#queering god

Be lying down with me.

“The Queer subject is nomadic, unsettled and does not have a sedentary vocation. Her boundaries of affiliations are constantly on the move, thus destabilising the settling ideals of Christian ethics.” (44)

“Consider the theological text as a libertine theatre of desires. Consider how a libertine epistemology could inform our present reflections by confronting us with other ways of knowing, of confronting different bodies in unusual terms and how these ways of understanding may lead us into a Queer theological praxis for our times. The point is that we cannot think a Queer God without understanding different sexual ways of knowing. Today sexual subcultures, and specifically fetish communities, not only know sexually differently but have that capacity for nomadic knowledge which we require in theology. That is to say the place of embraces and amorous gestures in theology fulfils a hermeneutical function.” (52)

“The historical discussion on the kenotic or ‘letting go’ process of God in Christ is basically in debt to a grammatical approach to theological reflection which has only recently been questioned. In theology learning about God has sometimes been a grammatical art and in the particular we are discussing now, a study of style in power, the dynamics of punctuation of persona (divine and human) in the theological reflection and the approved conjugation of actions or divine verbs. Recent modern work in the study of languages has demonstrated the difficulties and sometimes even the futility of the grammatical school of teaching foreign languages, but theology has yet to learn this truth. Instead of emphasizing a grammatical approach in the process of teaching and learning foreign languages, ethnographic methods...have been considered more effective. Instead of learning punctuation, students begin their learning process by active observation of people interrelating amongst themselves in everyday life. Could this be also a Queer way to re-discover God, by active observation of God’s polyamorous relationships as in the figure of the Trinity?” (56)

“However, the most interesting insight in all this may be the displacement of sexual theological knowledge, in the sense that the heterosexually disembowelled Trinitarians can embody lesbianism, while lesbians at the gate can embody the knowledge of bisexuals or transgendered people. This would mean that all these suppressed, displaced embodiments of knowledge could feel at home in the Trinity, just as the Trinity should feel at home in gay bars and S/M scenes, displacing temporary hegemonies and allowing a real plurality of religious experiences and theological practices by giving hospitality to strangers, in the most radical way.” (75)

“That story is well known, but we are going to read the unknown story as though it were gossip circulating around the gay bars. We are going to read the unknown in Sodom in the company of the traversing themes of death, waste (as in sexualities beyond the ethos of reproduction) and also irony. Consider the biblical story. Two men visit the city of Sodom. Their status in relation to divinity is unclear: men of God, or ‘angels’...Their presence brings infallibility to the sexual textual exegesis of terror...Like many visitors before them, they had apparently chosen to spend the night sleeping in the town square. That place was a site of hospitality in itself, since it was common for travellers to sleep there if there was no other place to stay. However, Lot, who happened to be at the gate when these men arrived, observed the law of hospitality by insisting that they come to his home. He broke one rule of hospitality (town hospitality) to impose his own. Perhaps Lot was accustomed to going to the gate to check on travellers arriving in Sodom for whatever purpose. Perhaps he liked to invite such men to his house. This, of course, we do not know. Later that day some people from the town went to Lot’s house and demanded ‘to know’ the men. Whether this use of the verb ‘to know’ is figurative speech for homosexual intercourse or not has been debated for some years. The most progressive of biblical exegetes prefer nowadays to conclude from the attitude of these men that it was the ‘violation of hospitality law’ which constituted the sin of Sodom. Thus a Sodomite would be the person who refused to have a guest room at home and that it is this practice (rather than a sexual culture) which defines the biblical meaning of ‘a Sodomite’.” (84)

“At any one of the many BDSM conventions or dungeons that one might find in any major American city, the paraphernalia of bondage, domination, submission, and sadomasochism intermingles with the paraphernalia of lived Christianity, past and present. A naked, blinded, long-haired man with this arms bound to two columns, tormented by the memory of a stereotypical Delilah, might be a biblical scene; it might also be a BDSM scene in a local hotel convention center. A priest in the confessional might be practicing certain unsavory methods of reconciliation with his penitent, but the setting of the confessional might be more nightclub than cathedral. A bloody crucifixion scene might take place, but do the blood and sweat that land on those who lay prostrate at the foot of that cross wash their sins away and free them from the powers of death and hell? What does it mean to reproduce these things in the dungeon, and what happens to the meaning of the original scenes that they are copying, the antitypes of these tableaux of torture and violation? And how does any of this relate to that other cross, on the hill of Calvary outside the city, to which--some of us have been told--we must send up our sufferings, with much rejoicing?” (148)