freedom not through the narrations of colonial history but through the stories told only in hush harbors. We learn about how to survive by remembering the importance of the drumbeat. We connect with possibility of freedom by remembering our ancestors’ experiences as our own. We learn from the queer dead ways to be alive in death, ways to exist in non-existence, ways to keep on coming out every day, ways to thrive even when we are not supposed to survive. Those are lessons that we seek when we talk to the queer dead, and when we talk to the dead in general. What does it mean, grandma, to be “full” when my belly is empty? How do I call things that are “not” as though they “are”? How do I manifest the family that I want? How do we manifest our purposes in this form of life? When should I start a new journey? With whom should I be connected? With whom have I always been connected, but didn’t know it?

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What knowing is there that you, grandpa, can now access that I currently cannot? And how do I bring myself in alignment with you and the rest of the cosmos? Talking to the dead enlarges the circle of life, causes us to exist, and helps us to learn about our place and possibility in the world and in the cosmos. It helps us order our lives based on knowledge and wisdom beyond our individual experience and understanding, to call things that are not as though they are, and ultimately to lean into the scandal of our interdependence, our interbeing. Talking to the dead is a particular skill honed by and among queer exiles, who learn to suspect at very young ages that the world is bigger than we have been taught. We cling stubbornly to a space for ourselves that is no longer dead, discover that we can speak ourselves into life, if only at first in whispers, if only at first in deepest closets. Even way back there, if we listen as much to things as to beings, the woven threads of old garments, the toothy edges of doc martins, the peeking feather of a rainbow-colored boa—how did that get here?—bear life.

Conclusion Talking to the dead is pouring out of libations. It is a naming and honoring of the queer and necessarily troublesome work that many of us engage in to reorganize our assumptions about what is and isn’t, and to recognize the sacred interbeing in which we have the privilege to exist. This chapter is oil on foreheads and an altar built and adorned. It is our recognition that each bit of boundary-shattering dead-talk opens and lights the way for us to connect with divine and limitless existence. It is our effort to rediscover ourselves in the exchange of sacred breath and voice. It is a prayer of thanksgiving—an honoring of what will be, what has been, and what is. And still, it is also a lamentation for what has been lost even to memory, and what we have sacrificed in the socio-political realm. It is our appreciation for ancestor-given cups overrun with the still waters that fertilize ever-growing green pastures. For the buffalo’s breath, the shadows on the grass, the queer tongue that talks back to all the forces of annihilation, and for all of the queer ancestors’ who give us courage to live anyway, we give thanks.

Notes 1 This popular quote is attributed to Chief Crowfoot in ‎ Clark Tibbitts, Aging in the Modern World: Selections from the Literature of Aging for Pleasure and Instruction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1957), 222. 2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ed. Richard Kelly (Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press, 2011), 123. 3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4 Birago Diop. “Souffles” in Présence Africaine No. 12 (1951), 187.

Talking to the dead

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5 “The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.” Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 130. 6 As Butler asks, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life?” 2004, 20. 7 Thich Nhat Hanh, “Interbeing” in Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh, ed. Thich Nhat Hanh (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1999), 150. 8 LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 12. 9 Thanks to Emilie M. Townes for this anecdote. 10 J. Achille Mbembé and Libby Meintjes (trans.) Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 14. 11 Ibid. 12 For statistics related to queer youth, people of color, and black trans women, consider the following source. “A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in America in 2018” https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/AntiTransViolence2018Repor t- Fi n a l.p d f ?_ ga=2 .13 42668 07.7150 0 48 0 8.1597 705267975968808.1542137216 (accessed August 17, 2020). 13 John G. Magee, Jr., “High Flight” www.classicallibrary.org/magee/index.htm (accessed August 17, 2020). 14 Sweet Honey in the Rock, Breaths, Flying Fish FF70105, 1988, compact disc. 15 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1, The Complete Words of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (London: Scott, Foresman, 1980), 368.

3

Queer creativity

If necessity is the mother of invention, then queer creativity may be the offspring of survival. In the 1950s, a practice emerged in the United States in which some lesbians in Buffalo NY began tattooing a small, blue, five pointed “nautical star” on their wrists. The tattoo sat on the upper side of their wrists, precisely where a watch could cover it. For lesbians going out at night from their day jobs, the watch removed, the small star gave indelible guidance to those in the know. Dangerous words need not be uttered, risky gestures need not be made simply to find out if someone was safe, a person around whom one could be oneself. This bit of body art, the possibly haphazard result of a 1950s post-bar excursion to a tattoo parlor, is significant not only because of its place in the emergence of pre-Stonewall lesbian and gay community-building in the US, but because of its culturally creative essence. Regardless of the immediate intent of that small group of butch women who left the bar but were not done with the night, who possibly thought that getting inked together at Dirty Dick’s tattoo parlor on Chippewa Street would simply be a lark and a half, they nevertheless chose a rich, multivalent symbol. It was the nautical star, a practical compass to sailors and adventurers. It was the Advent star, a guide for the wise. It was the North Star, a guide for those running to freedom. It was the Hollywood star, a self-declaration of having made it. Some lesbians and gay men still choose to put a blue star on their wrists, indelibly to mark themselves queer and to honor the bravado of those women doing so at a time when the police kept lists of known homosexuals and no lawyer would defend a lesbian arrested in a raid.1 For a few queer black youths in Atlanta, over 40 years later, the blue star was all of those things. Finding their way through college, navigating the world of queer-of-color existence in a seemingly straight black/gay white city, and trying to make meaning of the blurry lines between youth and young adulthood in the late 1990s, a small group of friends used that same blue star to help them navigate, draw wisdom from, and seek freedom within what felt like an overwhelmingly cis-het world. They drew on a history of the practice and the multivalent symbol to mark their connection

Queer creativity  35 with multiple pasts and to connect themselves to that past as well as to one another. Donning tattoos of their own, they recognized one another as stars—shining beacons of light and memory—that shined no matter their circumstance. There are countless examples of artistry forged, woven, strutted, or sung in the lives of queer people inventing and reinventing themselves in the process of making ways to be and to find each other against the odds of crushing heteronormativity. Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne (now, Sangodare Akinwale) Wallace, for example, have initiated an intergenerational “Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive” to collect and connect what they dub “generations of black queer brilliance.” Their project emphasizes the multiplicity and mobility of everyday black queer lives making ways out of no way, as well as the importance of storytelling in building intergenerational community. Such storytelling acts as revolutionary archives, charting the survival, poetry, family creations, and investments in livability detailed in black queer folks’ experiences. In describing the project, they say that its form is poetic, an “immersion in legacy” that “traces pathways between our lungs, called laughter, called stillness, called sigh.” It is, they say, “a dance, a prayer, a baptism in hope.”2 Based in Durham, NC, the two travel cross-country in a Winnebago RV (revolutionary vehicle) meeting, interviewing, and connecting black queer elders and holding intergenerational workshops and retreats in a “celebration of how boldness survives the moment of its need.”3 They are acutely aware that, like the queer elders they seek, they cannot follow accepted pathways, ask closing questions, or neglect to notice even the smallest rituals of survival or what Anishinaabe literary critic Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.”4 They are weaving something big and unforeseeable as they wend their way from place to place, from home to home, their RV filling with stories, treasures, and new knowledge. “We are not the first” they write, to challenge form (the form of the archive, the form of the movement, the form of the question) in ways that resonate in black queer communities, and we will not be the last. In each community, context, and time the ceremony must be found to activate the medicine necessary for us each to achieve our destinies.5 There is a powerful creativity at work in queer lives in the very fact of persistence that is both resistance and presence, which is what projects like the Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive are tracing. This poetic, prosaic, lived expression of soul-fired deviance, may touch on what Emilie Townes calls “isness.”6 It is close to what Vizenor means by survivance, a term he has adapted to signal a mode of being that does more than endure. Survivance is life (viva) that exceeds (sur) the presumed and presumptuous horizons of settler colonial norms and is at the same time a

36  Queer creativity persistent resistance, perhaps even a refusal, of those horizons. Survivance is the creative isness of those who, as Audre Lorde famously put it, were not meant to survive.7 Nikki Young tries to capture Towne’s isness and Vizenor’s survivance in her discussion of “creative resistance.”8 It is a means of pushing back against the “internal and external disciplines and the disciplinary powers that support and foster institutional assimilation.”9 Creative resistance requires that one assess and implement one’s own values, thereby creating a new system and barometer by which to measure one’s relationship to what is good, sacred, and necessary. When we understand queer lives as woven out of, through, and against the adversity of the globalized and religiously legitimated sexual, racial, and gendered demonization in spite of which we live, we can begin to see something vulnerable and tenaciously life-giving, a grace of resistance that gives back more than opposition. Perhaps it is, as Gumbs and Wallace suggest, a boldness that survives the moment of its need and a commitment to persistent in and as life. This tenacious but also vulnerable something, coursing out of and through the lives and communal experiences of the world’s gender and sexual deviants, is not a bland essence of a so-called queerness and it cannot be reduced to a single history. That would reduce the creativity we are talking about here to one cultural or one spatial frame. No, it is more of a dancing, ungraspable, fully human genius that is wholly dependent on the fuel of actual living, inventing, and reinventing regardless. This creativity we are after is an ungraspable vitality woven out of and through the differences that context (time, place, culture) make. So how might a couple of theologically and ethically minded writers go about describing the virtue of queer creativity which not only is, but ought to be impossible to pin down? The usual academic pathways of argument may well cause us to miss it altogether. Those modes of discourse, in which we have been well trained, are valuable insofar as they investigate and explain, and explain more, and dig deeper to examine and explain even further. Done well, academic work helps us to think critically about what we see, what we intuit, what we imagine. It asks serious questions about what we conclude and is probably the very best tool for those of us who wish to attend honestly to the gaps and erasures in knowledge, even as such work has often created both gaps and erasures. But that mode of communication can only go so far. Increasingly, queer scholars like ourselves are knocking into the hard-edged limits of the parochial form of academic discourse that is universally mistaken for objective and critical scholarship, a genre that disallows (except in carefully curated ethnographies) invention, story, poetry, or other forms of communication that work toward clarity. Or, if it allows invention, academic discourse does its best to surveille, define, categorize, and police what is created to such a degree that the life-force embedded in what has been created is almost unrecognizable. Even here, we have to name that limitation lest our approach be misunderstood, like drag so often is misunderstood, as something barely approximate, falling short of,

Queer creativity  37 or merely imitating, the “real thing.” And yet, we mourn the need for and compulsion toward such naming, as it snatches us out of our inspired and gracious acknowledgments of creativity and hurls us into a world of anticipatory apologetics. “Read this book like a song” opens Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s study of Black queer genders entitled Ezili’s Mirrors.10 She tells us that she eschews “a book of theory” because she is after something much more mobile. “This is a book in motion—” she tells us, “…so we can lose our bearings & find new ways to make sense, together & coming-apart-at-the-seams.”11 She creates an architecture of three voices (containing many more voices in each) in her conjure of black queer genders. It is a kind of roundtable marked by different fonts that does not exclude her scholarly voice but does not allow it the last say, either. The second voice tells stories of Ezili, lwa of Haitian Vodou, bringing in what she calls “spirit knowledge” and the third attends to black feminist ancestors, an approach that allows her to move more nimbly around and through the materials with which she is working. It is a generous study song that traces the polyamorous power of the Erzuli lwa through the brilliance of black queer art. She recognizes not only the multiple ways that gender and sex flow in the violent and still present wake of colonialism, but sees through black queer art glimpses of how the lwa “show up” and bless the riverine mess of living and loving in this world. Our attempt, then, must do the work that Gumbs and Wallace find amid the black queer elders; it must move beyond the straddling of lines and cradling of conceptual frameworks. Our thinking and feeling and living our way through creativity must instead usher us—and you, reader—into places of holy witnessing. The recognition of queer creativity, as a virtue to be lifted and felt, cannot and must not be captured by our attempts at assimilative academic gesticulation; instead, we will recognize it by putting our senses to use, by opening our third eyes, by being still long enough to hear the created melody of brilliant breath. So then, read this book like a song. How else can we catch glimpses of the virtue and dangerous blessing that we are calling queer creativity? Reading like a song (Tinsley instructs her readers to do so as if listening to her favorite group, Destiny’s Child) or like a poem, one is more apt to participate rather than sit back and be instructed. Reading like a song, dancing to a song, implies something one makes as much as one receives; one invents, in the reading, the singing, the dancing. Songs have breath, dances have turns, poems have gaps that all generously punctuate what words cannot express. Sometimes the breath, the turn, the gap, are closer to articulation than words. So, it is a challenge, to be sure, to set aside the familiar drone of self-important theory in order to sense the flame, the flesh, and the everyday brilliance of queer creativity, and name it as a core virtue. The capacity of lesbians and gay men, transmen and transwomen, bisexuals, and all of the queer lovers to navigate public and intimate worlds that try to erase them—and do so with attitude and style—reveals a stubborn, courageous

38  Queer creativity grace that should not be romanticized or domesticated. There is in queer creativity what we theologians might call an imago dei—an image of God. Or, as Danez Smith opens his poem Genesissy, “& on the eighth day, god said ‘let there be fierce’, and that’s the story of the first snap…”12 Queer creativity, perhaps equally understood through the imago dei, the first snap, and thermodynamics, does not seem to us to be the same as making something from nothing, or as the mothers teach us, “making a way out of no way.” Such a powerful making is what many of our black mothers and other-mothers have taught us about generating something where nothing exists, or at least where we cannot perceive what exists. This kind of creative work is valuable and life-giving and sacred, as it calls one to draw on powers and affects of production that seem impossible. In fact, within a Western framework, we understand such creativity as part of the most significant work of divine energy. After all, “the earth was formless and void…” Yet, the creativity emerging from queerness and queer folk, seems more akin to “making a dollar out of fifteen cents.” This kind of making requires imagining something beyond the bounds of our most reliable and reasonable truths—like mathematics or physics—and calling forth new and absurd ones. One of the “laws” of thermodynamics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. People always remember that part. What people often forget is the second part of those laws: energy can only change forms. This shape-shifting of energy, it seems, is like queer creativity’s capacity for more than formation—transformation. Such a capacity is funded by a belief in alchemy, or magic, which can transform what we know without doubt into something that we believe. Recognizing that this seems like an odd direction to take, we offer this: the queer virtue of creativity shows us that we do not, in truth, know the difference between a dollar and 15 cents. On the contrary, creativity helps us recognize that the difference exists because we construct and then believe it. It is the confrontation with and dismantling of narratives of “truth” that make room for the creation of alterities that transgress as much as they formulate. The crux of the virtue, then, is not in the production of 85 cents out of thin air; it is rather in the re-valuing of the 15 altogether. It is the re-working of the 15 into a new and different worth. And this work isn’t merely imaginative. Fifteen cents-todollar work shows up in beautifully tangible ways including, for instance, cobbling together a family out of seemingly disparate, non-blood-related strangers. Or, more acutely, doing a series of “death drops” to show just how alive one is. What else, then, can we say this creativity is that offers itself to us through the myriad forms of fierce queer lives and survivance, past and present? Creativity, which we are claiming as a prime queer virtue, is not limited to the experiences and culture-shaping influences of sexual and genderqueer outsiders. But the will to openly live and to love against the pressures of heteronormative decency and gendered conformity not only demands an

Queer creativity  39 ability to withstand ostracization, expulsion, and even violence; it seems to find sustenance in the outrageous, the swagger, the deliberate more-than that living queerly demands.

The creative elements I: coming out/testimony Sissy boys usually get it from day one, the punishing demands of masculine performance and the gendered strictures of play, and emotion. They find out early, if not from family members than from other children, teachers, neighbors or what have you, that they are failing the first rules of boydom, the basics for becoming gender—no, world—rulers. Butch girls have a little more time before the weirdly opaque and sudden rules of femininity start slicing them up, scalpel sharp, forcing their kickball-scuffed knees and proud young necks down and into smooth displays of the ladyhood to come. The corrections sometimes take, often they don’t. The acts of discipline and punishment vary in their success only because some of those boys and girls are able to fight for their life. Still, suicide always results, on some level. And heteronormativity rages on like an unburst boil in the crack of our collective ass. The long-running Paris play La Cage Aux Folles, made into a film by the same name in 1978 (and later into the clunky American remake called The Birdcage), is a farce about the hypocrisy of Western heteronormativity. The adult son of Renato and Albin, gay owners of a drag club in St. Tropez, is about to marry the daughter of the country’s “Minister of Moral Standards.” The film trades in stereotypes, but a case can be made here that director Edouard Molinaro uses those stereotypes to poke directly at the cruelty of gender conformity. “To call Albin a screaming queen would be an understatement” according to Michael Klemm, film reviewer for CinemaQueer.com.13 “Auntie” Albin loves her son enough to attempt to dress and act like a man so that the girl’s parents will not suspect the truth of her hoped-for in-laws’ lives and loves. It is a truly funny script, skillfully acted and, for its time, genuinely and newly affirming of gay love that can persist through the deformations of internalized homophobia. At its center is the moment around which we might say the entire story revolves. Albin, in a dress rehearsal (but what is effectively a test) before meeting the girl’s parents, steps out before Renato and their son in a conservative suit, walking carefully so as not to mince, sitting awkwardly, uncertain where to put his hands. It is an excruciating scene, illustrative of the betrayal and violence both father and son are willing to perpetrate on Albin for the sake of heterosexual marriage. Then Albin nervously crosses his legs, and one pink sock peeks out above his black shoe. The moment of gender failure, or the defiance of the sissy queer? Both. But Albin dies before our eyes. He bows his head and quietly says “No. Dressed like this I am even more ridiculous.” Michel Serrault’s performance in that moment rings painfully true in so many queer lives where the sissy man or

40  Queer creativity the transwoman, the butch dyke or transman not only fail the test of gender conformity but self-destruct little by little as a result. In the case of La Cage, the good news is that this scene is by no means the end of Auntie Albin, who wonderfully and hilariously roars back in precisely the kind of defiance that describes the tenacity and fierce neverthelessness of queer testimony. But it is important to see that that the fabulous over-the-top return of Albin the boy’s “mother” from this scene of erasure is the flip side of betrayal and self-annihilation. It is a “nevertheless, she persisted”14 in queer terms, based in part on the reality of her attempted murder/suicide. Underneath these foreground scenes, another murder/suicide takes place. As Renalto does his best to organize the evening and control Albin through a series of masculine-directed machinations, so too does he attempt to subordinate and whiten their black domestic servant, Jacob. What a film viewer can sense but perhaps not immediately name is that the policing of the dynamics and mechanisms of hetero-domesticity also require a racializing process. Laurel Schneider deals with this phenomenon directly, noting that “race, sex and gender are not only constructed for particular purposes of social order but that to contemplate them in isolation from each other is to perpetuate their more insidious social and political effects….”15 If we miss the ways that Jacob’s unsheathed feet, out-of-place food, and always exposed body is supposed to signal another kind of “otherness,” then too we miss Molinaro’s purposeful (or more likely, oblivious) illustration that “ideologies of race, gender and sex intersect and produce each other.”16 These ideologies are troubled by true and embodied testimony situated as undeniable articulation of one’s truth(s). Even as Albin and Jacob’s bodies and gestures and language and vocalizations scream “queen” and “black,” they also whisper a nevertheless, some other more honest element of chosen performativity. This testimony, of isness and could-be-ness emerges it seems from places of retrospection, telling and re-telling, contemplation, and transformative truth. The spiral mixity of these elements produce a story that is simultaneously representative of present perspectives and past experiences, past perspectives and future possibilities. And, this kind of (re) telling of one’s life allows for the interdependence of truth and imagination, knowledge production, and historical redaction. Queer testimony, then, lines up with the sacred processes of (1) shattering the divisions between then, now, and not-yet and (2) recognizing one’s self in the midst of narratives about one’s self. This kind of telling is not confessional, requiring an other’s substantiation, judgment, or absolution; rather, queer testimony is communal, assuming another’s capacity to witness one’s own self-becoming. The queer quality of this kind of relating calls for each party—all parties— to simultaneously suspend and dive deeper into knowledge about their own and the other’s experiences, performances, and expressions. Coming out, whether for the first time and only to oneself or for the millionth time in some banal necessity of exchange with the straight world, takes more courage in some corners than in others. Still doing so requires

Queer creativity  41 an endurance and survivance that is sometimes nourished only in passing, sometimes only in the dark. The places where that coming out occurs, where testimonials of words or of bodies can form and reform being, are sacred. Danez Smith captures this in his poem “The 17-Year-Old and the Gay Bar.” Too young to be legal but able to fake his way in; needing to belong and to “know how a man taste full on vodka & free of sin,” Smith invokes the desire and the sanctity of this forbidden place that has saved and will save many illegals, those coming out and those trying not to. But the 17-year-old finds something here to carry him forward, and the poem is a brilliant testimony to the power of such spaces to rewrite the killing erasures. Religious imagery, for Smith, fits what he tries to say about the revelatory importance of a place where queer body and desire find something other than erasure and death: “this gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we.”17 Finding the “we” is the creative center of many coming out stories of queer and trans people. Discovering, inventing, or ritualizing spaces physical or emotional in which one’s sense of wholeness can emerge and thrive, form the vivifying force of such stories. Coming out is, as so many find ways to express it, a kind of becoming alive after death, an experience that has rich resonance in Christian experience: “I was dead, but see, I am alive forever and ever” (Rev 1:18). Whether in words or a wide diversity of acts, coming out is a spiritually rich and sacred turning from death that does not divide itself from the deeply affective and material realities of erotic existence. The brilliance of queer coming out is an often-surprised affirmation of “we” even as it is a declaration of self, a death-defying reinvention of “I.” In her “Poem for My Love” June Jordan writes of her amazement at lying with her lover, a kind of miracle that is certainly not restricted to queer outsiders, but that has a particular relevance to the once-dead queer: How do we come to be here next to each other in the night Where are the stars that show us to our love inevitable18 No love is inevitable, but the self-and-we affirmation that queer love requires to be other than toxic (and it is toxic whenever the stories of Albin and Jacob end with his self-annihilation) is also the foundation of a creativity that confounds simple categorization. This may be because queer comings out take as many forms and follow as many winding paths are there are sex and gender nonconforming people. What is shared in queer comings out is a kind of arrival at physical, psychic, and emotional awareness, a coming to sense in both the cognitive and bodily meanings of the term necessitated by the ubiquitous normativity of cis-straightness around and among us (including our own entrapment in the heteronormative rules of state-sanctioned marriage).

42  Queer creativity The contexts and times change, but as long as global heteronormativity bears down on us all, the erotically charged testimonies of coming out—in whatever form and however private or public—is the first, most sacredly creative challenge of queer life. It may take the form of forgiving oneself for former suicides or murders, it may take the form “loves herself, regardless.”19 It may take the form of explosion in a rage of joy at the gloriousness of how a man taste, full on vodka & free of sin. It may take the form of finally, after so many names of annihilation, being the beast who hears God correctly and names herself, swings up behind her girl on that Harley and rides out of Eden.

The creative elements II: moral adventure Coming out is only the beginning, although it must take place again and again in the necessary dealings, inventions, and reinventions of queer life. Queer life, we argue, requires an openness to uncharted futures with an eye toward what can constitute a good life, or as drag queen Luscious says, “long as you’re not bothering nobody, hey you can do what you want.”20 What Luscious means by bother, of course, refers to a black American vernacular that is related to “minding one’s own business” and the right to have it. Coming from a mother or grandmother, “she’s not bothering you” is just as often a command to respect a sibling’s right to their own play as it an injunction against complaint, no matter how annoying the child is. Of course, the pressures of cis-heteronormative conformity mean that gender artists (and black transwomen like Luscious especially) are attacked and killed at alarming rates nevertheless, all while bothering nobody. But perhaps the idea of bothering nobody in Luscious’ sense is a good starting point for the queer moral adventure of seeking the good. Bothering nobody means standing up for one’s own space to live and abiding that in others as well, no matter how annoyed or inconvenienced doing so can make one. In other words, “bothering nobody” as a moral stance does not mean conformity or even mutual liking. It is a form of self-defense and it is a norm for communal experience. What “bothers” is thereby much more harmful than distaste or even disgust. Differences in gender, sexuality, family, religion, race, food, and aesthetics (to name a few) cannot be bothersome in this sense. Instead, real harm is what bothers. Real harm. Like killing a transwoman. Like forcing a child for sex. Like beating a spouse. Like unloading a machine gun in a queer dance club or a bible study meeting. Real harm qualifies as bothering somebody, and this is the genius of the black elders admonishing their young “that child’s not bothering you, let them be.” The message is let them do their thing. Save your breath and your fight for the real threats to your well-being and life out there, because those harms are real. So, what does the good in queer terms mean? Perhaps the point is not to jump too quickly to an answer precisely because the term queer itself is

Queer creativity  43 constantly in motion. Instead, the virtue of queer creativity can be guided by the many ways that gender and sex outsiders have countered the harm done to them and to others in the way that outsiders always do: with parody, protest, celebration (which is a kind of protest), community building, risk, and art. For example, the term “chosen family” comes directly from queer experience, a determination to create queer family even, or especially when, one is expelled from one’s biological clan. Mildred (Dred) Gerestant adorns a home altar with photos of Mildred’s biological family and Dred’s chosen family, “all mixed up together here.”21 There is both the power of protest and of reinvention at work in queer creations of psychic and physical spaces of sacred healing and affirmation. It is important not to romanticize the effort and struggle involved in daily refusals to conform, daily assertions of self-defense and daily practices of remembrance and grief that accompany queer living against sometimes overwhelming odds. Where there are no existing cultural tasks, honors, and ritual roles for multi-gendered and same-sex (or multi-gendered) loving people, we must find and build those tasks, honors, and ritual roles ourselves—most often among ourselves, sometimes alone. It is hard to maintain such a burden of cultural creation. Life expectancy gets shorter. Of course, life expectancy also grows with the risks that queer take. Plunging headlong into the scheme of family girded with only the tools of heteronormativity, many a queer person has found themselves drawing on creative relationship-building practices, motivations, and values to generate life-spaces that are nurturing, sustaining, and welcoming. This kind of family making, with one’s choicest peers, is akin to the more-than-biological relations that emerged, say, in black families throughout American history. Certainly, before black folks’ experiences of slavery and colonization, myriad types of families were available to be created and enjoyed, but in the context of and as a result of the devastations of slavery and colonization, the conceptual framework and practical manifestation of family became a project of re-defining, managing, and cultivating relational formations. People, for varying reasons and in different contexts, related to one another as “kin,” despite or regardless of (un)known biological connections. Folks understood one another as “cuz,” and “sister,” while referring to elders as “auntie” and “bro” without regard for frameworks of familial relations that were underwriting other elements of their lives. To be called “kin” was to be counted in the number—in the community—and understood as part of a network of relations that moved beyond and outside of the structures of white heteronormativity. This, too, is the legacy of queer family creating. And the risk of such a relationship-building and naming strategy is believing in the strength and longevity of these networks to help one survive and even thrive. What’s more, the risk is recognizing that longevity isn’t the prize. “Forever after” does not a family make. Instead, a confrontation with the reality (and long histories) of temporariness and transformation, mobility and

44  Queer creativity re-constitution suggests that the strength in families and familial connections comes through persistent commitment to choosing one another, while each one is present. The strength and power—and ultimate risk—resides in one’s investment in love, even in the face of impermanence. This is why the lesbian U-Haul reference is simultaneously funny, offensive, irreverent, and subversive. When, after knowing each other for a “short” while, women can pledge to one another, “where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge…” they—we—illustrate what it means to risk heart and hearth for a love that may have to pick up and move, or may be fleeting. It shows a depth of intimate creativity that, marked by new addresses and exchanged keys, reframes what family can and does mean. Even more, it reframes what it means to have family, to choose it… to construct it. The risk takes on the potential heartbreak, financial ruin, and emotional upheaval for the sake of valuing what is present and possible when new connections are allowed to flourish. And, it is the hope for an experience of joy in the process of creating something (a)new in queer life that outweighs the chance of sorrow. Diane Torr says of her drag performances as Danny King that “camp is a way to subvert sorrow.” The role of humor and parody, of biting wit and flamboyant neverthelessness, is antidote to the weight of carrying on in a world that does not expect us to last. It is also a way to subvert the moral dominance of cis-heteronormativity. Lesbian feminist philosopher Mary Daly followed by bisexual theologian Marcella Althaus Reid have both argued that Christian cultural rules of decency and virtue are so distorted in the binary patriarchal order that being essentially good or without sin for anyone who is not a white cis-male is, symbolically, a structural impossibility. In the 1970s, Daly argued that women ready to throw off the oppressive negations of female existence under patriarchy must have the courage first to see the structure of their inescapable oppression at its deepest levels, and then to realize that liberation requires a courage to sin (and sin big!)22 The courage required is real. The care, grace, and artistry of naming the mechanisms of oppression (seeing) and refusing to conform (sinning) enrages those most afraid of losing privileges in the existing order. There is moral adventure here, and there is virtuous risk. Queer sensibility tunes to spaces of coming out and living fully the imperatives of self-defense, doing no harm, and enlarging spaces of artistic expression. In other words, bothering nobody.

The creative elements III: new queer choreographies/cartographies There are rituals in every good life. Melissa Wilcox has been studying queer religious practices for years, and her work illuminates the relationship between religion and queer life that takes place in the communities she studies. Recognizing the diversity of religious traditions and the local nature of so much of them in practical terms, she nevertheless suggests four

Queer creativity  45 modes of queer religious practice that she categorizes in their relation to traditional religions: navigating, claiming, reworking, and finally creating new religious practices. Navigating practices usually takes the form of figuring out where one fits within existing practices; claiming practices means finding or creating space in which one can be openly queer or transgender and engaged in religious practices. Reworking practices means making traditional practices directly relevant to and reflective of one’s own life as a transgender and/or queer person. 23 The creation of new religious practices may stem from frustration over all attempts to navigate, claim, or rework traditions. The pull of spiritual need is such for some that walking away from religious expression altogether is not an option. So, some (Wilcox identifies the Radical Faeries and the Black Leather Wings as examples) develop ritual practices and new traditions specifically to address the spiritual needs of the community without invoking the traditions that have demonized and harmed so many of them. The energy involved in creating rituals of celebration, affirmation, mourning, and protest pulls on the creative genius of queer communities. Pride marches, that began in response to the Stonewall riots of 1969, started as true marches of defiance, the claiming of city streets for its trans and queer inhabitants. No one stood on the sidewalk to wave at corporate sponsor floats or politicians. Everyone who could, marched with signs, in full regalia, or with chosen family. The streets in cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Berlin were full to bursting, an experience none of the participants had ever had before, the creation of vast and public ritual space and belonging. The powerful and lasting effect of such marches have emerged as an annual ritual of importance to those who participate, even after, in the US at least, Pride marches have become increasingly commodified, spectator events for bars, businesses, and politicians. They have become, as it were, parades—sites of moving spectacle that place queer and trans gender and sexual expressions on display for the ever-present cis-het gaze. This gaze marks its territory over and over again and redefines itself through queer rituals of self-affirmation that simultaneously act as straight rituals of surveillance and evaluation. Nevertheless, city streets, the most unsafe space of all for queers (outside of many houses of worship, that is) are made into temple grounds, for a day. The city streets-turned-temple grounds also represent a complicated cartography. When homeless—or, quite accurately, underhoused—queer and trans youth find themselves making home, making places of rest and refuge, making family and life-sustaining connections, making pleasure and having sex, that is when the streets become something altogether different. They blend what has been divided as public and private space, making domesticity just as recognizable in the streets as it is between walls and under roofs. The streets represent spaces where people have to find

46  Queer creativity themselves, and in so doing, they act as sites of formation and becoming. In what we might all agree is a public context, the streets witness the intimate choreographies of dress and undress, food-making and bodily expulsion, sickness and health, work and rest. In much of queer street life, there is no division between the so-called public and private spheres; there are only creative responses to queer life in and out of doors. That queer life often has its being in contexts that everyone understands as public means that it must constantly do the work of creating sacred hearths and altars and “bedrooms” while on constant invisible display. Such cartographic creativity illustrates the queer work of blurring lines that seem drawn on stone and forged by fire. As a space known for violence and murder—especially of queer and trans people—the streets also show up as ad-hoc hospitals, nursing homes, nurseries, and other sites of care. Queer life on the streets, then, does the work of creating linkages that seems impossible to understand by those unmarred by the material effects of marginalization, and it also does the work of making meaning of those linkages along the way. Consider, for example the actual friends of Dorothy (pun intended) and their journey of discovery and space-making while attempting to retrieve what is necessary for their own individual flourishing. Their journey happens on the streets—a yellow brick road, to be precise—for all along the way to witness, judge, scorn, and even learn from. The public context of their self-enhancement strategies is also the site of food-finding missions, political declarations and acts, and physical and emotional triage. And, perhaps more importantly, their streets witness the forced growth of their “cultural competency,” as they learn to be with one other in supportive and life-sustaining relationship. When they are individually and collectively faced with the real and hurtful realities of marginalization, invisibility, erasure—all under the constant threat of death—they generate ways to survive and outwit the principalities and powers that seek their destruction. This generation emerges from the queer virtue of creativity. It opens for them, and for queers all over, a type of self-reflection and knowledge-making that transforms ditches into dining rooms, back alleys into breakfast nooks, gutters into guestrooms, and billboards into chalkboards. And what are the choreographies that lend themselves to such spatial transformations? They are the limber and agile moves of ousted sissy-boy to a legendary “ball” queen, the chameleon changes from sex worker to student, the butterfly shifts from dying from AIDS to living with HIV. They are movements that look to outsiders like survival but are really the dope ass brilliance of making a dollar out of 15 cents.

Conclusion, sort of Queer families and communities share with others who experience historic and religious ostracization the need to create modes and practices of resistance that do more than negate the deadening effects of erasure and censure.

Queer creativity

47

The queer rainbow of creatives who choreograph fabulosity and survivance are the beneficiaries of a long history of peoples who have mined their own cultural, religious, and spiritual resources for resources not only to resist pogroms, slavery, oppression, and erasure but to create ways of surviving and thriving nevertheless. In the mode of chosen family writ small or large, queer survivance is a kind of creativity that often cuts across cultures, races, and histories. This is not easy and is never completely successful because of the vicious persistence of white supremacy, ethnocentrism, male dominance, and garden variety human failings within and among queer efforts to choreograph new ways of relating and being. Queer creativity can never turn away from or even miss the harm that necessitates it, or the harm it may recreate, which requires both vigilance and humility. Rather than a turning away, queer creativity requires real and focused attention to what is so that it can foster what might be. Fueled in part by vigilance, humility, and attention, the virtuous element of queer creativity energetically rushes toward the production of what is good, holy, and righteous. 24 It does not merely try to acclimate to what others have projected and normalized as “good.” It makes the good. In her poem entitled “Sister Outsider” Audre Lorde writes of being born in a “poor time” when homoerotic touch is the enemy, “never sharing our crusts/in fear the bread became the enemy.”25 But she recognizes that queer creativity persists even in that darkness. It is able to turn the loneliness of such poverty into something “holy and useful,” which she locates in the next, less fearful generation. In the end, Lorde admonishes us to accept the whole complexity of creativity and, in a sense, to embrace both the darkness and the light of it. The virtue of creativity is not exclusive to queer communities, but it has a particular resonance in the tasks of living before us. Nothing is fully charted in moral terms ahead of us, but perhaps, if we understand queer creativity as the fibers of testimony, moral adventure, and constantly new choreographies of affirmation, protest, celebration and mourning woven together, we can see that where we already live is holy.

Notes 1 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (London: Routledge Press, 1993), 189–190. 2 Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace, “Something Else to Be: Generations of Black Queer Brilliance and the Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive” in Patrick E. Johnson, ed. No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 380. 3 Ibid. 4 This term is a portmanteau of “survival” and “endurance.” It is the notion of existence above and even beyond the circumstance, language, and capture of colonial realities and frameworks. Vizenor describes survivance as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or

48

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

Queer creativity a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1999), vii. Gumbs and Wallace, “Something Else to Be,” 381. Emilie M. Townes, “Womanist Etho-Poetics” Scholar and Feminist Online 14, no. 2 (2017). Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” in The Black Unicorn, ed. Audre Lorde. (New York: Norton, 1978), 31–32. Thelathia “Nikki” Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family and Philosophical Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 111. Ibid. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1. Ibid. Danez Smith, “Genesissy” www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEJ_ahg7x48 (accessed March 25, 2019). Interestingly, drag king Mo B Dick (Mo Fischer) announces in his Rev. Jimmy Johnson evangelist routine that “on the eighth day, the gods realized there must be a third sex” (Venus Boyz, a film by Gabriel Baur, First Run Films, 2002). Michael Klemm (Posted 2009), “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In Gay Film Reviews by Michael Klemm” CinemaQueer.com www.cinemaqueer.com/ review%20pages%202/lacagebirdcage.html (accessed March 31, 2019). On February 8, 2017, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Senator Elizabeth Warren during her attempt to read a letter from the late Coretta Scott King. This letter criticized Senator Jeff Sessions, who was President Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General. McConnell invoked a rarely used rule (19) that disallowed or prohibits one senator from “impugning” another. McConnell defended his vote against Warren with words that became a battle cry: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted” (emphasis added). Lisa Mascaro, “GOP’s Silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren Raises Her Profile as the Democratic Alternative to Trump,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2017, www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-warrenmcconnell-senate-clash-20170208-story.html (accessed August 17, 2020). Laurel C. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?” in Jennifer Harvey, Karin Case, Robin Hawley Gorsline, eds. Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need to Do (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2005), 143. Ibid., 144. Danez Smith, “The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar” in Poetry Magazine 209, no. 5 (Chicago, IL: Poetry Foundation, 2017), 455. June Jordan, poetry foundation website, www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/49218/poem-for-my-love. From the definition of “Womanism,” in which Alice Walker names several loves: food and roundness and struggle and the folk… and herself. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). Luscious in “Venus Boyz,” a film by Gabriel Baur, First Run Films, 2002. Ibid. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985). Melissa Wilcox, Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 100. Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family and Philosophical Imagination, 124. Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, ed. Audre Lorde. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 317.

4

Embodied beings and desires

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. – Psalm 139:13–15, NRSV

“The category is… Live! Work! Pose!” This is a typical call-out by emcees and judges to launch and encourage drag show competitors. When the house track is bumping, and the crowd pulsing, it is hard to ignore the creative brilliance of a legendary queen using a “death drop,” (more accurately, a dip1) to illustrate a full and fierce embodiment of life. This voguing move in house ball culture is when a performer “falls” dramatically to the floor, dropping into a position that looks like a broken split. 2 One leg is bent, the other in the air or stretched out in front, while the performers bend and arch their heads and shoulders back in a backward diving arc to the floor. One of the most eye-catching moves of voguing, it shows the strength, agility, grace, and athleticism embedded in the performance and posture of voguing while also offering a display of unapologetic relinquishment of control. “Liiiiiiiiive,” observers often shout, as the performer spins into or out of this position. And this shout, this invitation to fully be on the dance floor or the stage, is an appeal to the voguer to transform an often precarious existence into an undeniable effervescence of life in their body. Queer creativity like this reveals over and over again an important distinction between existing and living. Existence is possible even in death, in silence, and invisibility, something that many queers have known as the sum possibility of being at home or in churches, schools, and communities. Sometimes queer existence is ignored, erased, demonized, or commodified. Still, queer folk are. We queers have the experience of being, even if only recognizable through the survival knowledge of erasure, the ongoing presence and threat of nonexistence. Yet, existence in that negative sense is not the same thing as what we two queer authors of this book mean by being alive, as living. Living is what happens when one is able to feel, connect, desire, enjoy, and flourish in one’s embodied existence—in one’s skin and nerves, breath and bones.

50  Embodied beings and desires This heightened sense of living is an accomplishment for anyone, but it is particularly so for those who learn early on that they must hide or die. Though really, queer existence is not up for debate. Queer folk are here. Get used to it. What remains in question for many of us in the world—queer and otherwise othered—is the degree to which any of us can live. Fully. Living means, in part, understanding that our whole bodies and the sexy, messy desires that shape, teach, and trouble us, are necessary to that living. Being able fully to inhabit our bodies rather than struggle to deny them takes courage and a measure of unapologetic relinquishment of control. A dip of defiance. The question of living or merely existing is an ancient one. In 49 CE, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger wrote a powerful little essay entitled De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life) in which he argued that “life” and “living” should be measured in terms of the fullness of presence in every moment. Understood this way, someone dying in old age might still have lived a very short life. Seneca quotes an adage of his era, “‘[t]he part of life we really live is small’” and goes on to add that “all the rest of existence is not life but merely time.”3 While his concern was with the distractions of ambition and the leaching character of worry about the future that he saw in men of wealth and power around him, Seneca’s argument mirrors the queer virtue of living fully and courageously in our bodies, especially valuing the erotic wisdom we gain when we do so. A queer life is short, any life is short, regardless of the years, when the full erotic power of being is denied. There is no small irony in this association with Seneca, as the stoic school of philosophy to which he belonged held a largely jaundiced view of bodies, preferring to locate pleasure and meaning in disembodied thought. It was Stoic Seneca, after all, who declared that a true philosopher can be happy even on the rack. Though come to think of it, that claim could apply to some of the edgier scenes of queer life, as well. Living fully into the multivalent and ever changing, ever mixing measures of bodily desire, connection, and expression is a key, hard-won and still winning queer virtue. This is because one of the principal conduits for queer oppression runs through “the body”—social, material, erotic, gendered. Contemporary queertheologies have consistently taken stands against an ancient, medieval, and modern Western bifurcation of spirit and body that has manifested in a hierarchy not only of genders (male over female) but of races, religions, and all orders of nature. The patristic fathers wrote extensively on the importance of control of the body and of sexuality. The economic and patriarchal control of women, servants, and racial “others” became confused with religious perfection, an error that still distorts many Christian communities. Being oneself fully and erotically in one’s body is a virtue that queer folk, especially queer of color folk,4 have had to embrace in spite of overwhelming censure and often familial and religious exile. Living “out” and “proud” in a gay, lesbian, or trans body, radically affirming sensual knowledge and sexual attraction as well as the “good” of

Embodied beings and desires  51 queer sex is both political and theological affirmation even as it is a deeply personal refusal to die.

Put asunder: skin Refusing to die calls us to re-think and feel our way through the body. This means rethinking and feeling our way through the spirit as well. Body and spirit, to whatever extent those terms describe distinctive characteristics, cause, inform, and express each other the way skin causes, informs, and expresses the living parts it enfolds, making distinctive and connecting what it encompasses. Skin is more than a metaphor of connection and of separation—it founds and confounds relationship from the elemental exchange of atoms to the vast establishment of distinguishable planetary animal, vegetable, and mineral bodies. Skin is also more than its biological or mineral facts. Skin is erotically charged, politically charged, and historically charged. Skin color long ago became a basis for white supremacy and a tool for the enslavement and disenfranchisement of darker skinned people across the globe. It is a skin-based history that replicates itself still, cancer-like, everywhere it seems. “Redskin” was and is a demeaning reduction of the many American Indian peoples to an erroneous skin color (it may have been coined by Europeans who encountered peoples who used red tints for ritual body adornment) and “Skins” is claimed by some indigenous people as a self-named reversal of the insult. Among many tribes today drums are “persons” who are sometimes also referred to, respectfully, as “Skins.” Skin is the basis of social harm, but it is also the basis of touch, education, and pleasures. Skin to skin manifests boundaries and crosses them at the same time. The stroke of a lover, the silky roughness of a river stone in the palm, the whisper of leaves against bark or the gasp of a slap all communicate, all involve skins of various kinds in various sorts of relationship. Children who do not experience human touch often and with regularity do not develop properly, especially in mental and emotional terms. 5 The same can probably be said about adults. The connection between skin and sensation and emotion is thin, often displaying the capillary routes of experience, interpretation, and feeling. Animal skin is the largest organ in the body, and every bit of it is sensitive and capable of pleasure and pain. Every lover can understand the depth of beauty and longing when Roberta Flack sings “the first time ever I kissed your mouth, I felt the earth move in my hand, like the trembling heart of a captive bird…”6 Queer lovers, especially those experiencing the first touch of a lover in times and places of persecution, know a particular power in the erotic and life-insisting communication of skin. Queer spiritual practices usually involve some kind of bodily, sexual affirmation. Skin is therefore a medium of spirit, manifesting both the realities of differences between us and our multiple opportunities for connection. It forms boundaries and so constitutes maps for both ethics and erotics. Skin is an ever folding and unfolding surface of feeling. It is the

52  Embodied beings and desires materiality of every emotion, porous to every pleasure and threat, to every holy ghost, which makes it so important to a queer redemption of flesh. Denigration of skin-deep flesh is equally a denigration of bodies altogether, which is a deadening of spirit. Skin confounds simple reductions in theory or in flesh. Never inert, skin is therefore an apt metaphor both for the incoherence and violence of hierarchical separations and the healing spirit of difference, connection, and eros. Skin is flesh and spirit, a both/and that refuses estrangement.

Enspirited: breath The Latin word for breath is spiritum. Breathing is a profoundly physical reality, an exchange of elements carried mostly below or beyond the scope of human vision. Made of air, breath is not empty; it is laden with molecules, moisture, and the breath of other creatures. Pumped by lungs, breathing is muscular and emotional. It is a register of anger, fear, desire, control, or deep awareness. Breath and breathing are physicality and sensuality at their most elemental. Without breath, the lungs collapse, the blood has nothing to nourish the body’s cells, the brain shuts off. Without breath, there is no heartbeat, no pulse of eros to animate the skin and draw bodies together in rhythmic connection. The ancients associated breath with spirit and spirit with life, seeing the direct connection that exists between all three each time a creature would breathe its last. It is perhaps in this fundamental association of breath with spirit and life that the seeds of another level of dualism could take root—the usual invisibility of air makes it easy to dematerialize spirit. Because the long Western religious and philosophical tradition separated body (or flesh) from spirit (or soul or mind) it is difficult to avoid the trap of continuing that tradition by imagining bodies as still separable from spirit even in the process of claiming or celebrating queer embodiment as a spiritual good. The separation of what people understand as spirit and materiality into exclusionary opposites is a strange inheritance of the West. Body and spirit cannot even be described as “separate but equal” in this context because a “separate but equal” framework can only work when the meaning structure behind it does not rest on dualistic hierarchies. The ancient assertion of light over dark, for example (rather than light with dark), puts all things light over all things dark, unfolding a vast, religiously legitimated structure of privilege and oppression. Mind and spirit associated with light, and matter associated with earth and dark has meant over and over again that the sides of those coins are never equal in their distinction, which is why “separate but equal” never actually occurs. So it is with gender, so it is with race, so it is with sex. The deeply embedded cultural structure of dualistic hierarchy runs throughout Western societies, but that does not mean it was or is inevitable. There are numerous cultures in history, most of which we today call indigenous, that were not built on

Embodied beings and desires  53 those assumptions. Separations and distinctions are certainly useful and necessary to explain and appreciate the world we all inhabit—trees, deer, and hammers are not the same things—and therefore, we queertheologians and ethical revolutionaries have to be careful to dismantle the subtle hierarchies that cling to any useful separations we make. This is especially true when understanding and appreciating human beings. Rather than clarity about key elements of humanity or the human experience, a harsh and demoralizing value distinction between the spirit and the body betrays and impoverishes both aspects of experience. Theologically speaking, the ontological subordination of materiality to spirit has preserved a strict separation of God’s own being from the world. In this way, in traditional Christian theological terms even God’s incarnate breath and flesh in Jesus Christ can and should be separated and distinctly valued from all other fleshy existence rather than seen as evidence of divinity present in all flesh. Moreover, the flesh and breath embodied in humans properly reflects this valuation by being rightly ordered (read: hierarchically arranged, differently valued, unequally capable of divine connection). This hierarchical framework not only ruptures the human—effectively putting asunder what, in the Psalmist’s words God has knit together—but it also acts as a basis for ethics, functioning as model for ways to understand and relate to oneself and others. If people can understand themselves or their nearby “others” as rightly or wrongly ordered according to this separation and hierarchy of spirit and mind over flesh and body, then they can also understand and order the variety of human experiences (and the social categories that we attach to them) through a related hierarchical lens. This is the mechanism by which those more associated with “body” and “matter” are logically subordinated to those more associated with “mind” and “spirit.” The racial, sexual, gendered, and earthly aspects of this mechanism are obvious and all too evident in history. As a result, one inevitable outcome of the body-spirit bifurcation is a collective devaluation of sexuality broadly and, more specifically, a demonization of improperly ordered sexuality and sexual expression. With the body framed as a debased part of human existence, at once powerless against its urges and culpable for its actions, bodily expression through sexuality and sexual desire also bear the markings of debasement and depravity. The control of sexual urges is a hallmark of spiritual elevation in many religious traditions. But perhaps because of feelings of powerlessness in the face of sexual desire (made famous in Christian history by Augustine’s agony over the “disobedience” of his “member”), a pattern began early in Christianity of blaming the objects of sexual desire as agents of evil. Women came in early as prime targets. Ushering in a long line of like-minded theologians, in the third century CE Tertullian declared all women to be gateways of hell for this reason. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus added a medieval theatricality to this pattern of blaming those more associated with the body, a pattern legitimated by the hierarchy

54  Embodied beings and desires between spirit and body.7 Like his contemporary Thomas Aquinas, he claimed that “woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his….One must be on guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil…”8 Snakes, devils, and horns were all sexualized marks of those not blessed by God, an association of evil with uncontrolled sexual desire for those others that also functioned to place religious and racial others on the lower rungs of divine favor while marking them all as objects of sexual power, desire, and license. In cruel twists of logic that still pertain, rape and sexual violence become means of carrying out ruthless discipline, perpetrated by those who believe women, queers, enslaved people, prisoners, children, war victims and virtually anyone lower on the ladder of social value is a legitimate target for violence. As Toni Morrison writes of the brutal punishment of an enslaved child in The Origin of Others, “…who are these people? How hard they work to define the slave as inhuman, savage, when in fact the definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher.”9 Queer bashing often involves rape, sometimes sexual mutilation, sometimes death. How hard they work to define the queer person as inhuman, deviant, a threat to families and even to God, when in fact the definitions describe overwhelmingly the punisher. The devaluation of the human body and human sexuality, in addition to sanctioning and inciting injustice and violence, allows for fear among many Christians that they are—or are perceived as—too fleshly in their own being. People of color, formerly or currently colonized people, queer folks, differently abled people, and women experience this assigned proximity to the demeaned body, along with the violence and fears connected to it. It is not surprising that those of us who fall into one or more of those groups are often met with external (and sometimes self-) imposed admonitions to escape the body.10 This happens through body self-policing and by negatively judging and subsequently limiting moods, needs, orientations, and actions. The body’s own modes of communication are ignored, tamped down, denied. Fat bodies, queerly desirous bodies, menstrual bodies, black and brown bodies, trans bodies bear significations of defect, uncleanness, or even evil, all because of a hierarchy that denies spiritual fullness to flesh, period. Queer desire and queer sex, deemed abomination in much of Christian history, made and make queer bodies truly unredeemable in traditional theological terms. Of course, it’s not clear that cleansing the body, even in extreme forms, includes ridding it of any desire, rightly ordered or otherwise. For Augustine, “desire for anything but the will of God, especially desire for sexual pleasure, illustrates a sinful aspect of humanity.”11 The problem is two-fold: desire focused away from God and sexual desire, understood to be by definition already focused away from God. Womanist, feminist, and queer theologians have challenged the notion that sex and sexual desire (and pleasure, for that matter) are antithetical to the nature and will of God, and thus challenge the idea that sexual pleasure and communion

Embodied beings and desires  55 with God cannot overlap. We have done so in the face of biblical texts and priestly tradition suggesting that they cannot. For example, in a letter likely written to a broad audience of Gentiles, the apostle Peter suggests that in order to appreciate Christ’s sacrifice and to be good stewards of God’s grace, believers must be willing to suffer, or ‘arm ourselves with the same intention as Christ’ and ‘live for the rest of [our] earthly [lives] no longer by human desires but by the will of God’ (v. 1–2). The text polarizes God’s will and human desires and continues further, ‘though [the Gentiles] had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does’ (v. 6). Peter’s division between flesh and spirit, widened by the presence of desires, implies that in the spirit, there is life and God while judgment (and presumably death) can be found in the flesh. Peter’s investment in binary separation, along with the subsequent theological tradition built upon it, begs the question: can the body itself desire? Or, is desire something that comes from the spirit or the mind? Can the flesh itself have affect or emotion? Of course, these questions only make sense if body and spirit are ontologically divided. Based on bodily secretions, the movement of blood and other fluid, increasing and decreasing heart rates, and the speed or a volume of breath, we might emphatically say, “yes” to flesh as affective, emotive, and intentional, affirming that the body has its own way of responding, emoting, and expressing. A colleague in physics once told us that gravity, the power of attraction that draws all bodies together from the elemental to the planetary, is an observable phenomenon that occurs to all bodies in the universe, but is little understood in itself. Bodies lean toward each other, relate, react, and in so doing sometimes repel. Though such bodily behavior is most often explained through physiology and basic chemistry as if to dismiss affective dimensions of existence, those explanations do not make the behavior any less expressions of desire. Nor does desire have to be attached merely to need or lack as some would reduce it—scratching an itch, so to speak (though there is certainly pleasure and satisfaction in that as well). The physicality of breath, of spirit, means that the body exhibits affect, emotion, and desire both as a matter of blood, breath, and pheromones but also as a physical matter simply of being. There is more to a queer spirituality of sexual desire here that is related to a clearer and more rich understanding of the cosmos itself. We authors understand that queer sexuality recognizes the beauty and righteousness in needs as well as desires. A response to the demonization of the body through sexuality is to make holy, or sanctify, the sexual bodies that are, by the error of a twisted binary logic, deemed unredeemable. What if spirit, like breath, is matter? Cannot but matter? The radical cession of spirit from matter is not necessary for Christian piety, and for Christians at least there is a profound joining of spirit and matter in the incarnation, a queer scandal indeed. Breath we already know is embodied, tradition tells us it is spirit and life. The breath of God, we might say, is the breath of ever changing, ever forming bodies,

56  Embodied beings and desires which makes bodies always becoming forms of spirit, inseparable at every point. Sexual bodies (which could mean all bodies if ungovernable attraction has something to do with it) are therefore, by definition, spiritual, capable of expressing and experiencing divinity in themselves as embodied. The breath of life is spiritum, the body of the world.

Knit together: touch There is a great American novel about, among many things, the crossracial love of two men whose intimacy sustains their sanity under the rule of madness. In it, the narrator Ishmael and the characters Queequeg and Pip, their captain Ahab, and the white whale all figure large as metaphors of 1855 America convulsing in its white obsessions over chattel slavery, industrialization, forced removals, and slaughter—of humans for land and whales for profit. Lisa Ann Robertson suggests that in Moby Dick it is physical, even ecstatically sensual touch that is redemptive, distinguishing Ishmael’s sanity from Ahab’s madness and fatal quest. Robertson agrees with other interpreters that Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, which she reminds us is a marriage, saves him from becoming Ahab. But unlike other critical readers who avoid the physicality of their relationship, Robertson emphasizes touch as the key to Ishmael’s redemption and the ability to face the uncertainties of existence. Because, she points out, “if redemption were contingent upon finding a soul-mate, then Pip would have redeemed Ahab. What Ahab’s physical rejection of Pip suggests is that redemption from madness is contingent upon touch.”12 Melville’s brilliant, vast, and wonderfully complex anti-slavery narrative could be, among other things, a most queer and prophetic allegory for the uncertain time in which we now live. Touch is the key to knowledge and especially so in queer terms. Sara Ahmed agrees, instructing readers to “begin with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”13 Bodies are drawn together in spite of any laws or conventions that humans may contrive to police them. And just as skin describes the boundaries and containments of identity and difference, touch is the means of connection that has the capacity both to knit together and violently abuse. Like the complex relationship of skin to social orders, touch also falls prey to regimens of hierarchy and separation, being a medium of both connection and of violence. The denigrated body, along with the demonization of sexuality, sexual action, and especially sexual desire, is a problem that reaches all the way to how God and divinity are construed. According to Lee Butler, maintaining a natural theology of God as wholly other from the world happens through the destruction and dehumanization of the self by breaking the self into irreconcilable parts.14 Situating “the body” as separate from God’s spirit, domain, responsibility or control (since it is the ultimate receptor and

Embodied beings and desires  57 motivator of free will) and claiming that the body is the site of manifested evil (and evil orientations), God’s perfect goodness becomes devoid of responsibility for evil and the suffering of bodies in the world. Theologians have wrangled over this difficulty for centuries and will continue to do so so long as God must somehow be prophylactically sanitized of the mess of bodies and mucky fabric of the earth. Put another way, as long as the body, which has been materially and spiritually separated from God, is the  carrier of evil and debasement, then it is an explanatory scapegoat for the presence of evil and suffering in the world. In a basic sense, the denigrated body and all of the animals and peoples most associated with flesh serve a bifurcated divine system that necessitates their subordinate and despised status if only to secure the absolute purity and separateness of the divine. Remove that status, and the whole structure has to be rethought. Or better yet, reconceived. Queertheology offers a definitive “no” to the denigration of the body and to the separation of the body from what it means to be a self, a human subject. A notion of humanity or selfhood separate from bodies is a zombification of the life that we claim God intends. Many queer folk and queer theologians know that being human and living into our fully creative potential requires appreciation of our sensate capacities and tactile explorations, along with cognitive musings. In fact, we also know that it is sensation and desire that bridge mind and body. We queers lean into the virtue of desire because it keeps us alive even in the face of persecution. So just as spirit and body cannot be ontologically separated, queertheologies have to begin from and take for granted the reality that selfhood is materially formed. We queers know this because when we are persecuted in body—beaten and killed because of our clothes and nail polish and heels, jailed because we seek connection in bathrooms or parks or even our own homes, are denied medicine or care, thrown out because we were caught kissing a “friend”—we feel the pain and suffering in every part of our being. When we are on the streets, we feel the coldness on our skin, in our bones, and in our spirit. Loneliness and abandonment brings shivers and chattering teeth, too. This is why queertheologies have to offer an even louder “NO!” to the separation of bodies from humanity. Resistance to this separation is an affirmation that our bodies confirm what our spirits and minds know about injustice and pain and suffering. They are the pressure gauges in our moral barometers. Our bodies also help us recognize life and death. Several years ago, Nikki interviewed Bess, a black woman in the rural South, who understands herself to be shaped by and formed within her Pentecostal religious practices and accompanying faith. What she discovered as they spoke about Bess’ experiences, life choices, restrictions and freedoms, was that she was not (as Nikki had assumed) avoiding her body as a way to be closer to God. Instead, she recognized it as a temple and as a means of connecting her humanness to the basic elements of existence: life and death. Speaking

58  Embodied beings and desires about a particularly powerful moment in her life and in her faith journey, Bess shared, He had beat me to death this time…I knew it. I knew that I was dead right there on that first pew. I was sitting there dead….I felt when the blood, or something wet, started to go down the back of my head. I closed my eyes, and died…I died right when they were wailing [the song], ‘I know it was the Blood, I know it was the blood.’ The next thing I knew, Mother Mitchell was kneeling over me, spreading that holy oil across my face and arms…Oooh, she was praying, and the women around her, they were shouting and singing and someone was even whispering in my ear, ‘Live’….Those women prayed that night, they didn’t stop….They prayed my body right back to life….15 For Bess, the beatings, the death, the healing, and the new life were real and located simultaneously in body and in spirit. Life was in the body, even not constrained by it. She felt it as an embodied person, and believed the experience was happening because it was in her spirit and her body AND because she was surrounded by “holy, anointed, women prayer warriors who knew how [she] felt.” Bess’ story illustrates that bodies both represent and are the connection between what is sensible and what is intelligible. In them, any of us know in deep and real ways; we are our own proof, our own #facts. Of course, there is a danger in marking the body merely as a mechanism for connectivity and intelligibility. Humans need the body, sure, but a theological and ethical orientation to the body cannot be solely utilitarian. Such an orientation is a distortion of the fundamental relationship between the body and the self. The body is an inextricable, fundamental part of the self. Even more, it is not merely a “thing” that makes a person intelligible; it is intelligibility. Beyond the necessary “no’s” to separation, then, queertheology recognizes the need for a constructive move, namely that bodies—an embodied human experience—require a “yes” to connectivity, to the realization that lives and our experiences are sensible, intelligible, and communicable. All of us know and, perhaps more importantly, are known through our bodies. Thus, we queertheologians critique and reject the enforced dualism as a serious error in Christian life precisely because it has served as a systematic way of ensuring alienation from God, self, and neighbor. Perhaps it is appropriate here to point out that Christians typically call that alienation sin… The sin, Augustine argued, is turning away from God, diminishing and denying our full selves as a part of God’s creation. We are composed of materials that have connective purposes, and they model for us how we are supposed to be. We are skin, connecting others to our insides, blood connecting cells, heart to oxygen. We are breath, connecting to the air around us that carries the breath of all beings and even the dust of stars. It is

Embodied beings and desires  59 through these bodily elements—the skin, bones, breath, blood, pulse—that we are perceptible and recognizable to one another. It is how we know anything at all. And even if we utter no words we “speak” in other ways. As the old church folk and the queers in the club point out, “If I can’t say a word, I just wave my hand.”

“I Feel the Earth Move (Under My Feet)” Living in and of this world—fully in our bodies—is virtuously queer and requires a reorientation to the idea of life as well as a new perspective on good hospitality. To be fair, there are several virtues involved in the larger one of redeeming the human experience of embodiment. What lay behind the first pride movements, marches, and parades in LGBT communities was a body-righteousness, a grit fueled by the energy of refusal and the power of celebratory resistance. The virtue of fully being in one’s body and ­generously celebrating the rainbow array of other bodies is that doing so is the righteous response to God’s gift of flesh and breath, skin and touch. Body righteousness recognizes that it is the body, the lungs, and the bronchia in both God and the first human that transforms air/wind into breath. It recognizes that all bodies differ and are nevertheless related. It defends this ever-changing array of embodiment as a good. Inasmuch as the book of Genesis claims that God breathed into the first human’s nostrils the breath of life, God’s own being had undergone the alchemy made possible only by the presence of a body.16 The practical virtue of body-righteousness is vulnerable to arrogance and exclusion, and so needs the related virtue of humility. Inclusive and generous body-righteousness is also humbling, in the best and most honest way, as it helps us to understand and appreciate ourselves and our people in relation to that from which we come. At its root, this humility is self-awareness in relation to others. For some of us, the queer and colored and otherwise erased ones of us, knowing and understanding ourselves and our roots, is a soul-shifting experience since colonization, slavery, and genocide ripped our histories from us. But to know that we are first creations, children of God, is to know that we were called out of the deep, fashioned in blood and bone, and nourished in the water of the womb. Certainly a right relation with God, self, and neighbor calls us to respond with humility to the gift of the body and its possibility of story, which is always in some way testifying to the truth of our existence as matter-of-fact, a mattering-of-fact. But because some lives are still deemed more valuable than others and some bodies are still deemed unworthy of respect, love, or protection, the commitment to be—to live all the way in one’s body—is a constant and necessary work of queer resistance. It is a refusal to be dismissed, disassembled, disembodied, and ultimately dehumanized. This kind of work takes grit, chutzpah, and the kind of nerve that we see when black trans women continue to make their way through the streets despite the widespread

60  Embodied beings and desires murders of their sisters, or when a white butch lesbian in rural Pennsylvania wears her rainbow pin to her working-class job on National Coming Out Day. It is the spirit alive in public actions that celebrate despised bodies, like Lizzo’s electrifying performance of “Good As Hell” at the 2019 Video Music Awards. This kind of audacious resolve is bolstered by a commitment to locate life force externally and internally, in the community and in one’s cells. Simply choosing to be fully present in the face of every effort to extinguish our lives exhibits a virtue of regardlessness, of no-fucks-to-give on the question of self-worthiness. It is the type of refusal to be eviscerated that the founders of and ongoing collaborators with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) possessed and display.17 ACT UP folks said NO in multiple small and large public actions to the HIV virus determining a death sentence. And they did it by publicly shaming the government and religious and health organizations. They persistently expose the fact that the disease might be dangerous but the world’s refusal of the gay body was deadly. Political performances like theirs are also theological affirmations— refusals to “die” in the world of creation and, even more, they express a commitment to persist in existence as bearers of lovable bodies. The body is holy. Queer bodies throughout history are holy ghosts. We, co-writers of this book and queer lovers of our bones and breasts, bellies and back, recognize and value the bodyspirit as a sacred and holy thing in itself. It is, on its own, worthy of our protection, appreciation, and love. Even more, it ought to be free. We know that loving and liberating the flesh into its fullness of nonbinary spiritum is a revolutionary and socially radical enterprise. It challenges the investments in and attempts toward our erasure and death, especially as those attempts happen in and on our bodies in starkly different ways. “Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh.”18 Many womanist, feminist, and queer theologians and ethicists have taken up Baby Sugg’s sermon in the clearing in Beloved as an illustration of a bodyspirit-theology that comes out of but is not limited by the experience of enslaved Africans. We highlight and celebrate her use of body parts and bodily expression as well as her imagery of violence—the breaking and snatching and noosing visited on those bodies—to call the community into a place of knowledge about what the body needs, desires, and deserves. “You got to love it,” she tells those who have gathered in the clearing. After all, the people “out there” specifically don’t love it and want it mutilated and killed. With her words and movement, Baby Suggs reminds her people that the body, whether enslaved or newly freed, is a site of being and the place of life, existing always in connection to the soil and located on the ground that captures the tears and sweat and blood of black folks’ labor. It cannot be ignored because it is also the connection to God, which allows people to know laughter and movement and rest and music. Those connections to God and neighbor and self, through embodied and expressed emotions and

Embodied beings and desires  61 thoughts and beliefs and knowledge, are about love and freedom. And that is why attending to and loving the body and all its flesh is as much holy work as it is a radical and revolutionary process. One of the most helpful thinkers in this area is M. Shawn Copeland, whose book Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, frames theological inquiry around the bodies of black people—particularly black women—and argues that it is within the meaning of the body that God’s presence in human history is most profoundly grounded.19 Pointing out the link between the suffering body of Christ and black bodies that have experienced pain, Copeland suggests that all human bodies have been caught up in a web of body commerce, body exchange, and body value. As we know, orientations to the body as the lesser component of the human (in relation to the spirit) ultimately render the body a commodifiable thing rather than an essential and sacred part of God’s creation. But loving the body and perceiving it as already connected to God has both political and social implications as well as deep theological meaning. The body is divine… and dirty. We queertheologians know how to talk about the question of identity, the question of who we are. We’ve built ethical systems of study around it and generated hundreds of books, articles, and Buzzfeed quizzes about it. But what if we find and locate virtue in talking about what we are? What if we consider that the essence and quality of our being consists not only of who we become (a social and political concern), but in what out of and into which we are made? Mary Douglas, a twentieth-century anthropologist, wrote an influential reflection on purity and pollution in which she argued that dirt and purity are, essentially, social constructs. Dirt, she argued, is just matter “out of place.” Food in a dish on the table is not dirt, that same food on the floor is dirt. 20 This insight has been immensely helpful to queer theorists who recognize the social power of labeling certain genders, races, and sexualities as dirty, and especially as capable of polluting the rest. The hierarchical ordering of beings in a theological chain of being that puts disembodied (pure) spirit and God at the top and (dirty) matter at the bottom needs upsetting if there is to be any hope for healing. Douglas is correct. Dirt, purity, and pollution are terms that refer to values and if those values are distorted by outworn prejudices, then the terms need to be reconfigured. If sex is dirty, then let’s get dirty! If purity cannot abide the touch of difference, then let’s get polluted! Save the concept of purity for hospital instrument sterilization, and pollution for toxic waste. Give us the dirty, earthy world and messy, sexy bodies. These are the very being of spirit, of God. The naming of the earth as an act of creation as well as the construction of the earth as a life force brought into being out of an abyssal mystery— makes it God’s body. It is God’s lifeforce, God’s divine power and essence, that catalyzes the movement of waters and the growth of plants that can sustain animals and other creatures. The earth itself, already formed in

62  Embodied beings and desires God’s is-ness, from the material that God manifested through desire and energy, was already sacred, holy, and already God. The earth is God’s flesh and, therefore, already divine. This being so, every earthy body is God’s flesh, and therefore already divine. Queer spiritual communities, from the Radical Faeries to the Cities of Refuge to the multitude of syncretic and creative body-affirming spiritual practices of small groups of queer folk strongly tend in this direction. As we have already shown, body-affirmation in queer spirituality comes as no surprise. Coming out in the face of long-standing social annihilation usually requires it. Peter Sweasey points out that for queers, “[c]oming out involves rejecting social programming and expectations, and asserting that they will live by the truth of their experience instead.” Because that experience is fundamentally a sexual one there is no avoiding the body and its desires here. Going further, Sweasey adds that in refusing to keep up any sort of pretense (about this aspect of their lives, at least), they are laying the groundwork for a healthy, open spirituality. They are learning something about who they really are instead of who they are told they should be, and as a consequence, the act of coming out can be a source of spiritual insight. 21 While he goes on in his blog to caution against the limiting tendencies that come from creating new hierarchies of value, the basic point is that the hostility and alienation many queer folk experience in religion gives us what he calls a “God-given bullshit detector… If they are told that they should not exist or that their sexuality is wrong, they have reason to doubt the veracity of anything else that religion may say.”22 This skepticism is an important virtue on behalf of bodily experience, and it can serve queer spiritual practices that affirm and learn from what bodies have to teach. The various modes of inhabiting queerness encourage us to think about how our bodies, along with the ways we adorn, position, affect, and move them, mark us as humans existing in all of our divine glory. The long histories of monastic and other forms of religious life certainly give us some conceptual tools for thinking about the ways that practices and disciplines and performances of cross-dressing, of drag in its many forms, of swish and swagger, of fat and fairy, of dapper and queen, and on and on create collectivities of recognition that also undo the recognizable. On what is recognizably brilliant about black queer and trans folks, social ethicist and black trans scholar Benae Beamon writes, Performance is not limited to the way that we make choices; it is in our very embodiment. Every flip of the wrist as you vogue is an homage to black history and cultural reverence, each pose is a moral statement that “I will be seen,” and every death drop expresses the breadth and fierceness of black life. 23

Embodied beings and desires  63 Consider, too, the way that Hannah Gadsby gestures over her body in her routine “Nanette,” saying as she does so only “this…” to indicate an obviousness to her lack of fit in the narrow world of her family of origin. All of the wordless (and wordy) things we can say about the white lesbian butch body in her “this…” is a powerful and poignant pause, a simple hand gesture up and down the front of her body that, for some of us, jolts a recognition or a memory forward. We too are “this…” in a world that has sought or does or will seek to destroy us. But it also is a gesture, a “statement of self”—we dare to hope—that connects us to the divine messaging of beautiful, complex, sexy humanity.

Becoming one flesh Manifested in the earth, God’s body is fluid, eruptive, pulsating, rhythmic, cyclical, reproductive, and in a consistent state of yearning. God’s body is also wanton, and promiscuous. It desires communion. Our bodies desire, too, and there is good in the body seeking its own flourishing. In fact, flourishing is desire’s ultimate aim. Beamon argues that “desire brings about the possibility of thriving and flourishing.”24 Even more, “to satiate desire is to exist in a state of or in constant pursuit of flourishing.”25 For Beamon, there is a difference between needs and desires in terms of affective orientation and ultimate aim. For us queertheologians, thinking in relation to the body, this difference is a matter of pursuit. Is the body always only pursuing survival, or does it pursue joy and flourishing? And really, what is the ethical difference between seeking to survive or thrive? Is it good for the body to seek its own flourishing? Absolutely. The ethical difference between seeking survival or flourishing is the “projection of one’s existence into the future versus the projection of one’s life into a community of belonging.”26 Choosing to flourish and have joy affirms to ourselves and to one another that our lives matter, that they are good and worthy of witness and relation. Choosing to flourish is also, of course, a refusal to die, to be erased, ignored, marginalized, violated. People have attached queer efforts to seek flourishing in and for our bodies to the sexual, to the venereal, and to a misuse of bodily function and expression. Such attachments have been filtered through a lens of shaming. Queertheology can try to mitigate the shame by talking about the queer body outside of its sexual behavior and expressions, by naming the queer body as good simply because it is divinely ordained as such, glossing over the messiness, beauty, heartbreak, and ecstasy of sex. More than simply declaring queer bodies “good” because we say that God intended us, we want to acknowledge and honor the divine embodiment of the earth and ourselves and celebrate—“Dancing Queen” style—all the variants of sexuality. The divine, queer body is not always a sexual body, but sometimes—a great deal of times, even—it is. Our bodies—in full sexual and sensual essence—bring us into a special kind of divine knowing. Audre Lorde focuses

64  Embodied beings and desires on this knowing in her discussions of the erotic and erotic knowledge, noting that erotic power emerges from our own willingness to say “yes” to the inner voice of knowing that we possess.27 Where, conceptually and actually, is this knowing located? Colloquial expressions put it in the gut. In our bones. In the shivers of our spines. In the hairs on our necks. In the dryness of our mouths. In the wetness of other places… We would be remiss not to recognize the double timber of this voice as God’s, inseverable from our own. Through the feelings that we experience in body—ecstatic and torturous and suspending—we are able to connect to divine knowing, which is always a knowing about being alive. It is in the extended or fleeting moments of ecstasy, when we are seeking and sating our own flourishing, when our words slip into moans, and our bodies speak in shudders—those moments when we fully relinquish what we think for the sake of what our bodies know—that we live. And we live fully, unapologetically embodied and sexual, through and in the space of la petite mort, “the little death,” when we are most aware of just how alive we are. Queertheology has to advocate for and defend this same kind of reverberating, pulsing, undeniable gut, breast, clitoral, phallic, breathy, skin-tingling, toe-curling knowledge. This undeniable sense of our humanity, of our subjectivity, links us with ourselves and God, but also to one another in a way that fulfills the fundamental relational quality of human is-ness. Here, again, in the space of such links we can think about righteous relations. We can consider the truth about what our bodies and flesh, our senses and our sex teach us about a good, just, and joy-filled world.

Conclusion, finding the body, finding God We are all dirt. Better yet, we are dirty. That is what and who we are, and we cannot make pure what God has “knelt down in the dust of the earth” and made dirty. Of course, in light of our inability to scrub away what is made of grit and dirt, what is ourselves, we have used words to cover up the evidence of our origins. We have been telling ourselves the wrong stories about who and what we are for a very long time. We allow for the despising of our bodies when we think that what we are—really—is a separable spirit imprisoned in a body. Those stories having embedded themselves into our tongues and flesh, seem like unquestionable truth… for some of us. But for others of us, other queerly divine ones of us, the questions keep us alive. Our queerness helps us to “peel the skin from language,” as John Edgar Wideman puts it, and find the flesh of our individual and collective meaning. They give us room to interrogate what has felt like pretense, even if only our bones. Critiquing and challenging the idea of maleness or whiteness as inhabiting bodies and souls that exist in closer proximity to God than others feels like freedom. Calling these things out by showing our own divinity, through our own improvisations of bodyspirit love, through a theological and social voguing, feels like life.

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We have been lost to ourselves. But there are those who find their way, in performance and in dress, in science and in art—all seeking the first truths, and the lost truth that we are God(’)s. Ntozake Shange’s long choreopoem in For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf contains a multi-voiced celebration of finding her way. “I was missing something, something so important, something promised” she writes. It is touch that makes her whole, “a laying on of hands” that connects her not only to her own flesh but to the cosmos in its divinity that circles back into her, “the holiness of myself released.” She found god, she tells us in conclusion, in herself and loved her. Loves her. 28

Notes 1 There has been ongoing discussion about the incorrect usage of “death drop” to describe what has been designated historically as a dip. See as an example Mikelle Street, “It’s Neither a Death Drop Nor a Shablam: Celebrating the Art of ‘The Dip,’” Hornet, February 1, 2018, https://hornet.com/stories/deathdrop-shablam-dip/ (accessed August 17, 2020). 2 Voguing is a modern American dance style first created in the black and Latino LGBT community. 3 Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, trans. C. D. N. Costa (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 2. 4 For many queer people of color, the notion and experience of self-love or appreciation is eclipsed by pervasive messaging that their bodies and lives are worthless, unlovable, and morally abject. The result of self-hatred gains its strength from contexts of racism, homophobia, and transphobia in which efforts to love or appreciate or even value oneself is radical and revolutionary work. 5 Evan L. Ardiel and Catharine H. Rankin, “The Importance of Touch in Development,” Paediatrics & Child Health 15, no. 3 (March 2010): 153–156. 6 Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” on First Take, Atlantic Records. Recorded 1968, Released March 7, 1972. By Ewan MacColl. 7 Albertus Magnus Quaestiones super de animalibus XV q. 11. 8 Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women (Bedford, PA: Lighthouse Publishing, 2018), Bk 1. 9 Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2016 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 29. 10 Lee Butler, “The Spirit Is Willing and the Flesh Is Too: Living Whole and Holy Lives through Integrating Spirituality and Sexuality” in Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 111. 11 Traci C. West, “A Space for Faith, Sexual Desire, and Ethical Black Ministerial Practices” in Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 34. 12 Lisa Ann Robertson, “‘Universal Thump’: The Redemptive Epistemology of Touch in Moby-Dick,” Leviathan 12, no. 2 (2010): 5–20, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1750-1849.2010.01159.x. 13 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 30. 14 Butler, “The Spirit Is Willing and the Flesh Is Too,” 115.

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15 Bess [pseudo.], interview by the author, transcript, Walterboro, SC, 21 December 2005. 16 Gen 2:7, NRSV. Emphasis ours. 17 ACT UP is a New York-based international, grassroots political group created in 1987 to end the AIDS pandemic, focusing primarily improving the lives of people with AIDS. ACT UP methods and strategies for transformation include direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies. 18 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 88. 19 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010). 20 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge Classics, 1966). 21 Peter Sweasey, “Queer Spirituality” Lion’s Roar (blog), March 1, 1998, www. lionsroar.com/queer-spirituality-peter-sweasey/ (accessed December 18, 2019). 22 Ibid. 23 Benae Beamon, “Black Trans Women and Black (Christian) Religious Ethics,” PhD diss. (Boston University, 2020). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007). 28 Ntozake Shange, “A Laying on of Hands” in For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem, ed. Ntozake Shange. (New York: Scribner, 2010), 84–86.

Interlude The spaces

I remember the day that Emilie and I got married. Even though it was nearly a decade ago now, it comes to mind when I think about “before the pandemic.” That day, as we readied ourselves for what we so recently had thought impossible, “before the pandemic” would have meant “before HIV/AIDS” and how it changed the whole landscape of our queer lives and relations. That pandemic created the idea of safe sex. Well, for men, anyway. The long legacies of rape and sexual assault of women—enslaved women, war-vanquished women, prostitutes, mothers, teenage girls, little girls, lesbians, transwomen and transmen, any woman or designated woman any time—as well as the unequal burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing meant that women have thought about sex and risk forever, just without that recently neat phrase: safe sex. But HIV made us all think again about sex and how to have it, or to try not have it. Now the world reels with a different pandemic. It hits us at our most common human need to speak, sing, and be together; to eat, laugh, dance, lament, and share space together. Now we don’t have to exchange bodily fluids to endanger each other. We just have to stand close, talk face to face, share air. Our wedding took place shortly after Connecticut legalized same-sex marriage, years before the COVID-19 virus began its sweep through the human planet. But it comes to mind now, when I think of the times before we feared hugs. It was Connecticut in May and our people gathered in close around us. The two of us stood facing each other, at a cusp of so many American impossibilities of relation: Senegal, Wales, Haiti, the G erman Pale in Russia, Wolof, Ashkenazi, Carib. Wisconsin frostbite, collards, redlining, whites only, Ozark tabernacles, screen-door shotguns, class aspiration, North Carolina fried chicken, black skillet society, a wartime piano instead of a tractor, biscuits, preaching, pink triangles, Negro motorist green books, education, class aspiration, Stonewall, education, class aspiration, education and—not meant to survive. We moved all of the seating into a circle. As prelude everyone created Sweet Honey in the Rock’s jungle rainstorm. The two of us entered together, then we separated to follow drummers around the circle and back

68  Interlude: the spaces to each other, our breath soft and sweet and uninfected on each other’s faces. We listened to music, said our vows. We jumped the broom. The party was a swirl of bodies, our oldest friends voguing on the floor, our straightest friends feeling a freedom they later marveled at. Many sweated, laughed in each other’s faces, panted, shimmied, and got down. Some of our friends, living carefully closeted professional lives in catholic universities, seminaries, or various religious organizations, shook off their closet doors (pre-pandemic masks) and danced close, danced wild, danced dirty. Even our friends who were as out outside as they were inside relived some of the wild joy of those for whom this space—and its remarkable expression of impossibilities—made a difference. We didn’t know that night that we would soon be moving to a city in which, by the simple act of crossing a state line, we would no longer be married. The wonder of our public possibility would return us to a private affair. That move brought the issue of space forcefully into our relation, this time an ugly reminder of the difference it makes in relations, especially queer ones. Not that we stopped feeling married across that state line. We reassured ourselves that the move made no difference because it was the ceremony and our cloud of witnesses around that circle and on that dance floor that mattered. Even the ceremony, we asserted, came as a mere punctuation mark on the true reality of our relation. The rest, we told ourselves, was just the loss of tax breaks, health insurance, the addition of legal fees, property ownership hurdles and inheritance difficulties. That we felt a little less safe, looked more carefully where we would live, returned to a studied neutrality in public, was like putting on an old coat, familiar and scratchy. But our relationship and commitment to it, we repeated to ourselves, didn’t have to do with that. We stepped into heteronormative rewards and back out of them into a kind of space to which we were long accustomed, hoping we had not been diminished by the trip. But it meant, like so much in modern life, that our relationship felt a little less embodied, a little more fugitive and encumbered on the land. The benefits hadn’t been trivial back where we had been legally married. Being without them again, in our new space of greater vulnerability and slightly more disembodied at-homeness, reminded us that space and place matters. We wanted to make no heteronormative assumptions, although marriage seemed to entail them in spite of ourselves. We believed (and still believe) our jumping the broom meant something that was historically and continuously illicit and queer, blessed in a place that had made room for us. Of course, eventually the federal government stepped in and the state issue became moot. We were legally married again with the swipe of a politician’s pen. The space shifted. Although we were suddenly married again, we had been formed in the ephemera of queer spaces and relations. We were old enough to remember hiding in plain sight, shuttling between bars and private gatherings, communicating in ever-evolving codes of clothes, haircuts, walks, and gazes.

Interlude: the spaces  69 We were used to finding niches in public spaces in which to breathe a little more freely. But we were also used to relocating: our neighborhoods and meeting places easily and often turned on us. Sometimes it was police raids, sometimes it was our tendency to DIY fix things and decorate, inadvertently assisting in our own removal through gentrification. We have always been ready to run, to find new spaces to gather, collect ourselves, support each other, rebuild. This new virus, however, has made safe space a question we are not used to answering. Our wedding now lights up in memory in a new way. It is one of those times—and places—that shines like a religious icon from a world gone past. Queer relations have to take shape in new ways now. Long standing modes of support—gay bars, softball games, weddings, house parties, Pride—are suddenly newly life-threatening. Our poignantly deep needs for physical touch and intimate cohesion, for flaming resistance to heteronormative codes of decency, for the sense of community and safety in numbers—all must be navigated or relinquished, built in new ways all over again. What is safe space, now? In a New Yorker essay entitled “You Miss It When It’s Gone” Bryan Washington recites a litany of remembered gay bar visits around the country and the world before the novel COVID-19 virus hit.1 Each one is a glimpse of more-than community in “various shades,” each memory a snapshot of queer relationality. In one, a group of friends stands close around a dancing middle-aged man who has just come out, managing his need to be a little out of control while inviting touches of congratulation from others. In another he remembers a whole bar silently mourning the Pulse club shootings, hands on shoulders, hugs, and pats on backs, all mute determinations of support and community in spaces hard-won. For men to stand close to one another, to touch without having to fist bump or bro-punch, defies Western heteromasculine codes of male territorialism and homoerotic management. Simple, loving touches and heads tipped close in intimate conversation belie a difference that matters among those raised to be men, at least in the United States. A hand on hand, a soft grasp of shoulder, a passing brush of the small of a back or a casually draped arm around a waist during conversation, are all a queer revolution. The revolution is, in part, physical proximity and the power of nonverbal declarations of care. No longer furtive, having battled out of the shadows, but still nurtured in these gathering places. Then… another virus. “It’s worth wondering how a space largely free of threats evolves when every space becomes a threat” Washington writes. “Some of us waited a long time for those spaces. Some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don’t have time to wait. You miss it when it’s gone.”2 Although space and relationality have a great deal to do with one another (just ask Einstein) the inherent links between space and relation is not always obvious when we are talking about human connections. To be related to someone, or to be in relation with someone or group of someones, is often

70

Interlude: the spaces

conceptually unmoored from the spaces in which those relations occur and have meaning. This unmooring may be a modern phenomenon, reflecting a now mundane global mobility of individuals for whom relations may be summed up in cell phone contact lists. Or it could be a product of colonial expansion, traced back to the necessity of depersonalizing lands in order to colonize and commodify them, leading to the acquisitive dislocation of settler colonials and the coerced dislocation/s of the colonized. We experienced it in a disorienting way when we left Connecticut that spring. Queer relations have a long history of specific dependence on sheltered spaces where relations can take place. It is also a struggle to keep those spaces from disappearing, a struggle to keep them free and welcoming to an ever-shifting plurality of embodiments and desires. Despite those struggles, most of us remember the importance of havens, places to express self and desire without censure. Whether temporary or on the move, these spaces saved many of us. The challenge now is that, in this pandemic age and those that will inevitably follow it, every space of gathering becomes a threat. Perhaps like learning to have sex safely, we can learn to space safely and bring all of our campy creativity to doing so, still offering to each other the conviviality and sexy flair we are so good at, that we—all of us—need so much still.

Notes 1 Bryan Washington, “You Miss It When It’s Gone” in The New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2020, p. 45. 2 Ibid.

Interlude The fence

Me: We should get a white fence. It’ll go really well, don’t you think? Benae: A white fence with a white house?!? Nah, a white picket fence might be too heteronormative for me.

*** One of the most straightforward, concise, and queerly resistant conversations I had this year was about a fence. It was simultaneously about barriers and open spaces, public displays of queerness and privacy for our family. It was about choices that allow us to fit in or stand out, and about the possibility of cultivating a place of our own. So, the conversation was also both a symbol and a manifestation of our desire for home, along with all the baggage that house the concept and material structure together. I have struggled with the notion of home for a long time. Often connected to my roots, my place origin, my elementary school then high school mascot, my religious community and source of ethics, my first dance and kiss, “home” has represented for me the truth of multiplicity, impermanence, and discovery. Roots, origins, sources of ethics as well as sites of firsts and points of communal pride come from different locales for me, all of which are transient and recall small and large elements of loss. Part of my struggle as a 19-year-old, after losing a parent and the home that she created and ultimately represented was to find ways of (re)creating home for myself and figuring out what that could be. I asked myself several questions during my early 20s. Did home mean partnership? Or shared living space? What about bills? Did it mean something financial rather than emotional? Did it require memory and longevity? Or was it instead about creating new experiences? And, really, was it going to help me avoid the strong sense of loss that seemed to plague me as a young adult? It was while I was in my mid-30s and in a strong partnership that I began to feel that I could create and cultivate home in a way that was rooted in memory and newness. For the two of us, who were far away from the sacred lands and loved ones that grew us, home seemed inextricably linked

72  Interlude: the fence to place. After a few years in Pennsylvania together, we figured that we should turn our sights toward the possibility of new life in the land that we had both been trying to get back to after years of work and education in the Northeast. We packed up all of our stuff to haul it to Atlanta for the year that I would be on sabbatical. I had been saying for years, when asked where I’m from, “my heart beats stronger in Atlanta.” On that soil, I felt seen and heard, but never as a specter of blackness in the way that I did in rural Pennsylvania. In Atlanta, I had at once the benefits of personal anonymity and communal visibility as a black queer woman. And, the lilts and flips of English on the tongues of black southerners who look like me made me feel at home in ways that no other set of accents ever did. When we arrived in what we presumed would be our new hometown, I cut my locks—a symbolic gesture of trying to clear out seven years in a land that felt foreign to me and which I determined could never be my home. (Of course, I was trying to cut out other things, but that’s another reflection for another book….) I wanted us to invest in a new place, a new set of possibilities, and the South was the locus of the roots from which we might grow. As our new home, Atlanta brought us wonderful times and experiences and joys, but it also hit us with losses brought losses that were extremely difficult to bear. The place that we sought as home didn’t produce life for us in the ways that we imagined. Sure, it was life-giving in important ways: it was warm, fun, beautiful, culturally edifying, close to our loved ones, filled with simple and extravagant pleasures, and easy to navigate. But it didn’t give us what we thought was only possible on its soil. Despite our efforts and the warmth and comfort and black love and brilliance in the place, we were not able to sustain new life and add to our family as we had hoped. Those losses unmoored us, rendering our goals and dreams questionable and testing our faith and spiritual foundation. And it was still hard to pack up at the end of that sabbatical year to return to the place that I had symbolically cut out of my life. To make matters worse, I was returning alone—at least temporarily—while my partner completed a prestigious residency and a few other art projects and commitments in the city that we both loved. However, in facing our return to PA, we realized that, foreign as it still felt, we had developed important friendships there, the kind that hold folk together in strange lands…Our dear friend and colleague knew that we were looking for a semester-long housing option, and she offered a section of her home for us to occupy. My partner and I felt comforted by our friend’s generosity and glad to have a space within a warm, beautiful, fun, and brilliant black women’s home. So when it was time, we left Atlanta. My partner drove me back to Pennsylvania and spent the week setting up our temporary home while connecting with our lovely friend. The plan was for my partner to spend the week in PA and then fly back to Atlanta after I was settled. But during that week disaster struck. Our friend unexpectedly passed away. We found ourselves in an ocean of loss—our

Interlude: the fence  73 loved one, our colleague, our temporary home—was gone in an instant, reminding us again of the fragility of life. We were displaced in many ways that felt unspeakable and ultimately unknowable, frightening and without space for fear. The displacement thrust us into a position to rely on the relationships that we had created and cultivated in Pennsylvania and to lean on the kindness of others, a posture that is especially difficult for both of us even though we appreciate its elements of queer interdependence. On the night our friend died, we packed up all of the things that we spent the week setting up and left. In those hours of repacking and undoing “home,” we felt anew the ways that impermanence and queer life go together. We rushed to a hotel in the middle of the night and stayed for just enough hours to understand that that sleep was something we needed but could not access. The next day, we left for New York City, after dropping off a few bags and a wayward ukulele at a friend’s house. I would later stay with her for two weeks while I found another place. In New York, we tried to do what we often did after a loss: honestly check in with ourselves, one another, and our circumstance. We tried to celebrate Benae’s birthday, clutching at moments that reflected life and livability to ensure that the celebration of time on earth was also a recognition of survival. We went to an old theater and dropped by a day party. We called elders for wisdom related to death and cleansing. We ate in silence. We walked across bridges and drank wine. We marveled at the twinges of guilt that came with “should we have…? What if we had just…? I wonder if….” The packed bags and hotels, the incomplete processing and sleepless nights were all a part of our larger loss of home and safety. And then we parted. I drove back to PA, and she boarded a flight to Atlanta. We were each alone, yearning for the scents of one another and a real sense of home. After four months of back-and forth visits, sleepless nights, and heightened anxiety, we had to say goodbye again to Atlanta. My partner was joining me in PA, so we transferred our remaining stuff there into a storage unit, still hoping that we might return to Atlanta the next June. Mourning the fruitless dreams that had at first seemed so attainable there, we moved into a colleague’s home in Pennsylvania for the Spring semester. We knew the living space was temporary, so we were facing another several months of thinking about the value and process of anchoring ourselves to a place that was not ours. We lived among their things and hosted visitors in their house. We made meals in their kitchen and used their fireplace to warm ourselves. We tried to make it home. And then a global pandemic hit. And responses to anti-black violence, which have always been present, showed up with renewed energy. And it felt like death was everywhere—its truth and its threat polluted the air we breathed. We were trapped inside a house that wasn’t ours, in a land that wasn’t ours, in a world that wasn’t making room for us to live. So, as we faced loss again, we did the most middle class, heteronormative thing one does in America: in a pandemic and during an economic downturn while

74  Interlude: the fence the matter of black lives was at stake, we bought a house. We got a mortgage. We employed a handyperson and a yard person. We donned aprons and tried new recipes. We hosted physically distant visits in our yard, and we played jazz on the record player. Our queer life has always been hanging on the future. For us, such a future could be seen in a series of statements about what could be possible when we reach some previously unreached point. “When we get back to the south… when we have a baby… when we find the right jobs….” This posture produced over and over our dismissal of the value of the present, of what we were experiencing beyond what we were losing. It made us feel as though the present for us was (and could only be) deficient. So then our choice to buy a home was a distinct and intentional investment in embracing the space we were already occupying. It was an investment in “right now,” in claiming the present rather than suspending our happiness and ultimately our subjectivity. Going through the process of purchasing a house, and thereby giving ourselves the option of creating home, was our resistance to the weight of so much loss. It was a refusal to suspend the notion that our actual life is waiting for us instead of being accessible in the present moment. It felt like investing in life during a time when such an investment seemed futile. Our queer lives had always been lived on the run, it seems. We pushed back against death and fear and instability, and we claimed “home” as we rested on our newly painted haint blue porch. *** I stepped into the yard to take in our new space. I smelled the cedar from the brown fence boards and felt the moisture of the hot morning. I looked up, and Benae was peering down from the office. “I love it,” I mouthed. “What do you think?” She gave me a thumbs up and an eager nod. “It looks great!” We spoke through windows and across several feet into a space that was ours to affirm that the fence—our fence—was the boundary of our new home.

5

Scandal and improvisation

…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles – 1 Cor 1:23 NRSV

Queer lovers are used to being called names. Stumbling blocks, foolish, and worse. We are especially used to scandal. Causing scandal, being scandal, hiding from scandal, or wielding scandal like a toolbelt, or a boa. This familiarity with and close proximity to scandal has meant that, for the most part, queer lovers through the centuries have had to develop sophisticated improvisational skills to stay alive, out of prison, away from medical fixes, or worse. Recognizing one another in an endless creativity of code, “bearding” each other in order to pass, or performing extravagant drag to provide scandal as entertainment (and in so doing create a buffer of footlights to distract from more intimate acts) are the tip of the iceberg in the daily improvisational revisions of queer performance, communication, and community. Signified upon as abominations by religious authorities, as illegals by political authorities, and as shameful and moral threats by home communities have tended to open up few avenues forward for queer young people. We could easily say that every young person everywhere must improvise their way into adulthood, practicing patterns of being and relating that are part mimicry, part experimentation, part stumbling forward. With such a suffocating history of condemnation, queer youth in many places have the added challenge of facing down that condemnation while still handling all of the other drama- and hormone-filled matters of growing up. Perhaps the suicide rate continues to be so high among queer youth because, more than most, they must still choose between lying to stay alive, and lying as a form of death. But, as the Black folk saying goes, it is better to lie than to signify.1 Queer significations—the characterizations and stereotypes that fuel prejudice—play out in complicated ways on queer bodies, imposed from without by religious, political, and social imagination and from within by queer needs for safety, community, and recognition.

76  Scandal and improvisation The queer scandal of being out and proud, especially in excessive and transgressive ways, risks the full force of signifying discipline—the inevitable pushback of a dominant moral regime. Queer lives past and present are shaped by this push-pull of scandal and discipline which, over time, shifts transgression into a more domesticated frame (think gay marriage) but not entirely. Queer scandal, like other expressions of outrage by the excluded and oppressed, also exposes the machinations and power interests of signifiers. Scandal, of course, does not belong only to queer people, nor it is anything new. Whatever its many forms may be across different cultures, traditions, and time periods, scandal is inextricably tied at the root to Christianity. We can say however that because of its deep roots in religious history it is inextricably woven into and through queer experiences. Revisions and redactions of the stories of queer lives, bodies, and circumstances in Christian sacred texts, as well as traditional histories and genealogies, rituals, performances, and gatherings are all attuned to the signification of abomination, attuned to the winds of scandal that blow through queer readings of David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, even Eve and the snake. Despite a recent, heteronormative regularity of gay (and cross-racial) families on some American television channels and other media, the fear and force of queer scandal worldwide has not disappeared. Indeed, it has forged an improvisational, distinctly queer virtue.

The first scandal For nearly 2,000 years, Christians have had a theological love-hate relationship with scandal. Not the kind that keeps tabloid editors employed, what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “malicious gossip,” but the kind that the OED says “hinders reception of the faith,” or leads to “an occasion of unbelief,” and is a “grossly discreditable circumstance or condition of things.”2 These senses of the term imply that forces of credibility and status quo maintenance are at work in every instance designated as scandalous. But in doing so they hint at the presence of incongruencies, non-normativity, or even unintelligibility, qualities always already attached to queer-and-transness. Thus, despite the status quo pushback that every scandal incites, it also embodies a troublesome interrogator of perceived truth. Scandals in these senses indicate something is wrong but ultimately are unable to secure the status quo as answer. Perhaps this is because the scandal tangled at the root of Christianity presents just such a difficulty. That scandal is quintessentially theo/logical, having to do both with God (theos) and with logic. It is sometimes called the scandal of particularity (how can the universal creator of all things be a particular man, Jesus?), and it is sometimes called the scandal of the cross (how can God die?). These are not distinctly queer scandals, except that, perhaps as we discussed in Chapter 2, they are.

Scandal and improvisation  77 The early Jesus followers’ well-documented struggle to make sense of the crucifixion of Jesus meant that Paul, church planter, epistle writer, and arguably the first theologian of what would become Christianity, had to say something about the inexplicable claim that this god-man endured a criminal’s tortured execution. Through the centuries, Christians have found various ways to argue and interpret the narrative of Jesus’ death in light of the claim of his divinity, always having to address the question “Who was Jesus in body?” The fact is, his torture and execution makes an uncomfortable connection between the god-man and criminality. One struggle Paul must have faced in interpreting the crucifixion for the churches he led was knowing they could have the same struggle evidenced by the disciples who “ran away and hid” when Jesus was executed. The whole account of the trial and crucifixion ghettoized Jesus’ body and life into a space of terror and it is the torture of Jesus body that marked him as a criminal in the Roman imperial world. The Roman equivalents today would likely label him a terrorist. By the time of his arrest, Jesus’ actions and preaching appeared to promote new social structures, threatening the stability of long-established hierarchies of power. As Jasbir Puar notes, such “terrorist corporealities” establish themselves only within a context that uses violence and “normative patriot bodies to underwrite processes of racialization.”3 Once Jesus’ body experienced the torture worthy of a criminal and terrorist, he was criminalized, marked in opposition to the state. That is, after all, how the Luke-Acts writer narrates the story: Jesus was accused by the temple lawyers and convicted by the Roman authorities as an anti-establishment revolutionary who was found guilty of “crimes” against the state. Jesus became victim of criminalized signification, cast into the category of the dehumanized other. It should be no surprise, as a result, that the narratives tell us only his mother and the disciple he loved dared stand on the Golgotha killing ground with him as he died. In the trial and torture of crucifixion, we might say that Jesus became a product of what Emilie Townes names as the “fantastic hegemonic imagination.”4 Without the narrative of resurrection, that is surely where he would have stayed.5 Paul, the first Christian theologian, is the one who called the whole thing a scandal. He knew that a connection between criminality and the godman was a matter of theo/logic that could threaten his claims about Jesus’ divinity. In his letter to the church in Corinth he used the Greek word skandalon (σκάνδαλον) to describe the crucifixion, inadvertently ensuring that the English word scandal would ever after have a Christian undertone. Paul declared that “Christ crucified” was this skandalon, something that would trip up (or “trap”) the faithful and look ridiculous to the educated elite of his time. Himself a Greek-educated Jew, Paul knew what he was up against. First-century Corinth was a sophisticated, multicultural Greek city with a strong Jewish population as well as mystery cults and other oracles and temples dedicated to various local and foreign deities. A common criminal’s execution in the person of the deity was certainly a hurdle in the business of church growth.

78  Scandal and improvisation Of course, some of the early Christians had no problem with gods and semi-gods mingling with humans in heroic ways, resulting in strangely miraculous things. The mystery cults across the region were full of such tales. But many of the early followers were Jews who had no intention of renouncing their faith. They were followers of a Jew, Jesus, and for them the difficulty began as claims of Jesus’ divinity grew. They considered it blasphemous to think of the God of Moses, a universal deity who would not even be named, becoming a tangible human being. The early churches also drew Jews and gentiles who had been trained in Greek philosophies that strongly eschewed any idea of divinity in material form. The scandals of particularity and of the cross tripped many up and on the surface what Paul called “the crucified Christ” did seem to indicate what the Oxford English Dictionary names a scandal: a grossly discreditable circumstance. It could well have seemed like a real situation of gaslighting for new followers. Leaders like Paul had their work cut out for them. We know that the first Jesus followers in Corinth and other cities around the Mediterranean basin came from a range of backgrounds, and the educated elite among them would have had strong rationales from both Jewish and Greek philosophies for questioning the narrative of Jesus’ divinity. Paul waded right into the controversy in his letters, and admitted the crucifixion made no common sense. He understood that what he preached regarding the Christ required many of his followers to bend and possibly even break the iconoclastic tenets of their faith and wisdom. Even for those who had no difficulty with embodied deities, this Christian God-man required they accept divine behavior on the cross that ran counter to any heroic narrative. Skilled rhetorician that he was, Paul could not solve the difficulty of coherence in the crucifixion of Christ and this challenge still exists for those who contemplate the Christian narratives today. But he chose to name the problem head-on, and in doing so introduced scandal on a divine level into the lexicon of Christian faith. He declared the crucified Jesus a barrier and offense to good sense, accepting the very charge laid against the god-man by his would-be critics and followers. And then Paul did something eminently Socratic and vaguely queer. He turned the scandal of the cross into a virtue. He understood that the execution of his divine savior by crucifixion, a criminal’s sentence, looked like—and was—a disgrace to common decency and dominant norms. But common decency and dominant norms were, in Paul’s eyes, precisely the barriers to God’s messianic action in the world that the cross should both expose and remove. It was God’s confounding departure from the standard rules of order, hierarchy, and power for humans and deities that was important to Paul because he saw the whole Jesus narrative as a revelation of another order, an apocalyptic alterity, a better world about to be ushered in. Scandal, for him (and presumably for God) became therefore a tool of revelation (and, perhaps, revolution) not meant for its own sake. Paul made it the pivot on which the whole of Christian revelation turned. The indecency of the cross, the grossly discreditable condition of it,

Scandal and improvisation  79 became the key to another logic altogether, a discrediting of the dominant ways of seeing and being. Jesus’ companions and followers expected radical change. In her essay entitled “Queering the Cross,” Marcella Althaus Reid notes that “a new order of things (not a modification of the old one) was desired by the Messianic community who accompanied [Jesus] until his end.”6 Paul’s brilliant turn of the scandal of the cross into a virtue also, over time, could not avoid the sanitizing effect of his equally strong interest in a divinized Christ. This meant that, as the imperial church took up Pauline theology, it further elevated the divine Christ figure as mirror and legitimator of elite authority. The divination of Jesus, coupled with the theological rendering of the cross as a site of divine righteousness and transformation, cleaned up the criminality that saturated the wood though Jesus’ blood. Paul’s argument for the scandal of the cross as a stumbling block and radical overturning of the norms of the day were eventually swamped by an imperial church anxious to avoid apocalyptic alterity and rule as the Roman Empire had done before. The “new heaven and earth” of Christian preaching ended up being, queer and liberation theologians could say, a mere change in management. Therefore, inasmuch as Jesus’ criminality was a part of his embodied being, Christian theology through Pauline discourse also employed Jesus’ divinity as means of elevating him from criminality and terror (and, in modern terms, sexual deviance and blackness) into the pure, untethered, and untouchable realm of the imperial elite (homonormativity and whiteness). That is, the divination and thereby the decriminalization of Christ ultimately removed Jesus from what ontologically dehumanized him in the very structural system that now elevated Jesus Christ, Lord of the Church. What is more, the strictly disembodied understanding of divinity favored by the Hellenistic world evacuated Paul’s skandalon of its embodied reality in the real torture and death of Jesus Christ as itself divine indictment of the norms that establish criminality. This means, in sad irony, that the theological ground was laid for an eventual unquestioned and hard-wired ontological relationship between criminalization, dehumanization, blackness, and non-normative sexualities in Christian thought and subsequent expansion. The scandal of the cross as Paul articulated it in his letter to the Corinthian church, however muted, never fully disappeared, however. The death of God on a cross still required more explanation than the biblical texts provided. Over the centuries, different interpretations have held sway, some as evidence of a cosmic battle between heavenly angels and demons in which humans are cannon fodder, some turning the scandal into a divine reification of a feudal status quo (and so, again, hardly a scandal), some advancing the idea of sacrificial love, and some challenging that idea as a tool of oppression.7 But looking at Paul’s claim to the Corinthians that the crucified Christ was a scandal specific to the community he addressed, we may catch a whiff of resonance, albeit anachronistic, between his apocalyptic certainty that the cross indicated an end to the prevailing order of things

80  Scandal and improvisation for them and contemporary queer uses of scandal to signal the same. This scandal, for Paul, had the virtue of revealing a truth he believed essential to their lives. It is important to remember, therefore, that the history of the scandal of the cross is complicated and not univocal. The grossly discreditable circumstance of God dying as a criminal on a cross in a Roman colonial context eventually withered as a scandal and over the centuries, especially in the era of European colonial expansion, it became largely a non-sequitur in the face of Christian supremacy and aggression. The cross not only lost its ability to challenge the prevailing orders of things; it became a symbol of that order. Specifically wielded as a weapon against queer people struggling to survive and thrive (the infamous slogan of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist church, “God hates fags” comes to mind) we can say that the scandal of the cross now occurs as much in its historical distortion as in its capacity to indict that history and point to a different possibility. Those who return and continue to return to the scandal of the cross, as Paul first articulated it to the Corinthians, have never disappeared. They are the ones who refuse the imperial Christian status quo and improvise in their resistance, who do things like sit in at lunch counters, pour their own blood on nuclear weapons, associate poverty with crucifixion, volunteer in queer youth shelters and other scandalous moves. The scandal of the cross, its ability to be a stumbling block for any theology or ethical system that is comfortable with its norms of criminalization, remains.

The scandal of the cross(dresser) According to a contemporary detractor hoping for the shutdown of the speakeasies in the 1920s, Gladys Bentley was a “masculine garbed smut singing entertainer” of the Harlem Renaissance.8 In her signature white tuxedo and top hat, Bentley became a blues singing star of New York nightclubs, openly flirting with women in her audiences, writing raunchy lyrics to popular songs, and off-stage defying the heavily policed anti-cross-dressing laws of New York. Her musical skill matched the audacity of her performance, full of low growls and high sweet notes. She accompanied herself at incredible speeds on piano and often added a luscious, soft trumpet-y skat. According to Langston Hughes, Bentley demonstrated “an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard—a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”9 She represents in hindsight, in a way, the urgency and exuberance of the Harlem Renaissance, its defiance and transcendence of racial and gender stereotypes. Not unlike the icon of Rosie the riveter in the coming war years, Bentley embodied not only a gendered otherwise for black women but a professional otherwise that put the lie to prevailing stereotypes of black women. Bentley was an anti-black-woman-archetype of the prohibition, simultaneously debunking

Scandal and improvisation  81 mammy, jezebel, and sapphire motifs by being none and all at the same time. She was a black woman dressed in Gatsby bespoke who employed white men in drag to be her back-up singers. She crooned to the women in her audiences and controlled the take on her shows. She was a singing scandal at the height of her powers. The creative otherwise that Bentley represented hit all of the pressure points of a Jim Crow industrial society. Her defiance of gender norms may have been pure exoticism for the white audiences that streamed to Harlem for prohibition liquor and speakeasy music, and may even have reinforced white views of black female deviance. Her use of white drag queen backup singers was part of the scandalous gasp and genius of her shows for them. Bentley was a shrewd businesswoman, and it is clear that she knew how to wield shock. But Bentley also challenged her Black audiences and neighbors. As Kortney Ziegler has pointed out, although the majority of her audiences were white, her lesbian bravura and “kinky transmasculine” performances on and off stage, including a public marriage to a woman, worried a growing black middle-class governed by an aspirational ethos of heteropatriarchal respectability.10 Her entertainment value was lower in a community desperate to bootstrap itself out of centuries of dehumanization, in part through internal policing of gender norms. It was perhaps because of this counter-pressure, as the repeal of prohibition led to the decline of speakeasies and the immediate post-war period recapitulated heteronormative gender codes everywhere, that Bentley left Harlem and remade herself into a repentant, self-avowed straight “woman again.” A major article about her in Ebony Magazine in 1952 reinforced the scandal that was Gladys Bentley, but now by way of reversal.11 The magazine sported large photographs of a smiling Bentley attired in shapeless dresses making a bed, bending over a stove, and looking at a scrapbook of her former debonair stage photos. From the vantage point of another century, it is a strange article, with even stranger pictures. Whether there was a real transformation in Bentley’s later life, or a transformation at all, we may never know. Ziegler explores the possibility that, rather than thinking of Bentley as conforming, the drag and its scandal simply went deeper. He sees in the photo a coy feminine-drag Bentley holding the scrapbook of her Harlem days with several male-drag Bentleys gazing defiantly out of the open pages, suggesting that Bentley on Bentley swings between bulldagger and sissy male maid in a one-woman show of queer heteropatriarchal normativity, heavily dosed with mammy iconography. As Ziegler writes, If we are to read Bentley’s feminine drag as an embodiment of a sissy masculinity that foregrounds submission as sexual agency, then the photographs in the article of her performing domestic chores further emphasize this position, particularly through the representation of sissy maid aesthetics.12

82  Scandal and improvisation The specifically degendered matriarch/mammy symbolism present in Bentley’s attire and in the structure of the photos further deepens the drag challenge, making the whole collection a parody of the article’s title: “I Am a Woman Again.” For queertheologians, the image and performance of respectable black “womanhood” catches one’s attention in yet another way. As Ziegler claims and the Ebony photos illustrate, Bentley is not exactly a woman but instead an approximation of and gesturing toward what social standards understand womanhood to be. In short, Bentley is not quite a woman because, as Hortense Spillers suggests, womanhood is a category of gender that is accessible in and through whiteness, gaining clear definition though white domesticity.13 The history of chattel slavery housed a set of languages that determined what bodies and selves were designated by common social signifiers. For Spillers, the fact that “woman” denoted white womanhood in particular, the realm in which family created and reified gender was not one of which black bodies and selves were a part. Even more, if gender was understood during the half-millennium of institutional chattel slavery in America primarily in terms of whiteness, so too was the notion and realm of family in which that gender operated. Thus, the sphere in which black bodies functioned was an economic one. Existing outside of the proper area of gender formation, black bodies and selves inhabited and even formed the basis of the mechanism of the market economy.14 What Bentley illustrates in the shift from one set of performances to another is not a return to womanhood; rather, in a queer turn of events, Bentley actually shows how black womanhood, with all of its adjectival energy, exists outside of the grammars of heteronormative whiteness and white adjacence to domesticity, reproductivity, and respectability. Bentley’s tied hair, stooped shoulders, bent back, hands full of ironing, and shapeless apron together signal something other than white womanhood: they signify enslavement. As Ziegler points out, the “I am a woman again” performance in print turns one’s attention to the unavoidable quality of servility that underwrites Bentley’s synchronous marriage to a man in the post-war period of intense heteronormative resurgence. It was a time of national “menaces,” including communism, civil rights and black power, and women’s demands for equality. At the same time, what the images of Bentley’s scandalous “return” cannot fully speak to are the logics that articulate the black life of readers— the audience for Ebony magazine—who function in a culture structured by whiteness but who also live beyond the realm of white domesticity/black servility. A master of performance, Bentley may have been remaking herself in the post-war period in an image she hoped would eventually recapture her pre-war (white) audiences and so re-establish herself in a changed club scene. She may have sensed that those audiences were nostalgic after the war for the way things never were for black women, namely the “happy” servant/ slave, even as the Ebony article plays off of black women’s post-war anxieties about heteronormative domesticity.

Scandal and improvisation  83 Nearly a century later, it is still clear that Bentley wields scandalous creativity and improvisation like she wields song, able to perform across a wide range. The lasting effect of her immense creativity is a “vocal back and forth [that] situates Bentley within the in-between space of ‘appropriate’ gender roles, thus further demonstrating their instability.”15 To the extent that Bentley’s public life reveals something queerly important, it is simultaneously a blues satire on the heavily policed race/gender normativity in twentieth-century America and, if her own claims about her transformation in the Ebony piece stand, a horrifying witness to the death of all things bright and playful, debonair, sexy, saucy, and—perhaps most importantly—free under the weight of that normativity. We hope that Bentley was simply putting on another performance in the 1950s, savvy to the changes in her audiences as the decades shifted into the corsets of postwar suburban respectability. Her appearance in Ebony would then not be evidence of another queer murder but an improvisation, part of the ongoing survival genius at the heart of scandalous virtue. The scandal of particularity and improvisational bodies Cross-dressing in itself was nothing new on the stage. It was a longstanding fact necessitated by gender-segregated performances over centuries of European history. So what makes cross-dressing scandalous in late modernity, a salacious draw in Bentley’s Harlem and other places where drag shows flourished, and even a kind of virtue in modern queer life? The simple answer is not entirely simple. It boils down to the status of the body in European Christian culture, its anchoring in beliefs about the nature of race and gender, and all of the social, economic, and juridical consequences that flow from that mooring. The scholastic theologians of Europe’s middle ages drew on Greek and Roman philosophy and medicine to posit natural law as divine law, conflating gender expression with bodies themselves, thus imputing sin to any embodied impulses that threaten the strictures of binary gender differentiation or that imply gender itself to be a performance (what Judith Butler famously called “gender trouble”). But the gender hierarchy that makes cross dressing a scandal goes back further than the Middle Ages. As many theological historians have noted, the human body—and the female body in particular—has always been something of a difficulty in Christianity with various resolutions throughout the centuries involving control, discipline, and renunciation. With rigid Greek and Roman medical views on the absolute incommensurability of male and female bodies forming the backdrop of first- and secondcentury Christian formulations, any gender crossing in the cultures of early Christianity represented cause for alarm, especially for men. The documentary evidence of this concern in medical texts indicates that such crossings occurred then as they do now. What we today know as intersex was a medical worry for ancient doctors who interpreted physical differences in

84  Scandal and improvisation sexual organs as problems in temperatures and “humors.” Later, Christian doctors would adopt and adapt these worries, interpreting them largely as problems in virtue. Intersex and trans bodies in the ancient and medieval context were medicalized then as they have been in recent history in terms of problems to be solved rather than expressions of natural difference. For the ancient Byzantine and Greek philosophers who formed the intellectual platform from which Christian and Muslim science in the West emerged, male superiority and medical status as the more complete human being was scientifically established by “a decisive surplus of ‘heat’ and fervent ‘vital spirit’” evidenced by the “hot ejaculation of male seed.”16 Women, lacking sufficient heat to harden and make them “men, hot, well-braced in limbs, heavy, well-voiced, spirited, strong to think and act,” were simply deformed or failed men.17 But heat is tricky. As Peter Brown has noted, in the second-century Roman world of early Christianity “each man trembled forever on the brink of becoming ‘womanish.’”18 Any hint of softness or femininity had to be excised lest his virility come into question. A soft man was not a woman in the Roman world, but his lack of virility threatened the stability of all men. Such a soft man would constitute a scandal, a stumbling block to manhood and its place of privilege in the order of things. The body’s notorious plasticity has always run counter to these Roman views of body and gender that show up again and again through the long stretch and reach of Christian theology and culture. The body’s resistance to obedience, its unruly excesses and desires, and perhaps most of all its relentless changeability (usually ascribed to the female in classical thought) challenge theologies that link God with immutability, order, and subjective cultural notions of decency. Perfection, a kind of synonym for God in this scheme, is also a synonym for immutability. The human body (indeed the whole embodied cosmos) utterly fails at this standard of perfection and stands in opposition to God, merely by virtue of its capacity to change. Paul saw that the crucified Christ constituted a scandal for this very reason. If Christ was divine and the cross real, it put the lie to a divinity separated from embodiment, and thus from the mess of bodily existence. Millennia of Christian theologians since have contorted themselves to avoid this insight. Expecting the imminent collapse of the old order, Paul wrote exuberantly to the Galatians that they were “no longer subject to a disciplinarian,” that all gender, class, and ethnic differences were wiped away and even marriage had only a last-resort purpose.19 Of course, what Paul probably was not prepared for as he sat in Ephesus writing that other, first letter to the community in Corinth was that, in naming the scandal of the cross, he was actually introducing a scandal of embodiment writ large, which even in his own thinking came around to gender and race and every other embodied means of ordering human existence. A revelation that God would not stay obediently segregated or immutable—because that is not what bodies do—opens all kinds of possible reworkings, not only of the many rules that govern and police bodies in Christian societies, but of the rules governing

Scandal and improvisation  85 divine aseity. Are the queer scandals of gender fluidity, same-sex desire, and challenges to prevailing norms of heteropatriarchal social orders really that different? The Christian canon did not close with Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians or his letter to the Galatians, however. Looking back at a Christian scriptural canon that contains multiple narratives of the life and death of Jesus and 21 pastoral letters that circulated in the first centuries, perhaps the Paul of scandal spoke too soon. As some time passed, it is possible that, like Gladys Bentley, he and fellow leaders of the church read the signs of the times and thought it better to accommodate more to prevailing norms when the dominant order didn’t disappear. The revelatory excitement of those early letters easily falls into confusion with later epistolary returns to disciplinary concerns. Whatever the case for caution and accommodation on the part of the early Christian writers, Paul’s skandalon of reversal in a high deity who chooses to become low remains in the Christian scriptures. It exposes the deep fault of social hierarchies and was not excised from the canon. It remains provocative for queer reading, as it has been for liberation, feminist, and womanist readings. The scandal of the cross can be read as an ancestral gesture toward the scandal of the cross dresser and the ever changing variety of queer sexual expressions, all of which expose the multiplicity and plasticity of gendered lives, namely the scandal of particularity. At heart, it is embodiment that is scandalously queer in Christian theology to the extent that Christians have wrestled with the real body of Jesus including anxieties about (and denials of) his sexuality as well as the significations upon him then and now: his criminalization, what today we would understand as his blackness, and ultimately his queerness.

Scandalous virtue If scandal is basically an offense to moral feelings of decency, then it is a theme that runs through the whole of queer experience, whether as a major, even overwhelming description of that experience, or as a minor motif, a whiff of something coming from a forgotten closet. In the many places where same-sex lovers and trans people are demonized, even after legalization, daily life for them is structured by scandal. It can be exhausting and in some places physically dangerous to walk out the door as a stumbling block or a snare for the rest of the heteronormative world. It is no wonder that so much of LGBT activism has centered on minimizing the effects of scandal, emphasizing normalcy and accommodation to dominant (white) heterosexual ideals for marriage and monogamy. But queer theory has always suggested another understanding of scandal and, perhaps like Paul, has had more interest in exploring its revelatory character, its ability to suggest another way of being, and going further, exposing the oppressive nature of dominant norms.

86  Scandal and improvisation To get at the virtue that is possible in scandal, it is important not to romanticize it. Homoerotic, trans and intersex scandals over centuries have usually resulted in violence and death for the queer. Oscar Wilde’s famous trial in London for “gross indecency with men” led to his imprisonment in 1895, a sentence of hard labor, and early death at 46 in 1900. The numbers of transpersons murdered across the world, especially trans women of color, has grown exponentially as trans visibility in popular culture has risen. In 2019, the American Medical Association began to call the murderous trend an “epidemic” of violence against the transgender community. 20 In 1994 four 20-something Latina lesbians in San Antonio were falsely accused of raping two young girls and all four served nearly 15 years in prison. Their convictions rested on an accusation by one of the girls, who finally admitted she lied because her father, whose advances had been spurned by one of the women, had pressured her. Thanks to their own persistence and the help of a powerful documentary about them, the four women were exonerated in 2016 and their records finally expunged in 2018. 21 These stories are the tip of the iceberg, and they are not new. It is difficult to read the story about the San Antonio lesbians and not recall the history of Emmett Till, who like many black men lynched in the twentieth century was brutally murdered because a white woman lied and he was brutally targeted for death. The narrative of Till’s “crime,” his scandalous and boundary-crossing alleged whistle at a young married white woman, instigated a vigilante response that ended in deadly white violence against a 14-year-old black boy. The recurrent threats, scandals of violence and censure that accompany vigilante race and gender discipline expose the depravity of the heteropatriarchal norms that regularly stalk queer people. This is the negative side of queer virtuous scandal. The empire, we could say, will always strike back because queer lives are not mere exoticisms. The binary structure of race (white and black, as if that is all there is) and gender (male and female, as if that is all there is) and heteronormative sexuality (one man and one woman, as if that is ever really possible) appears to require violent defense. Rigid binarism is the cornerstone of white heteropatriarchal norms that still run deep across Western societies, wherever European colonialism left its mark. The question of scandal as a queer virtue is a specific kind of scandal, with specific parameters. It is not what the OED calls malicious gossip “concerned with the faults or foibles of others” but it is the kind that exposes persons or systems of power as dealers of death and harm to the vulnerable. It is the kind that links white Matthew Shepard (beaten and left for dead due to the presumption of his gayness) to black Emmett Till in the web of white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal violence, and shows that the technologies of normalization queer and blacken them both, affixing them to 1955 and 1998 crosses. The United States presidency in the wake of Donald Trump’s thug grip is a scandal of the latter sort. So are corporate cover-ups of toxic waste dumps in poor communities and economic policies that widen wealth gaps, and the list can go on and on. One hopes that these kinds of things are

Scandal and improvisation  87 perceived as scandalous because the moment they do not offend, the order of things has shifted to a status quo of tyranny. Scandalous offense, in other words, is information about the prevailing order of things. Scandal as a queer virtue is concerned with exposing norms that harm souls, dull embodied creativity, and kill sex outside of very narrow margins, all of which, we believe, harm human capacities for love. What is astonishing is that, despite the weight of living under the signifying thumb of Euro-patriarchal codes and modes of judgment, the queer dead talk back with a “nevertheless” experience of living, being, and communicating that is full of experimentation, bravado, and humor. Ever failing to embody rigidly gendered, racialized, and class-based chimeras of decency, queer lives cannot be codified beyond their multi-generational “nevertheless” insistence on embodied and sensual expressions of life, whether crossgender, transbeing, or same-sexual relating. Good sex, as anyone who has tried for it knows, requires healthy doses of experimentation, improvisation, and humor. Lovers don’t (usually) come with manuals, and as every single body is different, every need and mode of pleasure is also different. Every lover is made of stories, haunted by ghosts, physically specific, and gravitationally pulled toward touch. One must be able to improvise to be any good at sex, one must be able to fail, and even better, one must laugh about it with lovers. The rules are scandalously few: consent is non-negotiable; communication is necessary; improvisation is advisable; humor is a lubricant. It may be that because improvisation in public life is so much a part of queer existence through the centuries, it is part of the scandal of queer sex that it reveals good sex and sexy goods where prevailing norms say there should be none. Sexual desire, after all, tends to be chaotic and disruptive of disciplinary systems of social order, as Augustine well understood in his own battles to control his “member.”22 The virtue of scandal in improvisational queer sex can tend toward this chaos, but all good sex does that. Much of Christian disciplinary history took the route of demonizing sex altogether, as if that would solve its embodied proclivities toward mess. But of course, that does not remove the mess, it just hurts people, and sends good sex into hidden closets and darkened corners. Scandal and improvisation belong together as linked queer virtues. They run through centuries of gender-multiple, sex-deviant modes of being in euro-dominated cultures. Queer persons have been, and in many communities still are, a scandal to the reigning dictates of Christian imperial decency. We have had to improvise our lives and loves, to invent codes, modes, gestures, and shimmys that, even in death, resist the forces of annihilation. We have had to build and wield humor like a shield, or a home, or maybe like a spinning wheel, or a surgeon’s scalpel. As core elements of queer experience, scandal, improvisation, and humor indicate presence, truth, and agility. As virtues, just maybe they can help us in this troubled time, perhaps to shine a weird dancing light out on the crumbling edge of this world, like will o’ the wisps in a swamp.

88 Scandal and improvisation

Notes 1 Charles H. Long takes up this colloquial expression and develops a theory of significations—the constrictive constructions of narratives upon rather than about another—in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1999). 2 “Scandal, n.” www.lexico.com/definition/scandal (accessed August 17, 2020). 3 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xxiv. 4 Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 20. 5 At the same time that Jesus is made a criminal and terrorist, in a contemporary reading he is made black. Today one cannot ignore the connection between Jesus’ experience under Roman rule and his complete foreignness and blackness, along with the signification that accompanies those corporealities. James H. Cone made the important connection between Jesus, blackness, and power in 1969, arguing that the struggle for black liberation is indistinguishable from the fundamental quality and purpose of Christianity and that blackness is the way that God manifests—incarnates—in the world. But his use of the lynching tree as a metaphor and symbol of the cross is what allows contemporary Christians to consider Jesus’s criminality as a feature of racialization—death-dealing racialization, that is. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011). 6 Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Queering the Cross: The Politics of Redemption and the External Debt,” Feminist Theology 15, no. 3 (May 2007): 291. 7 For a helpfully brief summary of Christian theological models for understanding the cross (theories of atonement) see Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 247–252. Also Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Chapter 4, “The Execution of Jesus and the Theology of the Cross,” in Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet (New York: Continuum, 1994), 97–128; and Delores Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogate Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” in Paula M. Cooey, William R. Eakin, and Jay B. McDaniel, eds., After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 1–13. 8 Haleema Shah, “The Great Blues Singer Gladys Bentley Broke All the Rules” Smithsonian Magazine, March 14, 2019, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonianinstitution /great-blues-singer-gladys-bentley-broke-rules-180971708/ (accessed August 17, 2020). 9 Ibid. 10 Kortney Ziegler, “Black Sissy Masculinity and the Politics of Dis-Respectability” in E. Patrick Johnson, ed., No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 196. 11 Gladys Bentley, “I’m a Woman Again” Ebony Magazine, August 1952, pp. 93ff. 12 Ziegler, “Black Sissy Masculinity and the Politics of Dis-Respectability,” 205–206. 13 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. 14 Thelathia “Nikki” Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 113. 15 Ziegler, “Black Sissy Masculinity and the Politics of Dis-Respectability,” 212. 16 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10. 17 Aretaeus, Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases 2.5, in F. Adams, trans. The Extant Works of Aretaeus the Cappadocian (1856), pp. 346–347. Quoted in Brown, The Body and Society, 10.

Scandal and improvisation 18 19 20 21

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Brown, The Body and Society, 11. Galatians 3:25–28; 1 Corinthians 7:9, NRSV Brown, The Body and Society, 10. Deborah S. Esquenazi, Sam Tabet, Anna Vasquez, Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, Debbie Nathan, Keith S. Hampton, and Sam Lipman, Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four. Documentary 2016. 22 Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 5.

6

Queer relations

We four made love together. Renee had just undergone surgery: a little nip and tuck to punctuate the long and intense process of naturally shedding years of weight, burden, and layers of self-consciousness. When Renee came home from the surgery, we, her three best friends, cared for her. We did all sorts of things. We helped her to the bathroom and even stayed as she relieved herself, listening to make sure she didn’t strain too hard, listening harder to make sure she was really able to do her business. She was mortified by the intimacy— the— unavoidable closeness of it all—but we were there, ignoring her weak protests that she was “just fine” and would be able to do it herself “if we just let her.” She gave up quickly. Funny the effect that meds have on a person’s resolve. She was finally willing to let us do what we were there for, so we pressed forward. We loved her. We loved on her, as the old folks say. We caressed her body, offering massage to places the doctor told us to touch. We changed bandages and cleaned wounds. We prepared food. We gave her shots. And we had practiced those shots, too. With oranges. I’ll never forget the smell and spray of a newly punctured orange…. Her girlfriend at the time was filled with anxiety because she was too busy with work and parenting a pre-teen to really care for Renee postsurgery. We got this, we told her. No need to worry. It was our job anyway. No, she said, it’s my job. I am the girlfriend. I am the significant other. We rolled our eyes; they had been dating for only a few months. No, we corrected, actually, we are the significant others. We don’t know you. Your romantic relationship doesn’t negate this one. This is our Renee, our love, we got this. And Renee loved us right back. She welcomed us into her bed, into the crevices of her body, into the kind of pillow-talk that kept whispering love, long after we all left that bed.

The problem of heteronormativity The problem with heteronormativity is that, like all socially shared systems of value, it has its own set of “virtues,” and defines anything not in that set as a non-virtue. Understanding that heteronormativity polices relationality

Queer relations  91 at all levels (not only “romantic pairings”), we can see how and why those so-called virtues are precisely calibrated to demonize queer and other non-heteronormative relations. This means that, in order to open a wider space of relational possibility for everyone, it is important to peel back heteronormativity’s stifling grip on virtue and vice, and to suggest that other virtues, queerer virtues, can and do exist, that can and do structure more just relationships. The erotic energies and life experiences of samesex loving people and sexual and gender queers do suggest and indeed can model and form a more generous set of relational virtues. These queer virtues are hard-won. They are rooted in notions of counter-publics, scenes that exist well below ground, where the creative and life-giving forces of doing something naughty but pleasurable shift one’s thinking about naughtiness and pleasure altogether. In the realm of heteronormative condemnation, where good and righteous relating are tied to constriction and commodification of pleasure and intimacy, queers live and love against that condemnation. Not only that: we also strive to determine what good and righteous relations are on the basis of outcome and experience rather than convention or tradition. Queer relationality betrays the lies of positivist naturalism by embracing erotic diversity and fluid gender formations, rejecting the (il)logical dualisms that heteropatriarchal relations create and through which they authorize only a limited set of relations as “natural.” In this way, queer relations can actually serve as instructive genealogies of counter-virtue. Their resilience and refusal/s to disappear not only demonstrate living alternatives but expose the stories, language, scripts, and performances that maintain and validate the social rules of dyadic heteromonogamy, a framework that benefits a few no one at the expense of the whole. We queerly related and oriented folks struggle under the binary social and gender regime of heteronormativity, which criminalizes and marginalizes everyone in its wake. It makes liars of us all, forces us to act and relate in ways that by convention may be called natural but that our bodies and senses and spirits know are constructed. It scripts our stories, writes and rewrites our dialogues, all the while taking more and more of our voices away. Still across the globe, religious communities, families, and laws condemn queer desires and force internal amputations of spirit, passion, and body. As a structure of relations underwritten and sanctioned by a false and weak set of hierarchically arranged “opposites” supported by religious ethical traditions and heteropatriarchal norms, heteronormativity is the problem—the evil—that queer relationalities have worked against, resisted, imagined beyond, and eschewed. Let us be clear: heterosexual attractions and relations are not the problem for queer life, and queer lives are by no means free of disharmony or the capacity to inflict harm. But the long-standing conventions of heterosexist naturalism and the resulting regimes of heteronormative enforcement cloaked as “decent” and “natural” relations make misery—for everyone.

92  Queer relations A central feature of heteronormativity’s grip on relationality is its cultivation and coercion of relational behaviors into a reproductive pedagogy of limit, threading colonial patterns of heteropatriarchal law, religion, and education together to produce, enforce, and reproduce a single mode of sexual and familial formation. Even where gay marriage has been legalized and become relatively non-controversial, this regime is unaltered. Far from undaunted, heteropatriarchal marriage norms are further buttressed by the lure of conventionality and long-denied public stamps of approval and decency on the gay marriage industry. Unchanged is the script: there is only one way of relating sexually or one relational source of individual happiness and social sustainability: namely the binary “man” and “woman,” even if the two are the same cisgender or are transpersons. Heteronormative relations—straight, gay, bi, or trans—demand a limit of two sexual partners, and heteronormative families demand a structure of parenting that is the same. But in such a singularity of sexual pathways and gendered lessons, anyone learning and applying knowledge about how, when, why, where, and with whom to relate faces unavoidable failure. There is no living up to the heteropatriarchal norms for anyone, really. For that matter, there is no living up to Western norms of masculinity and femininity. All of these norms founder and become ridiculous in real bodies, parodies of themselves, impossible to sustain. After all, what is left unsaid in the script and lesson plan is that the presumption of one way of relating erotically is as unattainable when it involves real, breathing, human beings, as it is made up. And so, heteronormativity does not merely inscribe limits in terms of narrow pathways; it structures failure and self-delusion into the fabric of every relationship it oversees. Most folks can observe that assigned or assumed roles of any kind establish and reinforce boundaries around behaviors that reflect impermanent perspectives, ultimately confining them to static identities and states of being rather than expressions of mood, motivation, or orientation. Foucault warns us about this. The acts-to-personages road is short and dangerous, and it always results in someone being called a “pervert.”1 Ultimately, queer experience and story-telling reveals that, fecund as it is in reproducing itself across the globe, heteronormativity (not to be confused with heterosexual desires) is a death-dealing practice in both literal and figurative senses. It sucks the life out of relational drives—the motivations that make room for exploration, responsive connections, adventure, pursuits of joy, generosity and diversity of affections, and attention to unjudged desire. In so doing, it eliminates self-awareness and it disciplines articulations of feeling. More than that, it commands dualism, obligatory non-perception, and the erasure of the erotic, which as poets have ever known, is erasure of the divine. We might describe heteronormativity, along with its progeny, dyadic heteromonogamy, as a system in which people accept and make life and connections through lenses of deficit and non-potential, canceling relational imagination.

Queer relations  93 There are at least four pseudo-virtues and relational implications of systems of heteronormativity: restriction, redaction, purification, and sanitation. Heteronormativity as an organizing rubric and heteropatriarchal monogamy as a social practice work together to restrict relations into exchanges of power, position, and commodification, rather than enlarge relations that take open-ended forms of humility, care, mutuality, truth-telling, gratitude, erotic vitality, and love. By defining relationships according to bodily possession and regulation, capital and asset ownership, financial security and inheritance, healthcare and benefits, citizenship and geographic mobility, possibilities for social uplift, and political participation (and even political “success” like gay marriage laws), heteronormativity economizes connections and relegates them to a place of utility. Under this regime the very real needs of children and communities for structures of support, unconditional love, and flourishing are tethered to dyadic sex rules rather than myriad other bonds of belonging and responsibility that can undergird and nurture a diverse array of family structures or community formations. The many ways that heteronormative deviants—the single mothers, the co-madres, the grandparents and retirees, the queers and others—have held communities together, supported children, provided stable growing environments without reference to nuclear family structures (while being vilified for it) reveal the lie of heteronormativity’s claims to nature and right. Poverty and racism in their many forms militate against every form of community-building, both of which tend to go completely unchallenged in heteronormative systems. Instead, heteropatriarchal commodification of relations can only understand relations in terms of means rather than ends, marking some relations more valuable than others. Caught in this frame, the affective realities and myriad modes of bodily knowing that ground human desires for relations in the first place wither and die—or go underground. We police ourselves, inevitably dismissing and signifying on those who refuse the heteronormative restrictions. And it seems that we can’t help but foster these dismissals and significations because what it really means to relate under a heteronormative frame is that structural mechanisms of power and inequity guide and override even our own unique and sometimes very queer desires and drives toward connection. Dismissals and significations of this sort are also means by which heteronormativity redacts histories of bodily colonization and social limit, recasting them into stories of righteous love, protection, and stability. However, any set of relations with unequal and socially enforced norms that limits access to freedom, resources, bodily self-awareness, and expression— is a manifestation and tool of colonization. There’s no getting around that. In fact, one might understand heteronormativity as a structure of gaslighting, convincing everyone in its wake that we are not individually and collectively witnessing or experiencing localized and embodied dispossession. From respectability politics to wedding rituals, birth certificate designations of gender and parentage to rationalizations of unequal pay or access

94  Queer relations to basic healthcare, heteronormative scripts reconfigure meritocracies of dehumanization into stories of social stability that appear to support the collective good. This appearance, of course, urges people to learn to relate by exerting power over others, rather than learning to be with one another. In the late-colonial context of global Christian expansion, there is also a theological aspect to heteronormativity’s pseudo-virtues that vilify queer lives. We suggest that dismantling white heteropatriarchy also entails attending to and recognizing the increasingly brittle facade of pseudo-divinity, the patriarchal (and very judgy) Father God, who was built to legitimate it. The practice of controlling folks’ understanding, use and pleasure of their own bodies and personalities have echoes in dominion theologies. The theological perspective that humans are in charge of the world on God’s behalf has sometimes resulted in notions of divinely granted power over all of God’s creation, thereby sanctioning the authority of some humans over others. In such an order, a limited and predestined few have the right to access, manage, and enjoy the world’s resources and gifts for their own benefit. In the modern history of Western colonialism, Christian heteronormative schema that justified the demonization of other cultural forms are products of this theological perspective. Religiously legitimated heteropatriarchal ideologies anchor the notion that colonization—of resources, bodies, ideas, desires—is both a huge responsibility of the colonizer and an act of great generosity that rescues the colonized from the error of their ways. The gaslight? Responsibility and generosity rather than robbery and usury; civilization and progress rather than enslavement and subordination. To facilitate the lies and (re)production of colonization, heteronormativity relies on two complimentary cleansing mechanisms that redact histories and reframe motivations for the individual and collective control of relational qualities. On the one hand, it is predicated upon notions of female purity within a historically patterned patrilineal social and religious context. The issue (pun intended) of women’s bodies for millennia has been the public prerogative of paternal ownership. It is the hinge point for maintaining a hierarchically arranged social structure. This social structure exposes the political and cultural mores that adjudicate sexual exchanges. The dominance of patriarchal religious ideas across the Western monotheistic traditions, coupled with patrilineal patterns of inheritance and value, means that the colonial spread of these traditions has resulted in a globalized legitimation of the sexual, social, and economic control of women’s bodies and sexuality through gendered narratives of purity and pollution. Even in countries like the United States or most of Europe, where patrilineal laws of inheritance have been largely overturned and women can control their own wealth even in marriage, the long-standing social conventions of patrilineality persist, particularly in terms of asymmetrically gendered views on sexual freedom and purity. In many languages there are far larger lexicons of derogatory terms—often associated with dirt or pollution—intended for unmarried women who are sexually active

Queer relations  95 than there are for sexually active, unmarried young men. In the Gospel of John, there is a story about Jesus refusing to condemn (to death) a woman who had been caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). He challenges her accusers to go ahead and stone her if they are “without sin.” Eventually all of her accusers disappear, and Jesus finally tells the woman to go her way and “sin no more.” While there are varying interpretations of the passage and scholarly debate about its origin, biblical scholars interested in gender see a remarkable counter-cultural narrative moment here in which it seems that Jesus is assigning as much guilt to the men who accuse her as to the woman. Sexual purity as a virtue is not debunked by the story, but the hypocrisy of its asymmetrical application to women is exposed. In addition to its role in supporting patrilineal authority, the heteronormative pseudo-virtue of virginity is an instrument of obscuration. It camouflages the commodity economy of relations in which a woman’s “unsullied” body is more sexually (and therefore socially and politically) valuable than a woman’s body whose sexual experience is unaccounted for. But the social pressures placed on women’s sexual purity in patrilineal traditions do more than legitimate paternal lines of descent for the consolidation of wealth and power. Those pressures also obscure the process by which ethnic purity is maintained as a social, political, and economic virtue through sanitation. No family system in the history of human life has had or has ever maintained pure lines of descent. But the gendered disciplines of heteronormativity function to idealize the myth of sexual and ethnic purity by sanitizing the mess of actual human bodily habitation, expression, and bloodlines. Virginity restoration rituals persist around the world today to maintain the commodity value of virgins by sanitizing and effacing sexual activity, including surgical rebuilding of hymens, as well as services and products meant to simulate virginity for would-be brides. 2 The recent effort of white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to exclude his black progeny with Sally Hemings from family reunions is another example of the sexual and ethnic practices of sanitation, obscuration, and economic consolidation that heteronormative services perform. 3 Of course, the mess of human sexual vibrancy and desire always poses a threat to ethno-patriarchal demands for patrilineal certainty and control. This means that sex is also an unruly problem for religious traditions that were birthed within those cultural systems, raised with the onus of legitimating those demands. While Christianity is not the only world religion with deeply entrenched patriarchal and patrilineal values, it has generously spread its doctrines shaped by those values around the world. The Christian Trinitarian doctrine of the incarnation in Jesus Christ is a case in point. The notion of the Trinity has added a particularly strong dose of heteronormativity to the Christian world, especially in terms of the requirement that the incarnate Son be absolutely free of sexuality and all of the boundary-crossing impulses that sex entails.

96  Queer relations The patrilineal problem of incarnation is the problem of paternal certainty everywhere: in the absence of DNA tests there is no absolute lock on the paternity of any child. Hence the demand for virginity. Male control over a woman’s vaginal activity is the closest, though never entirely sure, route to certainty and control of issue. Matrilineal systems have a much easier time of determining motherhood, of course, and so questions of naming, claiming, and inheritance are far simpler to resolve by anyone available to witness the birth. In matrilineal systems generally, matters of sexual ethics tend to have less to do with questions of wealth and inheritance, as the legitimate claims of children are easily proven, and more to do with incest taboos and other rules of sexual health. If wealth and identity passes through the mother’s line, the identity of the father does not trigger religious, economic, and social concern as it does in patrilineal systems. This does not mean that fatherhood is unimportant in matrilineal systems, just that it does not have the profound consequences of sexual surveillance that serves to ensure paternity. In a Christian-dominant culture it is hard to imagine religion without such heavy surveillance. Indeed, with the Christian Trinitarian claim of incarnation the patrilineal problem sits front and center. Mary’s impregnation by God would not have been an unfamiliar possibility to many Gentiles in the ancient Mediterranean basin. Deities did that from time to time. But how could anyone be sure that God was the father and not some illicit lover? An unmarried young woman in a strongly patriarchal and patrilineal culture, in which women caught in adultery could be stoned to death, would be a real crisis for Mary and for her whole family. Stuck with a swelling belly and no father, she would have had many reasons to lie. We cannot know the historical veracity of any of the incarnation birth narratives, but stories and their effects matter. The canonical stories address inevitable questions about Jesus’ paternity and legitimate inheritance of divinity in two ways. First, an older man, established in the community, was willing to marry her regardless of her potentially polluted condition. His acceptance of her gave authority to her claims of virginity. Second, acceptance of her virginal status sanitized not only her, but the child she carried. Most importantly, her virginity provided the paternal certainty and control even an almighty male God needed to establish his rights and ownership of his progeny. Christian Trinitarian doctrines depend upon this assumption of patrilineality and its legitimating requirements for inheritance. In Christian doctrine, after all, it is through the Son that all divine gifts from God the Father flow. An added responsibility of Mary’s virginity and Joseph’s acceptance of her, however, is racial legitimacy because of Joseph’s lineage. Through the institution of marriage, Jesus’ familial connection to the chosen people is established. That Jesus has “a people” is necessary for the fulfillment of the prophecy and the development of the nascent Christian story that, at the time of writing, was still a minor sect of Judaism. While Mary’s untainted, unsexed body gives Jesus the respectability of a life created by her

Queer relations  97 and God alone (Mary’s bloodline is of no consequence here), it is Joseph’s fathers who give Jesus the legitimacy of belonging to the right people. The son of God, adopted into the family of men that God has already chosen, gains Jesus access to the line that claims connections back to David, Abraham, Noah, and Adam. In this way the patrilineal claim of God on Jesus, attested by his birth from a virgin, is seconded by the patrilineal claim of Joseph through his adoption of the boy. Both acts secure Jesus’ legitimacy as the literal, spiritual, and ethnically purified son of their God. Whatever really happened to Mary nine months before she gave birth to her first child in Bethlehem, the story is what survives, and is therefore what matters in all senses of mattering. The Christian doctrine of incarnation is the result of a redactive and restrictive process that improved on the raw material of a man who had to be born and given legitimacy as the true Son of the One God in a nascent religious movement, itself taking shape in an ancient cradle of patrilineality. The cleansing mechanisms of virginity and marriage, together with redaction and restriction of the man himself, generate and support an asexual God motif. That is, they work together to maintain the immaterial purity, cleanliness, the dirt-less-ness, of a God who has, paradoxically, chosen incarnation and the impure mess of earthly bodies as a way of relating to creation. While in so many ways, the Christian claim of an omnipotent, immaterial, pure, and thoroughly male Father God supports a racially structured set of heteronormative pseudo-virtues, incarnation has always been a bit of a problem for that system, requiring constant processes of sexual and material sanitation, lest the imputed humanity of Jesus the son of Mary take over the imputed asexual but heavily gendered divinity of God. Heteronormativity is ultimately a force that co-opts divine-human relations. As a form of malicious anthropomorphic imagining, heteronormativity reflects, especially in a Western Christian context, a God and peoples beset by economies of relations that are underwritten by power, capital, division, and erasure. The projections of divinity that emerge from heteronormative specula codify a God who seems to be primarily and ultimately concerned with reproducing structures and relations of oppression and whose creation is a manifestation of fear rather than attentive wonder, of shame rather than humility, of obligation rather than honor, of sameness rather than diversity. This is a sort of God who is driven both by anxiety over His own nonexistence and by the need to maintain and purify His image. He is a God riddled with the fragility of His own claims to paternity and sadness over the impossible corner of immateriality in which He finds Himself. This sort of god is tragic and dangerous in the ways that all insecure men with too much unilateral power are both tragic and dangerous. We could say that he is a god in need of reparative therapy…. But, of course, He is not a god or a man at all, He is a projection of patriarchal desire. All divine images, in human hands at least, are projections of some sort of desire. We can think of divine images and concepts as the

98  Queer relations result of lenses, cultural filters through which we try to make out the shape of divinity. Our preconceived and culturally framed ideas can easily set the terms for what we will allow ourselves to accept or recognize as divine. The question is whether we mistake the lens for what it conveys or allow ourselves to see the lens for the tool that it is and imagine larger, more generous, and less limited ones. Just as we cannot look directly at the sun and see it, the divinity behind Christianity (at least) is beyond any single metaphor of seeing, hearing, touching, feeling, or imagining. Patriarchal heteronormativity demands even of God that dominance— in which there is no play—is the primary and most valued form of relation. The pseudo-virtues of heteronormativity that lead to oppressive forms of relating form an architecture of religious and cultural symbolism that in turn exert influence on human expectations, desires, and horizons of imagination. If Christians can begin to see the incarnation as a more revolutionary intervention in the immateriality of divinity than tradition has allowed, it just might mean that there is another, queerer way to divinity for Christians, to a divinity beyond the facade of racist heteropatriarchy. A God who relates to creation as its vibrant matter, who is not only in and with the mess but of it, may not be the redacted and restricted distortion of distant, brittle control and sexualized condemnation. In spite of the theological distortions that encourage immateriality, virginal asexuality, male superiority, and ethnic purity, it is possible to imagine incarnation as a blessing on sexually and racially diverse bodies in all of our intersecting multiplicity and bawdy, bodily vitality.4 An additional queertheological import of calling out heteronormativity, therefore, is the possibility that we may redeem God from the narrow strictures of patriarchal and heteronormative requirements. We believe that it is necessary as well to reassess and redeem our understanding of God from “His” relegation to an ugly throne of distant non-relation, an unseating of God’s own separated and separable self from creation. Such a relegation diminishes not only what God is but what God could be. Calling out heteronormativity redeems the notion—the virtue—of sensuality in the world as a divine calling within Godself. Queertheologies that posit God’s self as full as it is and as sexual as it wants to be make room for a revaluing—a re-deeming—of humans and the earth in new and liberating ways. Through a lens that gives (to those who still look) God’s redeemed, sexual selfhood, it follows that we begin to appreciate anew the robust human sexual self as a moral self, as a member of communities that thrive on positive relations located in bodily experiences. It is from this appreciation that the queer relational virtues can emerge. So long as our highest cultural values, traditioned into and reinforced by religious doctrine, set God as the gatekeeper of heteronormative values, queer folk are forced to stand in opposition to the whole edifice of religious morality that, quite frankly, never meant us to survive. In essence we claim that, as progeny of God, we are not sexual or moral; rather, we have virtue within our fullest sexual selves.

Queer relations  99 If we have virtue within our fullest sexual selves, a queer theological imagination cannot support heteronormativity’s pseudo-virtuous pursuit of purification, redaction, restriction, and sanitized narratives of divine relations in the world. Instead, queertheologies make way for a wider mode of attention to the commodifying effects of heteronormativity on the one hand, making us better able to attend to the tender shoots of new, queerer possibilities of relating on the other. Queer folk have also learned the virtue of embodied sense, understanding that promiscuity is a false vice, deployed to shore up heteropatriarchal sex and race hierarchies, and so may be itself precisely the virtue that queer relations need. Finally, there is the community-building power of courageous humility, a virtue that militates against the false humility demanded of the oppressed on the one hand and, forged in underground spaces of mutual support, forms the basis of true individuality and communal integrity on the other.

Queer sense: what relationality can do (or, the virtues in action) When the founding members of Adodi Muse: A Gay Negro Ensemble, step on stage for the performance of the crowd favorite, “Ain’t Got Sense Enuf to be ’Shamed,”5 they dazzle in beautiful and colorful fabrics, similarly patterned sarongs tied in different ways that highlight the nuances of their personalities and show the unity of their connection as black gay poets, with varying arrangements of jewelry, makeup, and haircuts and styles. Duncan Teague, Anthony McWilliams, and Malik Williams are each stunning. Anthony’s smile makes everyone in room swoon. Malik’s high cheekbones and perfectly manicured eyebrows smack of fashion weeks everywhere, and Duncan’s face is beat for the gods. In the rhythmic, synchronic, and asynchronic spoken word poetry style that is the Ensemble’s signature, the poem begins with two of the poets speaking into the ear of the other with the refrain, “ain’t got sense enough to be ’shamed.” The poem’s main character, who is headed to enjoy an evening of freedom and joy and dance fierceness with fellow queers at Mama Tyreesie’s, breaks the refrain with a self-affirmation: “I look fabulous.” The two other characters, who began with disdain about the main character’s choice of a banana yellow ensemble—undoubtedly a metaphor for the unapologetic loudness of the rest of his personhood, choices, and proclivities—morph into co-affirmers. Together, the poets weave in and out of laudatory remarks about the main character’s skin, hair, style, and possible fun evening. Then they change again, reflecting the voices of parents who are seeing the same hair, skin, and outfit, and remarking about the ludicrous and disrespectful display of shamelessness. The poem goes back and forth, with the main character standing his ground, trying to continue his self-affirmation amid the chorus. The audience hears “ain’t got sense enough to be ’shamed” in tones that are disparaging and dignified all at once.

100  Queer relations “Where is your shame? Why don’t you have sense enough?” the parents bark. “I won’t have no shame,” the character replies to himself and to the audience more than to his parents. “I won’t have no sense either, if sense means staying here.” He continues to get ready, now sporting a torn outfit and mussed coiffure. Battle scars for the club and a story for the party tonight, he tells himself and viewers. Then, he picks up his purse, “and his freedom” and heads out to have a good time at Mama Tyreesie’s, where they love him as he is. The sense that the main character in the poem refuses to adopt ultimately makes room for him to have and to gain access to a widening set of sensual experiences in a context in which he is loved, valued, and recognized for who he is. His valiant effort to push away shame, which is an affective orientation to the sense of lack and debasement imputed by others, is rewarded with freedom and the possibility of seeing himself through a lens that is not merely bound up with the structures, expectations, and performances of hetero-respectability. The relations that shame him in the poem are his parents, who stand in for the dominant society, and offer him a sense of self that is scripted by power, restriction, and humiliation. Resisting the power of his parents to define him and using that resistance to clarify for himself his sense of relationality, the character turns away. He does not turn away from relating altogether; instead, he turns toward himself and a community that accepts him at the same time. He knows what is not life-giving for him, and moves toward spaces where he can be recognized and allowed to be fully himself. In doing so, he demonstrates the necessity of relationality— both negative and positive—in his own self-revaluing and so redemption. If we pay attention, relationships of all kinds have the capacity to teach what matters in building lives and communities grounded on what we have learned about the colonizing and racist forces of patriarchal heteronormativity. There is queer virtue in everything that identifies and questions those forces. The deeply woven and intertwining roots of heteronormative patrilineality with colonial commodification of humans and earth cannot be surgically removed from our relations or memories of relations. We are as much the product of those forces that have shaped us all, as we are of rebels, runaways, and stubborn lovers. We cannot be naïve about our inheritances and the unrelenting demands of internalized heteronormativity, racism, and settler colonialism that dog us. But if we adopt postures of relating that pay attention to those forces, they can be addressed, worked with, perhaps even turned to creative ends. None of us is pure or can excise the cultural or biological DNA of dream-killers. So, paying attention to the powers and lures of inequity is a primary queer virtue. Attention has another side as well. In order to build relations free of binary constraints, that go the long way and avoid Foucault’s short and dangerous road of acts to personages, we pay attention to each other, not as exemplars or guardians of categories but as welcomers of difference that ever emerges out of the familiar. Relational expectations shift in a posture

Queer relations  101 of attention to difference: they do not groove into worn tracks of dominant and submissive ontologies, male or female, top or bottom (though everyone should be welcome to a preference from time to time). This is a steady posture of expectant attention. “Show us who you are, day by day,” says something different than “stay who you were, every day.” Attention that expects and welcomes difference is not a convenient relational posture, and it takes practice. But the alternative is a system of identification that ossifies persons and stultifies creativity. Consider a vision of communal nurturing that abides rather than fears real individuality. Children tell elders who they are as they grow, which means that attention to small and large indicators of preference, pleasures, and skills has more to do with the gender identity of the eventual adult than any other factor. Because preferences, pleasures, and skills can adapt and change, this also means that attention is important throughout the life of every member of the community. It also means that gender fluidity or self-understandings of sex do not threaten the fabric of the community because not only do they describe the path of the individual, but they indicate the nature of that individual’s participation in the community. Individuality, in other words, is a skill best nurtured in community. In this vision, the communal expectation is that every individual must find his, her, or their own path to identity, which is neither solipsistic nor individualistic. Individuality includes discerning an individual’s own contribution to the community. If her, his, or their path looks strange to everyone else, strange can be fine, welcomed even, so long as the result provides something that the community may need for health, food, shelter, spiritual enrichment, entertainment, and so forth. This is “just a vision” but it is not a utopian impossibility. It occurs in small ways, under the radar, in many small communities around the world. It is a mode of nurture and sustenance of individuality that best happens consciously, in communal systems where children are expected to develop skills that are of value to the people as a whole, and are expected to do so in their own unique and colorful ways. They are, therefore, not free of weighty sets of norms as they grow and mature. The difference is that, as they reveal themselves over time (as all children do) the expectations laid upon them include attention to what may be a radically individual path of relation to the world and its many persons, human and otherwise. That path and that individual may hold an as-yet-unknown key to the community’s survival and health in the future, and so elders are ill-advised to overly determine what a child might become. But this means that a child cannot discover a path or be supported by their elders in doing so without a posture of skilled attention by others. A queer virtue of attention is a little like this. In order to support the individuality of queer lives without predetermining their shape or what is acceptably “queer” about them, we suggest that postures of attention to differences are as important as those that make us similar. The problem

102  Queer relations of attending to sameness is that it becomes all too easy to stop paying attention. Act like this, look like that, do like this, or be like that and we can stop paying attention because of predetermined categories to which those behaviors are assigned (acts to personages). That becomes a convenient short-cut away from attention for everyone involved, tempting not only because of ease, but because of political efficacy. Settled identities are the basis of liberal democracy, so queer fluidity must always do battle for recognition, as every genderqueer or racially mixed person knows when told to select one or another category on legal forms. Attending to differences, giving value to true individuality, requires large and small changes in how identity functions in intimate, social, and political relationships. A posture of attention that is open to change also opens the door to strange new things that may unsettle or startle us into unforeseen skills we may need in an ever-changing future. The queer virtue of shared pleasure in diversity and individual flair implies a concomitant virtue of making space for that individuality. Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English Victorian poet, a Jesuit priest and closeted homosexual whose romantic, religious poetry became popular after his death in 1889. Perhaps his most famous poem, Pied Beauty begins “Glory be to God for dappled things/for skies of couple color as a brinded cow/for rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim…”6 It is an ode to flair and rampant diversity, though he could not leave the raucous color of the world unsupervised by an unchanging “Fathering forth” God. The former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan is a lesbian whose contemporary writing is not so constrained. She concludes her poem Flamingo Watching with similar praise for gratuitous exuberance, but with a more critical and queer suspicion: “…The natural elect, /they think, would be less pink, /less able to relax their necks, /less flamboyant in general./They privately expect that it’s some/poorly jointed bland grey animal/with mitts for hands/whom God protects.”7 Both exult in the glory, beauty, and humor of difference, though Ryan’s poem also casts a critical eye on those who would enlist God in their discomfort with it. Welcoming the “dappled things” means making room for them conceptually, even before they may appear. Making room for the different and the strange takes a certain amount of courage, and a certain amount of confident humility. If there is room enough for everyone, even the wildly pink, there is also the ability to take a step back to make that room possible. Humility is a tricky virtue, however. It is too often demanded of the vanquished, the oppressed, the feminized, and the enslaved. Taken as a sign of submission, the pseudo-virtue of humility can be a powerful weapon wielded against those whose very attempts to get by traps them into acquiescing to their own erasure. But we suggest that a humility that serves oppressive forces is not humility at all, it is the effect and mark of oppression. Valerie Saiving pointed out early in feminist theological writings that humility demanded of women in a patriarchal culture should be rebranded as a sin against their humanity and Mary Daly associated false humility

Queer relations  103 with mutilation of women’s psyches.8 Similar arguments have also been made in black writings since at least the nineteenth century. The fact that a black man who dared to look a white man in the eyes in America could be lynched by a mob (or shot to death, or suffocated by a policeman’s knee on his neck) is disciplinary overkill (literally), a demand for false humility, a maiming and erasure of personhood. Conversely, we suggest that queer humility is full of Pride. It is the strut and pose that “ain’t bothering nobody.” It is the recognition that freedom of expression, by which we mean the stuff of living, relies upon the freedom to express. There is artistry possible in every life and in every communal arrangement, no matter how small or hemmed in. Eschewing normative demands for cultural, stylistic, or biological reproduction of ourselves as evidence of our own worth frees us to entertain surprise at who or what shows up. What counts as queer humility, then, is every quality that makes honest and sustainable relations across difference possible. It is the virtue of placing ourselves in contexts of shared responsibility, aware of the ever-shifting parts each one plays (or might play) in a constellation of relations. Quite simply, though it is never simple in practice, queer humility is a form of knowing oneself in relation to others. It is built on the virtue of attention and usually requires a bit of courage because it enables adaptation and surprise as others emerge and change or as one’s own experiences create new possibilities, experiments, and embodiments. This idea of humility, embodied in a posture of welcome to “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (Hopkins, again), takes bodily pleasures as signposts of virtue, attentive as well to signals of harm. Safe words and scenes make edgy pleasures not only possible but edgier and more pleasurable—useful metaphors for freer, queerer living, perhaps. Sex work is one example that illustrates the difference we are after here between false humility and queer humility. It can be a lucrative profession for sex workers when they are well paid with health benefits, respected as professionals, and protected by law. The stigma of prostitution demands false humility of its practitioners in the form of shame. The heteropatriarchal norms and overblown valuation of marriage reduce sex workers to disposable commodities of male pleasure when the conventions of monogamy or of heteronormativity become inconvenient for them. It is no mistake that the vast majority of sex workers have been and are women, transwomen, and boys, marketing themselves almost exclusively to men because of the heteronormative structure of sex and marriage. While straight, lesbian, and transwomen who seek to pay for sex can probably find it if they know where to look or can navigate networks of access, the market is not designed for them. The point about sex work, here, is that bodily pleasure is one of the values nestled in queer humility. Righteous condemnation of how people seek and find sexual pleasure has no place here, unless someone is being used against his, her, or their will, or harmed, or disrespected.

104  Queer relations So, humility that is full of Pride takes pride in the quirky and sensual otherness of every living person and being. It is invitational, paying attention to wallflowers who only need a little nudge to get out and get down, encouraging spaces of inclusion that are messy and non-conformist. This queer humility makes a virtue of making room for coming/s out and brave acceptances of the inevitability of change that every coming out creates in the world. Everybody needs times to shine and be applauded, as well as times for retreat, comfort, healing, and companionship in the struggle. Queer people have long experience with this: creating spaces like Pride; kikis; dyke marches; potlucks; queer churches and spirit gatherings; and, of course, bars—spaces of coming out together, whether for wild applause, spiritual healing, sensual celebration, or myriad forms of quiet support. There is pleasure, we already know, in making room for the counter, spare, and strange, for the pinkest of the pink. We step aside to make that room for each other, not down.

Promiscuity and fidelity Another set of interlinked virtues in queer relationality, built upon the virtues of attention and courageous humility, can be described by the seemingly opposed concepts of fidelity and promiscuity. In common parlance, promiscuity refers to “sexual indiscrimination,”9 which is tied to the industry of chattel slavery and its heteropatriarchal anxieties about the ownership of women’s reproductive capacity. Linked to the production of ethnically pure heirs on the one hand and deliberately “mixed” human capital for enslavement on the other, the epithet of promiscuity in the context of slavery could discipline both free and enslaved women. With all sex outside of marriage (regardless of rape or access to legal matrimony) as evidence of indecent promiscuity on the part of women, their reproductive labor is securely bound to the racial and economic advantage of white landowners. For white women in the context of the American slave industry—and all women in heteropatriarchal contexts before and after—the label of promiscuity threatened penury and a disgraced, unmarriageable state. More of Foucault’s acts to personages. For enslaved women the label legitimated regularized rape based on a racist narrative of non-white women as naturally incapable of European norms of marriage. And since at least the nineteenth century, homosexuals joined the ranks of the promiscuous for both sets of reasons. Because of its strange resilience and power in heteropatriarchal cultures as a norming deterrent to embodied sense (particularly for homosexuals, transpersons, Black people, all women, and every combination therein) promiscuity is an important term for investigation and consideration in a queer exploration of virtues gleaned from the lived experience of queerly related people. Its Latin root is the verb miscēre, which means simply “to mix.” In classical Latin, prōmiscuus means “common, shared, general,

Queer relations  105 indiscriminate,” and, in grammar, “of common gender.”10 Nowhere in its Latin background does the word implicate sex, although etymological claims seldom determine use. But it is helpful to know that this word, applied liberally to punish and discipline people whose sexual lives, gender, and sexualities do not conform to heteronormative restrictions, has at its heart a set of meanings about mixture, commonality, and even gender that we affirm. These are meanings that, twisted into an epithet, also illuminate the fear of sharing, of mixing, and of wide-armed welcome. A queer virtue that is faithful to this deeper understanding of promiscuity exposes the commodification and life-dulling impact of relationships based on proprietary claims. No member of a relationship is the property of another, regardless of how laws may still be written. The ring on a finger may symbolize a set of promises and hopes, but it does not symbolize ownership. This is why we suggest that queer relationships have learned the hard way (and not always successfully, we might add) that humility, attention, and courage delineate everyday lines of flight from heteropatriarchal strictures. Sexual and other intimate relations can open your heart, and they can break your heart. Heavy, insecure policing of relational boundaries never protects hearts, though it may deaden them. It is far better to have faith in the embodied richness of every sexual being at every stage of life and focus concern instead on truth-telling, celebration of desire, health, resistance to abuse, care and protection of the vulnerable, and attention to the multifarious possibilities of human ways of being fulfilled together. If this kind of shared, common, and indiscriminate fulfillment is made of faith and promiscuity mixed in a common pot, then we claim them together as a virtue of the highest order. As a result of more critically understanding the heteronormative distortion of promiscuity, and furthermore by claiming faith in human diversity and embodied sensuality as goods for the health and well-being of relationships, both virtues are freed from the false opposition that ties them to ownership models of relationships. It is also very important that we not redeem promiscuity for queer relations by evacuating its association with sex and bawdiness. Quite to the contrary, promiscuity connected to fidelity brings bawdy back to bodies as an aesthetic and redemptive pleasure in all things sexy, funny, ribald, and sensuous. Mixture, commonality, sharing, and other meanings of the classical Latin root of promiscuity only enhance the vibrancy and potential for surprise and humor of sexual expression and embodied pleasures.11 At another level, because we are linking promiscuity with fidelity (its apparent opposite) sex and race become conceptually inseparable at the core of this combined queer virtue. As we have said, the link between fidelity and promiscuity allows us to disentangle both from their heteropatriarchal chains and lifts queer relationality up to the bone fide of healthy, pleasurable, attentive intimacies that welcome change and are unconcerned about racial, ethnic, or gendered purity. Mixing it up is a queer pleasure and a tonic for relations of all kinds.

106  Queer relations Understanding human existence as filled with sensuality and the capacity for experiential growth throughout life, promiscuous faithfulness and faithful promiscuity are forms of welcome to the many ways of being awake in the world. Both virtues support lasting and committed relationships, and at the same time make room for change in relational structures as needs, preferences, and desires adapt and change. Because fidelity balances promiscuity, sex and other pleasures do not easily devolve into solipsism or covert betrayal. Keeping faith with desire is keeping honest with oneself and one’s intimates. This means staying open to the ebb and flow of intimacy, even in traditional, dyadic relations. Because promiscuity balances fidelity, relations may be less susceptible to controlling patterns of ownership, and so less likely to become confused with betrayal, though they may change enough to end. Judgment is reserved for acts of harm and for those who willfully close down others’ capacity for growth and life. Family structures can take many forms that contribute to the communities in which they live. These communities grow strong through support of diversity in family systems and non-dyadic loving relationships. Finally, all relations, queer and otherwise, are embedded in complex contexts. The social history of the world we each inhabit sketches horizons of knowledge and imagination that fold back and reinforce who we think we are, for good or ill. Queer communities of all sorts navigate stereotypes that stem from what Emilie Townes calls “the fantastic hegemonic imagination.”12 Developed to better understand the complexity of social stereotypes applied to Black women, Townes exposes the revelatory character these stereotypes have, not of the Black bodies they purport to represent, but of the “deeply afflicted society from which they emerge.”13 Gay men are fey and simpering, they are witty, self-absorbed, and commitmentphobic. Lesbians are heavy-handed, tough, without beauty or humor, and they bring U-Haul trucks to first dates. Transwomen are arrogant and obsessed with traditional notions of femininity. Transmen are anti-feminist and overeager to display dominance. Bisexual, asexual, and genderqueer persons have trouble deciding, and so on and so on. None are categorically true, all circulate as ciphers for the deeply afflicted heteropatriarchal society from which they emerge. All deploy caricatures of gender against the personhood and difference each person embodies, even as they have sometimes been deployed as counter-resistant displays of pride and become partly true. Paraphrasing Townes, we can say that “the fantastic hegemonic imagination that breeds social myth, never represents [queer] bodies as ‘true true’ flesh and blood realities, but rather deludes [queer] personhood by rendering it as a ‘sometimes true,’ and ‘almost true’ caricature.”14 Promiscuity is a kind of stereotype that, redeemed and constructed as we have argued for it here, also theoretically declaws all stereotypes. As sexual and gendered differences in practice and in familial formations become a social value rather than a threat to the commonwealth, the kind of denigration that stereotypes effect becomes harder to exploit. It is far easier to

Queer relations  107 point out and dismiss the different one in a context where everyone is the same. The implication of carnival and bawd in daily life that promiscuity offers is a redemption of sensuality and sexuality as vital to lives lived fully and well. It threatens only those who fear enjoying it too much.

Queer relationality The relational quality of human existence is built on a foundation of sex and sexuality. It is the connections to and distances from others that drive human experiences, and affective postures like disgust, fear, and desire that provide and underwrite the tenor and orientations of those connections. Queer relationality expands, reopens, and resurrects the sexual and sensual self that is often suppressed and snuffed out through the structures and strictures of heteronormative hegemony. In offering a vital alternative to heteronormativity, queer relationality is not without its own norming dynamics. Striving for accountability without imposing ontological judgment means that actions may be judged in terms of their ability to help or harm a community’s well-being and openness to difference but not as a means to boxing actors into static categories. A queer basis for relating has its roots in the needs of an entire people to be free of stultifying gendered, racialized, and sexualized shame that maps onto social, political, and economic oppression. Throwing open the heteronormative purifying, sanitizing, redactive and restrictive gates do not mean that queer relations are also liberated from restraint in the form of respectful treatment of others, attention to the voices and desires of difficult, discomfiting, or oppositional others, or care for “the least of these.” All relations are vulnerable to harm, disrespect, and misuse. Compromise or delay in pursuit of one’s pleasures on behalf of communal thriving is always part of the equation, but systemic suppression and demonization of those desires is not. While much of our discussion in this chapter has focused on the alternatives that queer experience may offer to heteropatriarchal pseudo-virtues, it is perhaps obvious but also important to note that queer relations, being human, are not all sweetness and harmony. We must not be naïve about the difficulty and complexity of relating. Indeed, “relation” has no moral leaning. Enemies are in relation, sometimes more intensely and intimately than lovers. Ruptured relations are relations. So, the question is not whether queer relations will solve every difficult human interaction. The question is rather how queer relations can resolve the deadly inner structure of heteronormativity that distorts every human relation shaped and labeled by it. Labels and binary rules have the benefit of making human relations simpler and more easily categorized and disciplined. Loosening categories of identity, affirming the irrepressible mess of sexual and gender variability, and removing its stigma and association with pollution and dirt means that every relation must be negotiated in new ways. This takes work, and attention to difference.

108 Queer relations Although queer relations are not always easy relations, they do tend to emphasize expressive freedom and open tables of welcome and support. They depend upon ancient religious norms that accentuate protection of the vulnerable, release of captives, good news for the exiles, and that furthermore emphasize the importance of art, individual flair, embodied differences, sensual pleasures, and relational creativity. The specific virtues of queer relating come from specific queer relations, which means that the canon of virtues cannot be closed. The good news here is that folks are relating queerly like this in micro-communities, households, and shelters all over the world. They fly mostly under the radar but embody an enormous, existing cache of wisdom for queer living. Attention, courageous humility, promiscuity, and fidelity are only some of the virtues necessary for queer relations. But they are all essential and all implicate related virtues, like truth-telling, without which attention is cover-up, humility is false, and promiscuity is abuse. Without humor, every queer virtue withers and hardens, turning on itself and on every vulnerable being that it encounters. Attention with humor is aware of the kind of pain that cannot be named or healed without some laughter. Humility with humor is capable of helping others to be courageously humble, declawing fear. And promiscuity is, frankly, usually pretty funny. Sexual desire makes clowns of most of us, a fact that heteronormative obsessions with decency and purity try to shame, and very nearly erase. Camp, bawds, and carnivals—all queer spaces—remind us all that these virtues are nothing if we cannot take fullthroated, foot-stomping, hand-testifying pleasure in all of it.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York, NY: Vintage Reissue Edition, 1990), 43. 2 Poppy Noor, “Now I Have to Check Your Hymen: The Shocking Persistence of Virginity Tests” The Guardian, December 9, 2019, www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/2019/dec/09/hymen-virginity-tests-us-ti (accessed August 17, 2020). 3 James Dao, “A Family Get-Together of Historic Proportions” The New York Times, July 14, 2003. 4 We owe much of our thinking here to the theoretical foundations provided by Kimberle Crenshaw, including particularly her development of “intersectionality,” and Jasbir Puar, on her notion of “assemblages.” See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 1989, Article 8; Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago. edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 5 Adodi Muse: A Gay Negro Ensemble, Ain’t Got Sense Enuf to be ‘Shamed,” CD Baby 2004, compact disc. 6 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty: A Selection of Poems (Cumbria: Simon King Press, 1994). 7 Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 2011) 33.

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8 Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–112. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) 49. 9 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. “Promiscuous.” 10 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. “Promiscuous, Adj. and Adv.” 11 Sexual health is critical for the well-being of whole communities. Although some diseases can be transmitted sexually and it is important to pay attention to safe practices, there are unending ways to affirm sexual pleasures and to share sexual intimacies that increase appreciation of bodies in all of their diversity and to protect the health and welfare of participants. 12 Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 21. 13 Eboni M. Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 148. 14 Ibid. See also, Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, pp. 3, 11, 15.

7

Queer transformative epistemologies

How do we know what we know when there are no words for what we know? What has made it possible through centuries of demonization and suppression for queer people to come to some knowing otherwise, even without maps or models? And how does the legitimacy of our knowing escape becoming a new device for suppression—of dreams, of adventures, of desire? Desire is sometimes a physical language that, no matter how inchoate or confusing, still works its way through to a knowledge. Muscles tighten, blood quickens, breathing catches below, or beyond, words. When physical language makes its way to consciousness, running counter to the given rules and norms of society, decisions have to be made. Is it wrong? Is it harmful? Is another, more vulnerable perhaps, put at risk? What courage does it require? What deceptions? What will make it go away? At age 13, in the horrors of junior high, one of us was walking between classes. The crowded hallway was a river of pubescence and teetering cusps, still almost children, still not grown. Ahead of me a girl I knew a little bit: her body almost the woman she would soon be. She rode horses, and the muscles on her forearm, that held reins and now her books, looked strong, grownup. I was suddenly mesmerized by that arm and wanted to stroke it, moved by the way she walked easily in front of me, and by her smooth, sun-touched skin. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to hold her, and feel it all. Then the immense horror: what was this feeling? It had broken through, it could not be mistaken. No! Not me! I turned and ran back to the girls’ bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and began hitting, clawing, and punching myself. I chanted “sick, sick, sick” and I did so for the entire next period, listening all the while for someone to walk in. It was junior high school after all, where misery and fear must be hidden at all cost. It was class time. No one came in. When the bell rang, I walked out of that bathroom as determinedly heterosexual as a scared 13-year old could be. There was no one “like that” who I knew of (until much later of course, looking back.) I only knew, somehow, what the feeling meant, and that it was sick and terribly wrong. I had beaten “it” out, or so I thought as I worked my way, from high school into college, through a parade of nice but ill-fitting boys and men.

Queer transformative epistemologies  111 Queer desire has to have a strong enough fist to punch through the denials, internal and external, that militate against it. Insistent enough, and persistent enough, to evolve into knowing, and then, with care, into courageous knowing. Navajo poet Jake Skeets writes “I learned to touch a man by touching myself. I learned to be a man by loving one.”1 This latter knowing is attuned to the difference between kinds of harm: harm that stunts or damages the vulnerable, and harm that stunts and damages everyone because of its roots in oppression. It is a transformative epistemology that Emilie Townes calls colored orneriness. “When we lean into the knowledge that comes from the marrow of our bones we are choosing a colored orneriness that has an attitude as it crafts moral thought, strategies, and actions.”2 It is ornery in part because it isn’t always easy to lean into that bone-marrow knowledge when the known world denies it, and it most certainly is not always safe. Before Brandon Teena was gang-raped and then murdered, before the internet could show him the existence of others and possibilities beyond his immediate world, the young transman was trying to fit what he felt. His role models were the men who would torture and kill him. What he came to know about himself through his teen years was rooted in feeling, and ran counter to everything he was told. Becoming the man he felt himself to be would offend some, but, as Luscious said, could bother nobody.3 Nevertheless, trying to do so—just being himself—separated him from his family and challenged a dangerously brittle and vindictive ethos of masculinist supremacy. Bone-marrow knowledge that can be crafted into moral thought, like the gravitational pull of desire, requires dogged persistence to muscle its way into the workrooms of consciousness, to make itself available for acknowledgment, for the kind of awareness that may change everything. It recoils at the stench of decaying narratives that render the body dead and incapable of feeling the knowledge. Courageous knowing has to become stronger than fear, patient and ornery enough to recognize and expose the words and deeds and structures that mask it and signify upon it. Bone marrow knowledge that does this talks back lest, as Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins once said to her mother, the words “just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”4 Such a knowing is visceral in the most basic sense, calling on every sensibility to establish what is true by suturing the millennia-deep slice between body and mind. Danez Smith captures the ornery and courageous body-knowledge that (literally) drips from guests’ mouths in his poem “at the down-low house party.” The guests are men who disavow their homosexuality except within the agreements of the gathering, for a time between the men they were and will be again, outside. In first person plural, Smith writes as the guests, capturing the searing ambiguity of desire for the “glittering boi” who appears at the party and the inexorable drag of homophobic repulsion that—they think—anchors their safety in the world. “We call him faggot” they admit, “meaning I been waited ages to dance with you.”5 Smith knows something else, something otherwise, about that glittering boi, and conjures readers’ knowing through a courageous transformation

112  Queer transformative epistemologies of the label those men fear the most, the one they fling at the beautiful object of their frightened desire, “faggot.” The word has different—new— meaning for those who are in the know even as it carries the doubled folds of their lives. Such a meaning is established in and through the body, through flesh that moves, not in resistance to some external constriction, but instead in its own rhythm that insists on freedom. In that space even the word they most fear outside becomes a revolutionary honorific inside. Inside it means brave, it means “Hail the queen!”6 Although same sex lovers and transpersons are appearing more and more in television shows and movies, it was not very long ago that there were no such public reflections of queer life, confirming “yes, you exist.” Gay bars were unnamed, windows painted black, largely unnoticeable from the street, usually with back entrances. To acknowledge same-sex desire or to know oneself to be another gender than one of the narrow options on a set menu, was—and still is for many queer people—a doorway of self-knowing from which there is no return. As Nikki Finney writes in her poem Aureole, “If I touch her there everything about me will be true.”7 Understanding things that cannot be or are not spoken, as Alexis Shotwell suggests, pushes something up from regions of experience that threaten status quo expectations, blur certainties into irretrievable uncertainties. For Finney, the body and an act of touch together confirm what she knows, rendering moments before and moments after into different realms of truth. Language is the medium and shape of settled knowledge, but there are whole countries of embodied experience that language either cannot reach or, in fear, misnames. Ornery queer knowing, when it is bone marrow knowledge, has the capacity to craft moral thought, strategies, and action—queer virtues—and does so for those whose lives epitomize a courage of “nevertheless.” Camp and creativity, talking to the dead, scandal and improvisation, sexy embodied being, new relational possibility, all sketch virtues forged in queer experience. An ongoing human endeavor at moral thought, strategy, and action and by no means finished or comprehensive, these lived virtues cannot help but transform knowledge production and open us to possibilities not yet seen. Could we become pleased, for example, by differences that confound language, untroubled by unicorns everywhere, more comfortable with verbs than with nouns, energized by uncertainty? What kind of knowing (and unknowing), and therefore making and unmaking, would empower these dispositions? Queer transformational epistemology begins in affective, situational, embodied experience that cannot be reduced to neat categories or fixed claims about identity. It is satisfied neither with heteronormative binary closures on gender and sex nor with early queer theory’s strict nominalism.8 As Kim Q. Hall suggests, a “queer epistemology is sensitive to that which lies beyond the edges of identity, to that which remains unknown and possibly unknowable but nonetheless beckons as an affective register of the experience of ambiguity in the face of identity.”9 This means that

Queer transformative epistemologies  113 queer transformational epistemology is seeking to affirm a kind of knowing that allows for recognition in community, a comforting ability to say “I am like these, I belong here” even as it affirms an individuality that cannot be reduced to a single identity category. Even more, queer epistemologies have no real appetite for the production of closures guaranteed by white supremacist ableist cis-heteropatriarchal capitalism. Neither the assuaging of ignorance, nor the comfort of stability, is met by queer epistemes. At the same time however, this queer knowing recognizes that closures and exclusions follow all too easily on such identifications. An oppositional thinking sneaks in, a requirement that being “like these” makes impossible a concurrent being “like those, I belong there too.” As some queer and crip theorists have noted, the demand to “come out” finally (and for all time) to unshakable sexual or gender identities primarily serves the interest of heteronormative dominance in contested fields of identification. The demand to “reveal the truth” about one’s sexuality or gender implies that such truth is essential, unchanging, and transcendent to context. It also implies that such truths are not found in one’s race and culture, ethnicity and spirituality. Such a demand (dis)misses the assemblages that comprises one’s experience, self-understanding, expression, and reception in the world. The confessional demand, as Foucault put it, which is sometimes issued as a moral imperative, attempts to relieve an anxiety cultivated within a liberal, democratic context organized by labels.10 Your existence, along with your rights, depends upon the categories to which you belong, have consistent and unchallenged access, or to which you have been assigned. The association of stable categorization with truth serves to establish the normative (white cis-heteronormative) identity as both solid and dominant, while establishing all other identities as both solid and marginal. The virtue of knowing otherwise, of seeking a posture of wise attention to others, including one’s own fluid otherness, is “about the space, effort, and experience of making space for us all to exist.”11 This is not easy in a larger social and political context that diagnoses transient or unfamiliar identities as unstable, incoherent, or even pathological. This knowing otherwise directly challenges the epistemic regime of static categorization, which has been dominant in the West for so long that it seems natural. The queer project of revising our approach to transformative epistemology requires a number of difficult shifts in posture, shifts to what we could summarize as virtues of attention and openness. But to understand these shifts, it is important to have a sense of the regime we are working to depose, or at least to decenter and denaturalize so that we can be better prepared to recognize the parameters, new or old, that shadow any claims we make to knowledge. Technically speaking, epistemology is the science of knowledge, specifically addressing how knowledge is obtained, what constitutes knowledge, and what it means for a thing to be known. Challenges to the dominance of Western epistemology are not new to queer thought. Precedents span the last century in black critical thought, feminist theory, a range of postcolonial

114  Queer transformative epistemologies and decolonial theories, and even further back to the likes of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Even quantum physics and other sciences have loosened the grip on certainties available through the received methodologies of knowledge production. The archival “known” itself has proven to be less objective, less settled, and so more difficult to assume, than in earlier ages. The producer of knowledge has become a relevant figure in the nature and scope of what is known, meaning that power, perspective, and standpoint matter, not only in describing a fuller character of what is known but in limiting its scope as well. There is always another standpoint from which to learn, another context of knowing. But this form of contextual epistemology is new knowing when we look at the long trajectory of Western science and philosophy. Western medicine, for example, which relies on increasingly powerful and detailed instruments of observation, bases its knowledge on classificatory systems that depend upon comparison for diagnosis. The healthy state for any body or body part is its level of sameness with other bodies or parts in the same class. Deviations from the standard, established through processes of normativization, are important for diagnosis: they may be signs of disease, injury, or some other fault. This is a highly effective mode of analysis and knowledge production, the diagnostic benefits of which should not be dismissed. Of course, there is irony is such a process. Consider the history of gynecology in which James Marion Sims is lauded as the “father” of modern surgical techniques for his work in and on enslaved black women’s bodies. Through violent colonization of these bodies and a dismissal of the enslaved women’s humanity, he developed and produced a set of knowledge related to reproductive organs, women’s capacity for child bearing and reparative methods in situations of obstructed childbirth. Operating on enslaved women while using no anesthesia, Sims simultaneously (re)established black women’s bodies as sites of fungibility and violence and forwarded the field of medicine. In the field of medicine, Sims is now known as a “controversial figure” due to his unethical medical techniques and research methods. Queer epistemologies beg the questions: what precisely is the controversy? Is it the exploitation celebrated through decades of citation, implementation, and justification of Sims’ work? Is it the odd truth that even though enslaved black women’s bodies were exploited and violated for the advancement of Western medicine (hear the echoes of Henrietta Lacks), black women’s bodies are always “other” in modern medical contexts? How did they become mutations while used as the founding specimens? Yet, not all differences are deemed pathological, and some may even raise the ideal standard for the class. The point here is that medical knowledge rests on the existence of a standard to which individual cases of deviance may be referred for diagnosis and treatment. The question, however, is not whether the standard of sameness is a viable tool of analysis, because it has proven itself to be so, but rather what structures of normalization it inadvertently (perhaps) establishes and then polices.

Queer transformative epistemologies  115 The queer epistemological question, here, is whether differences that fall outside of the standard range of variation become unnecessarily vulnerable to pathologizing tendencies that lead to unnecessarily harmful remedies. The answer is yes, they do. Contemporary examples of this vulnerability and harm are the controversial surgical assignment of intersex babies to a single sex and treatments for mental illness in non-western cultures.12 The epistemological regime of categorization and identity is a cultural product, one with distinct capabilities and powers that have ensured its dominance in the West. The point here is not that it is ineffective or always incorrect. Rather, it is incomplete and in error when it pretends to have exhaustive or complete access to knowledge. The ancient Greeks bequeathed the encyclopedic, comparative method of observation and classification to the Hellenized West and established the epistemological regime that is still dominant today. Using this method of knowledge production, Aristotle also linked epistemology and virtue. He argued that proper and stable knowledge of the essential natures of things enables virtuous action in relation to them. To know the good is to do the good. Proper and stable knowledge of essential natures, he argued, is acquired in two ways. First, he accepted his teacher Plato’s assumption of the eternal existence of ideal forms for all things. The eternal form of a thing—say, an oak tree—establishes the standard for all oak trees, the criterion of sameness for which all oak trees will be evaluated. The question that follows from this initial assumption is, of course, how that ideal essence can be discerned. To Plato’s dismay, Aristotle here departed from his teacher’s contemplative inclinations. He argued that the ideal forms for every kind of thing can be discovered by rigorous longitudinal and latitudinal observation of physical examples. Careful observation over time of like things would reveal, he believed, the eternal ideal for them. Once classified, virtue for each thing lay in its own approximation to the ideal of its class, so far as circumstance would allow. Diagnosis also follows systematically from classification. If a thing deviates from the ideal because of bad environment, change the environment. If it suffers because of an incurable and infectious ailment, isolate or remove it to protect the class. Understand a thing’s sameness to a rigorously discerned ideal, then diagnoses and treatments are more easily located and applied as well. The truth, therefore, of every occurring thing, tree, human, pig or pebble, is available by virtue of its sameness, not its individuality or difference. What all of this boils down to is that Western modes of knowing inherited from ancient Greek philosophy a fundamental conceptual division between essence that is unchanging, and variation that, being variable, changes. They thought that truth is located in unchanging essence, to which knowledge is tethered. Necessity opposed to accident. Essence opposed to variation. Two boys, one with red hair, one with brown hair. “Boy,” in this epistemological frame, is essential or necessary to “knowing” both while

116  Queer transformative epistemologies hair color is accidental, an inessential variation. Change the hair color, both are still knowable, nameable, right? Change the boy, who and (maybe more pressing) what are they? Queer transformative epistemology, if we take seriously the queer virtues we have proposed up to this point, does two extremely important things, one more simple than the other. In simple terms, queer transformative epistemology highlights the genealogy of knowledge, reading the knower by exposing the context of observation as an important element in the initial source of knowledge. Because observation is always mediated by assumptions, prerogatives, moods, and motivations, the historic pressure of patriarchal heteronormativity is bound to creep in and scratch the lens, so to speak. When Aristotle sought to determine the essential character of man, it mattered, in other words, which men he chose to observe. In less simple terms, queer transformative epistemology redeems knowledge from its inherited tether to stasis and loosens the grip of ontological essence. In a queer epistemological frame, perhaps what any given thing is, is not an unchanging essence or identity, but a mobility in which sameness is demoted from its executive position to one less fixated on categorization. This means that our search for knowledge is less concerned with essential truths of identity that lurk behind facades of contextual variability, and more with what and who present themselves to us, in their own irreplaceable uniqueness at any given moment. Finding the box to put them in is less important than paying attention to what comes forward in the encounter. We could call this rebalancing of epistemology an “ontology of the accident” recognizing that variation and variability is not mere window dressing on an otherwise identity-based truth. Catherine Malabou uses the notion of “ontology of the accident” to think about what she calls destructive plasticity, when events radically alter existence, such as in brain trauma or at times, she says, for no reason at all. A form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident. A funny breed. A monster whose apparition cannot be explained as any genetic anomaly. A new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography.13 This notion of ontology of the accident, focusing on destructive change, can be understood another way, too. Given the history of ontology in the West that emphasizes unchanging essences as the basis of knowledge, an ontology of the accident can also emphasize uniqueness instead, delaying an identity search for sameness, and even then subordinating that search to a posture of reception, to the possibility of unicorns. A queer ontology of the accident understood this way turns ontology of essence on its head, reorienting the goals and results of learning. Queer experience depends on this variability if only because raced and colonized gender and sex norms have been so confining and ill-fitting. In the early

Queer transformative epistemologies  117 1990s, the late night comedy revue Saturday Night Live ran a series of sketches by SNL member Julia Sweeney called “Here’s Pat!” The sketches present a decidedly white character whose gender is undecidable. Pat’s popular success at the time (the sketches also spawned a full length movie) depended entirely upon the anxiety that the character’s gender ambiguity created in everyone around Pat. Each skit centered on one futile effort after another to secure Pat’s gender and sex. What is significant about “Here’s Pat” is not any proto-trans, butch lesbian, or nerdy otherness to dominant white masculine or feminine norms, though it has been read and aptly criticized that way. Any one of those labels, however, would have resolved the nudgy undecidability at the center of Sweeney’s humor. It is the character’s apparently artless refusal of any label at all that raises the temperature and funds the nervous laughter of each skit. “Here’s Pat!” is not sophisticated theater, or particularly good theater. It provoked the ire of critics who saw the character as an intentionally unsavory trans figure.14 But “Here’s Pat!” also clearly exposes and banks upon a node of anxiety in a label-driven classificatory epistemology. One has the sense, watching the sketches, that any label would satisfy—even trans, because then Pat’s identity would be secured. Pat does fit certain classifications with ease, but some is not enough. Without gender, Pat could be neither loved nor hated. Without it, Pat gives everyone hives. Without it, Pat is just what Pat is: unclassy, white, nerdy Pat. Epistemology without classification is, without a doubt, difficult in a dominant social and political environment that depends upon identities. The undecidables, or unicorns we might say, are vulnerable to the violence that anxiety sometimes creates because they threaten the structure and legitimacy of the prevailing, interlocking hierarchy of species, classes, races, and genders. An ontology of the accident in this sense sounds innocent and banal, as if a philosophical rebalancing of ancient Greek epistemological requirements is a mere matter of reconceptualization. If that were the case, there would be fewer murders of transpersons and faggy bois, fewer rapes and murders of stems and fuds, lesbians and genderqueers. A queer ontology of the accident is an ontology of perversion, of criminality, in an overall epistemological system that depends not only on classification and identity but on a hierarchical structure of identities, violently enforced. Ontological perversion looks to the despised and criminalized classes, those designated as intolerably other, including those who are intolerably undecidable, to expose the violence of classificatory epistemology. Transformative queer epistemology suggests that that which makes us unique and different from one another is now the starting point of knowledge, not its distraction. Difference is now essential to anything we can say, learn, or know. The differences I embody, that establish my individuality and uniqueness from all others, the differing that I continue to experience, are no longer non-essential variables or window-dressing on my essential species/race/gender/you-name-it identity. The categories of gender, or race,

118  Queer transformative epistemologies or species to which I am assigned may still have meaning and conversational use, but in terms of knowledge they are less informative because those classifications are less important for anything but the most abstract conceptualizations. The deeper overturning here is that essence becomes difference, confounding the whole inherited epistemological system. But this queer epistemological move fits what we actually experience, which is each other’s difference and uniqueness. Labels and identities (as classifiers and points of sameness) serve proximal purposes having to do with temporary arrangements and needs: adult, child, student, teacher, human animal, lover, employee, and so on. So, to start with difference or uniqueness in attempting to know something or someone is to bracket all identifications that classify sameness and likeness. It is a process of learning that pauses before naming, or, if naming is important, that is attentive to what is not named therein. But in a social and political history violently coercive in the classification of species and persons, this epistemological shift to queer knowing is not innocent or banal. It exposes the brittle substructure that supports white supremacy, male supremacy, human supremacy, and every other coercive supremacy that depends upon ontological classifications. And empires do strike back. In the Christian story, Jesus was tortured and killed by the Roman Empire because he would neither label himself nor answer to the charges laid against him. In light of queer epistemology it is interesting to look at Pilate’s apparently frustrated decision to execute him. Pilate demands to know who Jesus is, and attempts to get Jesus to label himself. Pilate asks if he is a King, Jesus responds that Pilate is the one saying so. Furthermore, in one of the rare consistencies of the canonical Christian gospels, each includes the detail that during the trial that led to his execution, Jesus refused to answer for himself. “But he gave…no answer, not even to a single charge” (Matt. 27:14a). “But Jesus made no further answer” (Mark 15:5a). “So [Pilate] questioned him at some length; but he made no answer” (Luke 23:9). Even the later, more voluble Johannine Jesus retains this refusal in Pilate’s second round of questioning: “But Jesus gave no answer” (John 19:9b). Such consistency among the four gospels is remarkable. Why did Jesus refuse to defend himself? There are a number of possibilities, the simplest of which is that he had no defense, no answer for the charges. His very existence is the problem for the political powers, and nonconforming bodies are always hard pressed—or ultimately unable—to defend themselves. They always exceed definition, or explanation. “For this I was born,” Jesus says enigmatically to Pilate, according to the writer of John (18:37). Through the lens of Christianity’s claim of divine incarnation, his refusal or inability to defend himself takes on a wonderful richness. Standing silent before Rome and Israel, Jesus effectively challenges all of the legal systems that depend upon a reduction of persons to commodifiable identity, as if any answer he might give for himself could be exchanged for his deeds (or misdeeds) or especially for his existence, his life. His silence lifts up

Queer transformative epistemologies  119 his own irreducibility—the irreducibility of his embodied presence—to the charges laid against him. Jesus’ silence refuses the empire’s efforts to measure, dismiss, and cancel him. Having touched, healed, and loved, there is nothing that Rome can do to him that can cancel out, nullify, or constitute an exchange for what he has legally or illegally been and done, for what he is and will be. The divine singularity of Jesus of Nazareth rests in his unicorn self, which can be killed, but not cancelled or exchanged. And Jesus’ refusal echoes God’s refusal to be categorized in a similar fashion by Moses, who encounters and questions God in/as the burning bush. God introduces Godself through a lineage that Moses knows including Moses’ own father, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Yet Moses still inquires: if the people ask me your name, what do I tell them (Exodus 3:13)?And God gives the answer that illustrates queer transformational epistemology best: “I am who I am,” or, “I will be who I will be,” or even, “I cause to be what I cause to be (v. 14).” God basically says to Moses in that self-naming exchange, you will know me by my dynamic being, not by a static category that my “name” would establish. And this exchange is everything because it is such a queen move! God avoids capture, but establishes intimacy in this refusal, and Moses is none the wiser. God’s intimacy with Moses is only possible because of an internal knowing, and embodied and self-sensory knowing. Audre Lorde talks about this as erotic knowledge, in which the body and sensuality are epistemes—sources of knowledge that cannot but yield truth, regardless of whether or not it is externally denied. When the erotic—the fully attuned sensory reality emerging from within—is a point of trust, one does not need to articulate it nor establish it as a norm it just is. Or, as God establishes, it will just be… God knows that this posture is one of ultimate liberty and that for some, it will be the motivation for liberation. And for Lorde, the necessity of liberation for black and queer women requires a return to such knowledge, and a commitment to redeem what we have been taught “to suspect… in ourselves.”15 Ultimately, the queer challenge of rebalancing epistemology suggests two related virtues. Openness is the capacity to leave lists of identities, catalogues, and encyclopedias aside for the present, to remain undecided enough to allow each occurrence to reveal itself without labels. Because labels allow for laziness and inattention, openness requires a posture of attention, the capacity to observe and accompany without foreclosure. These twin virtues of openness and attention together generate and support an epistemology that starts—courageously—with surprise, and that waits on identities. The virtue of openness shifts communities into a queer space, where the plasticity of existence may interrupt taken-for-granted norms and practices. Cultures never shackled by static ontologies of essences are better equipped to deal with interruptions in norms, mostly because interruptions are expected and norms are always open to revision. Which is not to say that massively destructive interruptions do not occur and do equally

120  Queer transformative epistemologies massive damage. Genocides, middle passages, and cultural exterminations all destroy possibility, even for revision. But it is possible to imagine cultural revision, even in the West, that stretches toward openness, in part because it is already happening. A well-known non-western example from the Anishinaabe culture of native North America illustrates these virtues at play, demonstrating their necessity in a changed epistemology. Irving Hallowell was an anthropologist who lived for a number of years with the Anishinabeg in northern Minnesota. He earned the trust of the community and, in his notes, he recorded one exchange with an elder member of the tribe. He confessed to the elder that he was having trouble with one aspect of the tribe’s worldview. He understood that many of the central stories and teachings told of rocks and boulders that acted with intention and, sometimes, with powerful effect. He asked the elder if this meant that all rocks are alive. He was told immediately (one gets the sense that he was considered a little dense) that of course rocks are not alive. But, the elder continued, some are.16 An ontology of essence requires conformity at the point of definition, so to say that “some rocks are alive” and not mean that others simply have died (allowing the claim to stand that all rocks have the capacity for aliveness) requires a different ontology, one where things, persons, and events are allowed to reveal themselves prior to definition, and possibly against any possible definition. Hallowell’s question was a reasonable one from a Western perspective. But an otherwise ontology demotes the status of the label, without rejecting it altogether, in the face of lived experience, action, and event. If only some rocks are alive, it is impossible to anticipate which ones are, and which ones are not. The label “rock” does not necessarily provide a conformity of essence though it may remain a convenient shorthand for things that seem similar. So how can one tell if any given rock is alive or not? One cannot tell in advance. One has to pay attention, and remain open to possibility and surprise. What is required is an openness to the possibility of aliveness in every rock, which of course also implies openness to aliveness in other things as well, followed necessarily by attention to one’s surroundings in a new way. Queer things are always occurring. Adopting a posture of openness and attention revalues and so redeems experience as arbiter of meaning. This openness has been a key to survival and to thriving in queer life. As Alexis Shotwell writes, “We also know otherwise—we understand things that cannot be or are not spoken, and we may suspect that this form of knowing is important.”17 Queer transformative epistemology re-centers unrepeatable individual and communal experience as a mode of knowing, giving weight to its variability but also to the non-verbal, life-in-the-body that houses bone-marrow knowing, that leads to courageous and ornery knowing, that crafts moral thought, that is neither static nor entirely categorizable. This kind of knowing requires a posture of learning that is not satisfied with mere classification but is patient with the process of emergence

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and able to live with the not-yet or never named. This kind of knowing is unthreatened by an ever expanding vocabulary of self-identifications, understanding that such undecidability requires a different kind of politics and democratic structure. It demonstrates a willingness to work at loosening the filters we use (and may not even know we use) on incoming experiences. It shifts the grammar of knowledge from noun to verb, and from catalogue to itinerary. Queer lives settle into strict definitional categories at their peril. It is the shifting, living, uniquely expressive and courageously different from whom we learn, if we are open and pay attention.

Notes 1 Jake Skeets, “Dear Brother” in Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems by Jake Skeets (Minneapolis, MN: Milkwood Editions, 2019), 36. 2 Emilie M. Townes, “Knowledge from the Marrow of Our Bones,” Plenary lecture in honor of Katie Geneva Cannon. Society of Christian Ethics Annual Meeting, Washington DC. January, 2020. 3 See Chapter 3, “Creativity.” 4 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 42. 5 Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 2018), 36. 6 Ibid. 7 Nikki Finney, Head Off & Split: Poems (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 8 Even early queer theorists argue that notions that bespeak “it is only performance, there is no there, there” are insufficient. Instead, “working on and against identity” is important, as queer of color critiques have claimed. Cf. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 9 Kim Q. Hall, “Queer Epistemology and Epistemic Injustice” in Ian J. Kidd, et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 164. 10 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: Introduction, especially “Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse” (New York: Vintage, reprint, 1994), 17ff. 11 Nikki has written elsewhere that “Love is about the space, effort, and experience of making space for one another and ourselves to exist.” “Loving Speech: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13” in Eric Barreto, Jacob Myers, and Nikki Young, eds., In Tongues of Mortals and Angels: A De-constructive Theology of God-Talk in Acts and Corinthians (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2018), 99. 12 Cf. Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2010); Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997). The problematics and diagnostic limitations of western medicine also account in part for the rise in popularity of non-western and “complementary” medicines. 13 Catherine Malabou and Carolyn P. T. Shread. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 2.

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14 Cf. Tony Maglio, “Jill Soloway Cites ‘SNL’ Sketch ‘It’s Pat’ as ‘Awful Piece of Anti-Trans Propaganda’” The Wrap, August 4, 2017 www.thewrap.com/ jill-soloway-its-pat-snl-hateful-awful-anti-trans-propaganda/ (accessed August 17, 2020); Tim Kenneally, “Julia Sweeney Responds to Jill Soloway’s ‘It’s Pat’ Transgender Criticism” The Wrap, September 7, 2017 www.yahoo.com/ entertainment/julia-sweeney-responds-jill-soloway-pat-criticism-011555293. html (accessed August 17, 2020). 15 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 4, no. 6 (1981): 730. 16 Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2007) 86. 17 Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), ix.

Postlude

I hear Fred Hammond’s voice urging the choir into a harmonic chant. “Blessed (blessed) blessed (blessed)” over and over before the verse or the chorus even begins. When he starts, they fall into a seamless call and response, bringing their voices into a rhythm and melody that moves through muscle memory. Their dialogical exchange of one word bears multiple meanings: Can you say blessed? Yes. Is everyone blessed? Yes. How blessed are you? Blessed. Full stop. The chants become the backbone of the song—a harmonious percussion that moves it forward. Eventually, the chorus emerges, answering a question embedded in Fred Hammond’s series of calls: We’re blessed in the city/we’re blessed in the fields/we’re blessed when we come and when we go… The song, as a musical alarm, sets things in motion, and my body knows that the ritual is starting. My partner goes into the guest bathroom—our temporary and makeshift laboratory—to get everything ready. I move to put ice cubes into a small jar that we’ve demoted (or elevated, perhaps?), and one of us takes our homemade heating pad (a sock filled with rice) to the microwave. We both return to our en suite-turned-holy place and set out one gauze pad, an alcohol swab, and a hand towel. She picks up the syringe, and following her cue, I grab one cube of ice. As we listen to the song, with the choir at its climax, she draws a circle on one side of my hipass. Then, we both proceed in seemingly opposite processes of alchemy. On great mornings, we smile (wordlessly) while she warms the oil in the syringe by rolling it between her palms, and I rub the ice cube on my skin. Sometimes, I have a hard time staying within the circle, but she directs my hand and encourages me to keep going. When the spot on my body is as cold as I can get it and the oil in the syringe is as warm and thin as she can muster, my partner cleans the iced area with an alcohol swab. I fan my hip-ass for a few seconds and then lean over, looking as far away as I can. She bends down with her face mere inches away from my skin, and… prick. The needle goes in smoothly, and the oil seeps into my body. My partner pulls out, and immediately hugs me and rubs my back. We tell each other how great the other did while she massages our hand towel-wrapped heating pad over the injection site. As she massages the oil into my body, she also massages in

124  Postlude hope. We breathe that hope in together and let out anxieties and fears. Even when there is bleeding or twinges of pain, we know something more than us is guiding the process, letting us feel its presence through and with our bodies. In recent months, it has been through this process—in the hands of my love, my partner, and my best friend and through the beautifully jarring and occasionally painful holy prick—that I know God. I come from a people who know God through a serious of simultaneous realities. On one hand there is the knowing that comes through contemplative silence. It is the space where quietude and the strength of belief sustain people, keep them comforted, and remind them of one another’s stories—testimonies—of deliverance, survival, and joy. On the other hand, my people rejoice with and through noise. It is the clapping of hands, the stomping of feet, the shouting of voices, the utterances of glossolalia, and the harmonies lifted that keep people in faith of God’s presence. For me, all of these illustrate body-knowledge. This body-knowledge acts as an erotic theological episteme. That is, the knowing that comes through the body and senses produces, or arguably reaffirms, a knowledge of divine presence that comes not by way of reason and theological projection. Instead, it is a knowing that draws on the sacred movement of breath, ruah, and flesh. It is the erotic—intentionally pleasure-filled and choice-oriented—showing up of God through breaths and skin and flesh and heat and song and chants and even in the sacred choreographies of progesterone shots. This body-knowledge works as a collaborative process in which our bodies know things, remember things, allow things that our minds might not be able to fathom. The body-knowledge makes room for a sacred remembering: the creative process is always and already queer, subversive, and confrontational. It is a reminder that we can transform our world(s) and realities through processes of creation and that doing so is a way of participating in the holy work of God. If this is an essay about queertheology, then here is the queer thing I’d like to say about God: God seems to be present in the most mundane parts of life. And, it is in the recognition of those mundane elements as sacred that we find ourselves attuned to and able to access a God of possibility. Inasmuch as we make meaning from experience and story, we create narratives about God. This is anthropological theology. Yet, when we release God from the limits of our experience, taking those only as instances of connection and knowing that comes through our senses, then we have the capacity to learn about God in our lives and in our flesh. The queertheological element, here, is feeling more grounded in a partial knowing that leads to possibility than in a full knowing based on controlled stability. As my partner and I participate in a baby-making process, it is the confrontation with an ability to fully control that provides a basis for being open to a God of possibility. God’s creation of the world—including humanity—is a masterclass in faith. It is an example of producing something wholly unfinished and hoping that it thrives. It is a means of letting go while remaining

Postlude  125 invested. It is a process of turning away from a normative end and instead recognizing each moment as a potential-filled beginning. What has been more and more evident to us through our baby-making process is that creating life is queer, hard work. It seems silly to only discover or acknowledge that now, but that is the absolute truth for me. If the work of queerness is to simultaneously destabilize, denaturalize, and confront the narratives of progressive sex/gender/sexuality as the essential and foundational quality of life and life-making, then our baby-making process is absolutely queer. The need for imagination and hope and investment and resignation—all at the same time—is so emotionally taxing that I find it nearly impossible to engage. Yet, those same affective postures allow for the physical elements to take place in a more palatable way. The amount of shots, vaginal invasions, hormone suppression and invigoration, and more require affective mobility and agility. But what makes this process queer is not that we are two women; rather, it is that we are doing the queer work of disentangling the process of life-construction from a normative, cis-hetero-reality. The process of creating and establishing new life is no more heteronormative than the alchemy of turning dust into flesh by blowing on it. By recognizing the miraculous, scientific, body-derived, love-filled, time-sensitive, and other generative elements in the process of life creation, my partner and I confront and de-naturalize the narrative of baby-making that emerges from and reproduces heteronormativity. And, in so doing, we articulate the holy presence and incapturability of God’s work in that process.

Index of names and subjects

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. accountability 12, 25, 107 affect 8, 26, 38, 41, 55, 62, 100, 107, 125; and communication 18–19; and desire 55, 63; and knowing/ epistemology 93, 112 Agamben, Giorgio 17–18 agency: divine 27; moral 8–9, 53; sexual 81 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) 24, 60, 66n17 AIDS/HIV epidemic 12, 22–24, 33n12, 46, 60, 66n17, 67; and COVID-19 12, 67, 70; as punishment 23–24, 60 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 44, 79 ancestors 12, 19–20, 26, 30–32, 37; listening to 20, 30, 32; see also holy ghosts Aquinas, St. Thomas 54 Aristotle 10, 16n11, 115–116 asexuality 106; of God 97–98 attention 9, 20, 30, 47, 99–108, 113, 116, 119–121; see also virtue Augustine 13, 53–54, 58, 87 Beamon, Benae vii, 15, 62–63, 71, 73–74 being: embodied 50, 54–55, 59–61, 64, 79, 112; queer 14, 24; in oneself 13, 27, 50, 111; see also interbeing; ontology belonging 41, 45, 63, 93, 113 Bentley, Gladys 80–83, 85 binaries 26–27, 52, 55, 86, 107; of sex and gender 25, 44, 50, 83, 91–92, 112; see also essentialism; hierarchy blackness 9, 35, 42–43, 72, 99, 104, 119; and ancestors 19–20, 31, 37;

and bodies 54, 61, 82, 106, 114; black queerness 35, 37, 62; black transwomen 24, 33n12; black womanhood 80–82; of Jesus 79, 85, 88n5 body/flesh: as virtue 49–51, 58–59, 64; body-knowledge 63–64, 111–112, 119–120, 123–124; bodyspirit 58–60, 64; body-spirit bifurcation 13, 50, 52–7, 61, 64, 91; denigration of 13, 40, 50, 53–57, 61, 65n4, 82–83, 95; divine 27, 29, 53–55, 61–64, 77–79, 84–85, 98; see also pleasure; sex; spirit bothering 42, 44, 103, 111 boundary 26–28, 92, 105; of life and death 20, 26, 31–32; of skin 51, 56; transgression 20, 25–28, 31–32, 86, 95 breath 5, 32, 37, 73, 92; as life 13, 17–18, 30, 49, 59; as spirit and matter 27, 52–53, 55, 58–59, 124 Brown, Peter 84 burning bush 28–29, 119 Butler, Judith 18, 33n5, 33n6, 83 Butler, Lee 56 Cannon, Katie Geneva 9, 121n2 Carroll, Lewis 17 categories: challenged 112, 119–121; gendered 102, 106–107; identity 113–116; of living and dead 20–21, 27; see also essentialism choreography/cartography 12, 44–47, 124 Christian supremacy 7, 12, 80 closet 5, 32, 68, 85, 87, 102

128 Index of names and subjects colonialism: and ancestors 20–21, 31; and race 12, 21, 43, 86, 116; and the body 54, 59, 93–94, 114; colonial relations 43, 70, 92, 100; and sex and gender norms 7–8, 37, 86–87, 94, 116; see also empire; racism/white supremacy; slavery coming out/testimony 6, 12, 31, 39–42, 44, 62, 104; see also closet communicability/intelligibility 18; divine 28–29; of the body 51, 54, 58, 87; with the dead 20, 29 communion 55, 63; Eucharist 30 community 11, 35, 63, 93, 99–101, 106–108; church/religious 13, 49, 71; community recognition 25, 40, 113; queer 14, 45, 69, 104, 119; see also belonging; communion; family; individuality; relation; space Cone, James 88n5 Copeland, M. Shawn 61 COVID-19 vii, 5, 12, 14, 67, 69–70, 73 creativity/creation: divine 27–29, 58–61, 98, 124; queer 12, 34, 36–38, 43–47, 74 Crenshaw, Kimberle 108n4 Daly, Mary 44, 102 death drop/dip 26, 38, 49–50, 62, 65n1 death/the dead 12; and life 17–21; as boundary 25–32; black death 21, 31, 73, 86, 88n5, 103; Jesus/incarnation 24–25, 27–29; queer death 22–24, 46, 54, 60, 86, 92; talking to 19–20, 24–25, 29–32; the deceased 19–21; see also violence desire: embodied 41, 49, 50, 55, 57, 63, 70, 84, 93, 94, 110; God’s desire 27, 29, 62–63, 97; queer desire 41, 54, 93, 108, 111–112; rightly ordered desire 13, 28, 53–55, 87; see also eroticism difference 26, 51–52, 68, 100–103, 106–108, 114–118 Diop, Birago 18, 30 dirt 61, 64, 94, 97, 107 discourse: academic 36; queer 10, 26; virtue 9–10 Douglas, Mary 61 drag/cross-dressing 13, 36, 44, 48n12, 49, 62; as scandal 75, 80–83 empire: Christian 7, 80; Roman 77–80, 83–84, 88n5, 118

epistemology/knowledge 14, 31, 40, 111, 113; bodily/erotic 50, 60–64, 110–112, 119–120, 123–124; queer transformative 110, 112–121; Western/Greek 113–115, 117; see also body/flesh erasure 12, 25, 36, 41, 46–47, 60, 92, 102–103; see also death eroticism: and wisdom/knowledge 50, 63–64, 119, 124; as virtue 13, 91; homoeroticism 47, 69, 86; see also desire; sex/sexuality essentialism 9–10, 113–117; see also categories; identity ethics 6, 8–10, 18, 80, 91, 96; moral philosophy 8–10; queer ethics 11, 24, 30, 51, 53, 61, 63 exiles 6, 9, 13, 18, 28, 30, 32, 50, 108 family 2–3, 15, 23, 95; biological/ nuclear 13–14, 43, 63, 93, 103; chosen 14, 31, 38, 43–47; family values 8, 54; heteronormative/ patriarchal 13–14, 39, 43, 82, 91–93, 111; of Jesus 96–97; queer structures 31, 35, 43, 71, 76, 43, 93, 106; slavery/colonization 43; see also ancestors; patrilineality fidelity 104–106, 108; see also virtue Finney, Nikki 112 flourishing 8, 10–11, 29, 63–64 fluidity 63, 113; gender fluidity 85, 91, 101; queer fluidity 10, 102 Foucault, Michel 92, 100, 104, 113 freedom 9, 31, 61, 100, 112; of expression 35, 103, 108; sexual 94; see also liberation future 25, 63; of open possibility 6, 40, 42, 74, 102; telos 10; see also hope; time Gadsby, Hannah 63 gay bars 34, 41, 69, 104, 112 gender 7, 40, 83–84; femininity 39, 94, 102; gender queer/non-conforming 6, 12–13, 37, 106; masculinity 21, 39, 69, 80–81, 84, 111; gender norms 38–39, 81–83, 90–92, 104, 116–117; see also binaries; heteronormativity; identity; sex/sexuality; trans/ transgender Gerestant, Mildred (Dred) 43 God: and bodies/sexuality 54–57, 59–64, 84, 97–98; as Father 94,

Index of names and subjects 129 96–97, 102; judgement of 28, 54–55; redemption of 7, 11, 98; relation to world 11, 26–29, 53, 56–57, 59, 98, 119, 124; see also creativity; incarnation; Jesus good, the 9, 11, 42, 47, 115; see also virtue Gumbs, Alexis Pauline 35–37 Hall, Kim 112 Hallowell, Irving 120 Hammond, Fred 123 Hanh, Thich Nhat 18 Hartman, Saidiya 14 healthcare 24, 57, 60, 93–94; health insurance 68, 103; sexual health 67, 70, 96, 103, 105, 109; see also medicine heteronormativity: and decency/ respectability 69, 71, 73, 76, 82, 91–92, 100, 108; and whiteness/ racism 6–7, 40, 43, 82, 85–86, 94, 98–100; and death 24, 39, 42, 86, 92, 107; as pseudo-virtue 6, 10, 44, 90, 93–99, 105; queer resistance to 12–14, 35, 38, 42–43, 85, 91, 98, 125; relations within 14, 43, 85, 90–93, 100, 103, 107, 113; surveillance/discipline of 6, 39, 42, 81, 86, 91, 93, 105; see also binaries; essentialism; gender; marriage; naturalism heteropatriarchy/cis-heteropatriarchy 6, 7, 15, 24, 116; and gender norms 81, 85–86, 91–92, 102; as pseudodivine 94–98; as racist 6, 50, 86, 94, 100, 104; relational structures within 6, 13–14, 81, 91–93, 100, 107; Christian 6, 13, 44, 50; sexual values of 14, 44, 50, 86, 95, 99, 103–105; see also binaries heteronormativity; oppression hierarchy 91; body-spirit 13, 50, 52–54, 61; social 18, 26, 77–78, 83, 85, 94, 99, 117 holy ghosts 17, 20, 52, 60; see also ancestors home 45, 49, 71, 73–74, 87 homelessness 24, 45 homophobia 111; internalized 39, 65n4, 81, 100; see also shame hope 44, 63, 105, 124; see also future Hopkins, Gerard Manley 102–103 Hughes, Langston 80

humility 12, 47, 59, 99, 102–104, 108; see also virtue humor 13, 87, 105, 108 identity 56, 61, 92, 101–103, 107, 112–119, 121n8; see also labels imagination 38, 40, 75, 91, 98, 106, 120, 125; fantastic hegemonic imagination 77, 106 imago dei 38 improvisation 75–76, 80, 83, 87 incarnation 26–29, 53, 95–98; see also scandal individuality 102, 113–114, 116–117; and community/collective 8–11, 100–101, 106–108 interbeing 18, 32 intersex 83–84, 86, 115 Isapo-Muxika/Crowfoot 17 isness 35–36, 40 Jesus 53, 85, 95–96; and criminality 77, 79–80, 88n5, 118; and divinity 76–79; as boundary-crossing 24–28, 118–119; see also incarnation; scandal Jordan, June 41, 48n18 La Cage Aux Folles/The Birdcage 24, 39–40 labels 107, 117–120; see also identity liberation 7, 28, 31, 44, 60, 119; liberation theology 79, 85; see also freedom livability 21, 24–25, 29, 35, 73 Lizzo 60 Lorde, Audre 36, 47; erotic knowledge 63–64, 111, 119 love 2–4, 12, 41, 60, 65, 87, 90–91; see also self/subject Luscious 42, 111 MacIntyre, Alasdair 9–10 Magnus, Albertus 53 Malabou, Catherine 116 Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda 19 marriage: heterosexual 41, 84–85, 96–97, 103–104; same-sex/gay 3, 67–68, 76, 92–4 Mary, mother of Jesus 96–97 masks 5, 23; as closet doors 13, 68 Mbembé, J. Achille 21 Mbiti, John 15n3

130  Index of names and subjects medicine: and violation of black bodies 114; Greek and Roman 83–84; Western 114, 121n12; see also healthcare Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive 35 Moby Dick 56, 65n12 Molinaro, Edouard 39–40 monogamy 14, 85, 91–93, 103 morality 8–10, 33n5, 98; and body-knowledge 111–112, 120; heteronormative morality 13–14, 44, 65n4, 85, 98; moral adventure 12, 42, 44; see also ethics Morrison, Toni 54; Beloved 60 Moses 28–29, 119 murder 5, 40, 42, 46, 60, 86, 111, 117; homicide 24 Murdoch, Iris 9–10 narrative/storytelling 19, 59, 88n1; biblical 28–29, 77; Christian 10, 28, 78, 85, 96–99, 118; queer 35–36, 40, 92, 124–125 naturalism 10, 20, 26, 83–84, 91; denaturalize 26, 113, 125; theology 56; see also essentialism; medicine nautical star 34–35, 41 Nussbaum, Martha 8, 10 ontology 14, 79; of essence 116, 118–120; of the accident 116–117; see also body/flesh openness 113, 119–120; see also virtue oppression 12–13, 26, 28, 44, 50, 97–99, 102, 111 orgasm 13, 64 orneriness 111–112, 120 patrilineality 13, 94–97, 100; divine 96–97, 119; see also heteropatriarchy; purity Paul, apostle 77–80, 84–85 performativity 13, 39–40, 49, 62, 75, 80–83, 99–100, 121n8 persistence/neverthelessness 6, 35–36, 40, 44, 48n14, 60, 87, 111–112; see also resistance perversion 6, 7, 12, 25, 92, 117 Plato 115 pleasure: as virtue 12, 51–52, 55, 87, 101–106; commodification 91, 103; condemnation 54, 94

polyamory 14, 37; see also monogamy poverty 24, 47, 80, 93 Pride 45, 59, 69, 103–104 promiscuity 99, 104–108; see also virtue Puar, Jasbir 77, 108n4 purity 24; divine 57, 79, 97–99; ethnic 95, 100, 104–105; of bodies 61, 64, 97; sexual 94–95, 108; see also dirt; sanitization; spirit; virginity queerness 6; as concept 15n1, 27, 64; as disruptive/resistant 13, 25–26, 49, 85, 87, 125; as source of theology 9–13, 38, 91, 112; oppression of 6, 13, 49, 57; queer experience 9, 12, 21, 36, 62; queer theory 9, 26, 30, 85, 112; see also body; desire; gender; heteronormativity; queertheology; sex/sexuality; trans/transgender; virtue queertheology 6, 10–11, 15n1, 124; affirmations 61, 63–64, 57, 98–99; rejections 13, 50, 53, 57–59; sources for 20, 25–26, 28, 82 race 7, 13, 61, 83–84, 86, 105, 113, 116–117; gendered 40, 50–54, 61; racialization 12–13, 21, 36, 40, 77, 88n5, 107; see also racism/white supremacy racism/white supremacy 5–8, 47, 51, 56, 65n4, 86, 93, 100, 103–104, 118; see also slavery; violence; whiteness rape/sexual assault 24, 42, 54, 67, 104, 111, 117 redemption 6–8, 10–12; of bodies 52, 54–56; of God 11, 98; of queer lives/ experience 100, 105, 120; of sex 56, 98, 105–106 relation: cosmic/divine 11, 18–20, 25–32, 55, 61; heteropatriarchal 6, 13–14, 90–94, 97–100, 107; of life and death 18–19, 24; queer 13–14, 43, 69–70, 98–108; right relation 14, 59; see also family; humility; promiscuity resistance: and bodies 57, 59, 84, 112; creative 35–36, 80; queer strategies for 13, 46–47, 91, 106; see also persistence/neverthelessness respectability 81–83, 96, 100 responsibility 14, 25, 93–94, 103; divine 56–57

Index of names and subjects 131 righteousness: body-righteousness 59; divine 79; queer 47, 55; relational 64, 91 ritual 30, 35, 41, 43–45, 62, 123; and ancestors 19–20, 29 Robertson, Lisa Ann 56 Ryan, Kay 102 Saiving, Valerie 102 sanitization 93, 95, 107; of the divine 57, 79, 96–97, 99 scandal 13, 75–76, 80–87; of the cross 55, 76–80, 85 Schneider, Laurel: “What Race Is Your Sex?” 40; Beyond Monotheism 122n16 self/subject 10, 21, 26; as body 26, 57–58; Godself 98, 119; love/ affirmation of 40–41, 45, 60, 65n4, 99–100; moral 8–9, 98; see also identity; individuality Seneca the Younger 50 sex/sexuality 26, 45, 85; and Christianity 7, 13; as controlled/ punished 13–14, 22–23, 50, 53–54, 92–94, 96, 98; as pollutant 7, 61, 94–97; redemption of 8, 13, 45, 50–51, 55–56, 63–64, 87, 98–99, 105–107, 112; safe sex 67, 70; sex work 1, 46, 67, 103; sexual health 67, 70, 96, 103, 105, 109; sexual outsiders 6–7, 12, 24, 28, 34, 36, 38, 41–43, 79, 105, 107; see also desire; eroticism; gender; queerness; rape/ sexual assault Shakespeare, William 30 shame 63, 97, 99–100, 107; see also homophobia Shange, Ntozake 65 Shepard, Matthew 86 Shotwell, Alexis 112, 120 signification 9, 54, 75–76, 88n1, 93; of Jesus 77, 85, 88n5; see also stereotype Sims, James Marion 114 sin 7, 44, 54, 58, 83, 95, 102 Skeets, Jake 111 skin 13, 51–52, 56, 58–59 slavery 20–21, 31, 43, 51, 54, 59; and the body 60, 82, 104, 114 Smith, Danez 38, 41, 48n12, 111 song 58, 123–124; reading like 37 space 20, 41, 67–74, 119; making spaces 41, 43–46, 104, 113, 121n11

Spillers, Hortense 82 spirit 30, 37, 51–52, 58, 60, 84; and matter 27, 52–5, 61; Holy Spirit 26; queer spiritual practices/communities 7, 11–12, 29, 41, 45, 51, 62, 104; two-spirit 31; see also body/flesh; breath; holy ghosts stereotype 75, 80, 106; see also signification suicide 39–40, 42, 65, 75 survivance 35–36, 38, 41, 47, 47n4 Sweasey, Peter 62 Tertullian 53 theology: Christian 6–8, 11, 26–28, 53–61, 79, 83–85, 88n7, 94; necrotheology 28; liberation theology 79, 85; womanist/feminist theology 9, 29, 48n19, 54, 60, 85, 102; see also queertheology Till, Emmett 86 time 50; as linear 19–20, 29–31; the past 19, 31; see also future Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha 37 Tongue 17–18, 20, 32 touch 13, 25, 51, 56, 59, 65, 69, 87, 111–112 Townes, Emilie vii, 15, 33n9, 35, 67, 111; fantastic hegemonic imagination 77, 106 trans/transgender 6, 31, 86; transmen 106, 111; transwomen 24, 42, 59, 103, 106 transformation: divine 59, 79, 119; creative 10, 38, 124; epistemological 14, 46, 111–113, 116–117 violence: anti-queer/trans 13, 24, 38–39, 46, 54, 86; anti-black 5, 73, 77, 86, 103, 114; see also murder; rape/sexual assault virginity 95–98; Mary 27, 96–97; see also purity virtue 6–12, 44, 115; of bodies/desire 13, 50, 59; of creativity 13, 36–38, 47; of queer epistemologies 14, 113, 116; of queer relations 14, 91, 98–100, 108; of scandal 13, 78–80, 86–87; of talking to the dead 25; pseudo-virtues 7, 90–91, 93–98, 107; virtue theory 9; see also attention; ethics; fidelity; good; humility; openness; promiscuity Vizenor, Gerald 35–36, 47–48n4

132

Index of names and subjects

voguing 26, 29, 49, 62, 64, 65n2, 68; see also drag/cross-dressing Walker, Alice 48n19 Wallace, Julia Roxanne/Sangodare Akinwale 35–37 Washington, Bryan 69 whiteness 44, 64, 81; and heteropatriarchy 9, 43, 79, 113, 117; and womanhood 82, 85, 104; see also heteropatriarchy; racism/white supremacy Wilcox, Melissa 44–45

Wilde, Oscar 86 wisdom: erotic 50; moral 9; of exiles 6, 32, 108 women/womanhood 44, 82; black womanhood 9, 61, 80–82, 106; control of 13, 50, 53–54, 84, 94–96, 102–104; white womanhood 82, 86, 104 Young, Thelathia Nikki 36, 57, 121n11 Ziegler, Kortney 81–2

Index of biblical references

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Genesis 2:7 59 Exodus Book 28–29 3:6 28 3:13–14 119 Psalms 139:13–15 49, 53 Proverbs Book 17 18:21 17–18 Matthew 27:14a 118 Mark 15:5a 118 Luke Book 77 23:9 118

John 3:16 29 7:53–8:11 95 11:4 24 11:23 24 11:43 24 18:37 118 19:9b 118 1 Corinthians Book 77–80, 84–85 1:18–25 77–80, 84–85 1:23 75 7:9 84–85 13:1–13 121n11 Galatians Book 84–85 3:25–28 84 1 Peter 4:1–2, 6 55 Revelation 1:18 41