Feminist Theology

http://fth.sagepub.com Theology as a Sexual Act?

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Theology as a Sexual Act?

ABSTRACT
The article discusses the challenge of Indecent Theology to Latin American liberation theology and feminist theology in unmasking their implicit support for the binary, heterosexual norms of society. Althaus-Reid argues that theology is a sexual act, and provides rich metaphors and language for a vibrant sexual political theology. Her work undresses conventional Christian symbols by queering the intersection of theology, sexuality, and politics.

Theology is a sexual act...Theologians, therefore, are nothing else but sexual performers who need to take many ethical and sometimes partisan sexual decisions when reflecting on God and humanity, because theology is never innocuous or sexually innocent or neutral.
Marcella

Althaus-Reid

With such

bold assertion, Marcella Althaus-Reid

challenges all theo-

hide behind Theologians the abstract discourses of Gods revelation, Jesus humanity, or the kingdom of God as if they have nothing to do with sexuality. She undresses theology from heterosexuality and her targets include not only the dominant white male theologians, but also liberation theologians and feminist theologians from the North and the South. I want to reflect for a moment on the claim that all theology is sexual for it has far-reaching implications for the task of theology and the role of theologians. What are the reasons for such a claim? What is to be gained if we view theology in such a way? Coming from a Chinese background, my first reaction to Marcellas provocative statement was: Is there something inherent in Christianity that makes its systematic reflection sexual? What about Jewish theology, Islamic theology, or the teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism? Can we say that they are sexual too? While I am not competent to comment on all these traditions, I submit that Marcellas statement puts into sharp focus the deeply sexual
can no more

logians to come out of their closets.

1. Marcella Althaus-Reid, IndecentTheology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 87.

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150
nature of the

religions. For example, in Confucianism, the five cardinal relationships include that between the husband and the wife, and the family is often taken as the root metaphor of society. Taoism believes that the universe is governed by the interplay between the yin and the yang, and harnessing the energy of yin and yang through sexual activities has long been regarded as paramount in the pursuit of immortality and in replenishing the essence of the body. In sharp contrast, Buddhism views sexual desire as an obstacle to enlightenment and the lust of the flesh as a cause of suffering and a failure to recognize the impermanence of the true self. While scholars of comparative religions may want to consider queering
Judaism, Islam, Confucianism or Buddhism, Marcella has done her share

worlds

outing Christian theology. She gives several reasons why Christian theology is sexual. First, the fundamental symbols of Christianity, such as the father and the son, the Holy Family, the male Jesus and the Virgin Mary are inherently sexual. Secondly, she observes:all the concepts of sin and grace seem to be unendingly tangled around the theologians gaze at other peoples beds, bathrooms or sofas.2 Thirdly, systematic theology has for a long time upheld an omnipresent heterosexual system supported by dogmas and religious teachings. Fourthly, theologians tend to remain deeply in their closet and their failure to confront the realities of their sexual life results in disembodied theo-ideological abstractions or in outright condemnation of sexuality.3 She aptly cites Paul Tillichs sadomasochist practices as an example. If we grant that Marcellas observation of the development of Western Christian theology is convincing, we may still want to ask whether theolin

ogy should be sexual or whether we need some alternative visions of the discipline. Such a question is raised not out of erotophobia, but for the sake of stretching our theological imagination. Much of Marcellas critique is based on the overly anthropocentric nature of theology - the preoccupation of human nature and destiny, the sexual overtones in the doctrine of sin, and the belief of the incarnation of God in a sexed-body Jesus. Ecological theology has pushed us to use new language and paradigms to speak about God and creation so that it will be more sensitive to environmental concerns and less anthropocentric. I am not suggesting that a more cosmological-oriented Christianity will be asexual or antisexual, but I want to push us to think how a sexual theology will look if it is less anthropocentric.

2.

3.

Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 88. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 88.

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Let me now come back to Marcellas charge that all theology is sexual and discuss what are its ramifications and what kind of paradigm shifts it would require. Marcella has rightly pointed out sexual theology is different from a theology of or about sex. Theology carries with it sexual assumptions whether we are talking about God, Christ or the Spirit, even when it is not specifically addressing human sexuality. She reclaims the centrality of lust, sexual desire, fantasy and sexual experience in our conceptualization of the world and God. Hence, sexual theology is not just the specific concern of queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered theologians - as it is often assumed to be - but a project that all theologians, whether consciously or unconsciously, participate in. What would the traditional doctrines-creation, revelation, Christ, atonement, Church, sacrament, eschatology - look like if we were to incorporate Marcellas insights? For example, how shall we undress the heterosexual myth in the creation of Adam and Eve in the Genesis stories? What kind of eschatology would we envisage when the new heaven and new earth include also sexual liberation and erotic celebration of the communion of all

beings?
A sexual theology requires the use of new language, metaphors, images and symbols. Just as liberation theology has introduced the concept of the preferential option for the poor, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the poor as subject of history, and Jesus as the liberator into our theological vocabulary, sexual theology will include new jargons when theology interfaces with sexual discourse. Indecent Theology has done a fair share in introducing some of them, such as doing theology without underwear, locating the G(od) spot, French kissing God, vanilla Christianity, the Bi/Christ, virginal liberationist, the Phallic Word of God, Mary the drag queen and the cross-dressed Jesus. Such powerful imagery subverts the traditional decent rhetoric of theology and may indeed be labeled as perverse in some conservative circles. Since sex has the dimension of fun, risk and transgression, sexual theology pays attention to expressions and performances that subvert the status quo, as in the case of drag, street carnival and theatre, when people release their energy and become euphoric even in times of political control. Marcella charges that liberation theology remains trapped in the binary and dualistic construction of gender and heterosexual norms. She first cut her teeth in theology by studying liberation theology in Argentina, and her book represents an attempt in bringing liberation theology into dialogue with queer theory. Liberation theology may have deviated from traditional theology in terms of its solidarity with the poor, but it continues to perpetuate the same sexual hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality found in most theologies. She argues that much of liberation

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theology is decent-meaning that it supports the sexual codification of society and heterosexual norms. She also observes that even feminist liberation theology tends to accept this codification when talking about human anthropology and sexuality. Although Third World feminist theologians have spoken about gender oppression, they are less prone to talk about sex and the sexuality of women. Thus, liberation theologians portray images of Christ and Mary that are decent and safe, and do not disrupt conventional sexual norms. For instance, Jesus can be seen as a social revolutionary, but only as an asexual or celibate man. As for the Virgin Mary, feminist liberation theologians have tried to affirm her
motherhood and referred to her as the mother of the poor, without disrupting the accepted role of women as mothers.4 These writers also tend to be obsessed with discussions of Marys virginity, as if her virginity must be somehow maintained or rescued. In this way, liberation theology may be economically subversive, but it is still decent and acceptable to the theological establishment. Her other criticisms of male liberation theology includes the reliance on the grand narratives of liberation, the homogenization of the poor, and the oversight of other indigenous religious practices outside Christianity. Marcella challenges her female liberationist colleagues to be more daring to talk about sex as in sexual acts, sexual intercourse and sexual passion. When we survey Third World feminist theologians discourse about sex and sexuality, we can see that they are mostly concerned about the cultural-religious marginalization and socio-economic oppression of women. For example, recurring themes in African feminist theology include the issues of polygamy, the pollution of blood, widowhood and rituals of mourning. Asian feminist theologies have condemned sex tourism and the fact that Asia has become the brothel of the world. When womens sexual stories have been used, they are narrated to support the claim that women are victims of multiple oppressions. Marcellas book, however, reclaims oppressed men and women as sexual beings: they want bread, but they want pleasure too. While the church and theologians may feel able to tackle issues relating to people who are poor, they are most reluctant to face the fact that the poor are also sexual beings. That women are sexual beings is a taboo subject hidden in the closet. Recovering the sexual pleasure of oppressed women is a transgressive act, for it has the potential to expose both the sexual and political binary and hierarchal nature of the Church.

4.

See, e.g., Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary: Mother of

God, Mother

of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).

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Marcellas work offers new insights to my own work in the postcolonial critique of Christianity. She points out the crying need for queering postcolonial theories and criticism. Because of the heterosexist and patriarchal biases of some of the postcolonial theorists, the relation of homophobia and colonization is seldom fully explored. If postcolonial theory is concerned about the misrepresentation of indigenous cultures and the imposition of the civilized mission of the West, the relationship between homophobia, religious discourse and the colonial machine should be taken seriously. In the encounter between Christian and non-Western traditions, such as Native American cultures and Chinese culture, travelers and missionaries often observed what they described as abominable homoerotic behaviors and practices that they argued were condoned by the culture as a whole.5 Such behaviors were considered evidences of the debasement of these cultures, which desperately needed the tutelage of the West. When the term homosexuality was coined during the latter half of the nineteenth century, sexologist Havelock Ellis regarded male homosexual relationships as a widespread natural instinct among what he called the lower races.6 These missionaries and medical experts then hailed Victorian sexual repression as normal behavior and a true mark of the superiority of Christian culture. The English law that criminalized male homosexual behavior was then superimposed in the former British colonies, which often did not possess a legal discourse on sexual matters. The colonial legacy took an interesting twist in 1998 during the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion when some conservative African and Asian bishops decried homosexuality as abominable and a sign of the moral degeneration of Western Churches. The homophobia of Third World churches has led to drastic consequences. AIDS was initially misconstrued as a gay mens disease, and the churches did not pay sufficient attention to the rapid increase in HIV infection rates. The most common means of spreading HIV/AIDS in subSaharan Africa is through heterosexual intercourse and women account for 53 per cent of the cases. Some of the Third World churches refuse to admit that gay men, lesbians, bisexual and queer people exist in their midst and even push the government to legislate to discriminate against them. They have exerted pressure to drive queer people deeper into their

5. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 52; Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1-2. 6. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Arno, 1975 [1896]), p. 4.

Symonds,

Sexual Inversion

(New

York:

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154 closets. But gay and queer people have begun to organize in Argentina, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places and demand that their voices be heard. Another hidden issue on which the churches have been silent is the number of young boys and street children in poorer countries serving as prostitutes to satisfy the sexual craving of tourists from richer
countries.

Marcellas work will also open new avenues for analyzing the relation between Christs gender and sexuality and colonialism. During the struggle against colonialism and white hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s, male liberation theologians began to attack racism and poverty and to criticize white, European Christianity for its complicity in racial oppression and colonialism. The image of the Black Christ proposed by black liberation theologians demystifies the power behind the symbol of the white Christ while celebrating the beauty and dignity of the Black man. The image of Christ the liberator dispels the myth of a gentle, submissive and self-sacrificing Jesus, and imagines Jesus as someone who brings hope and emancipation to his people. The liberator can be imagined to be a masculinist fighter - in the person of a guerrilla, a revolutionary, or a political dissenter. What are missing, however, are the concomitant critiques of male dominance in society, and the patriarchal and heterosexual assumptions of Christianity. Marcellas analysis of the contest of manhood in the colonial setting helps to explain why Jesus assumes a masculinist image. She writes:
In colonial processes, patriarchalism has reinforced chains of oppression when the male colonial subjects felt that their maleness was diminished by the colonial masters... As part of the colonial Christian mytho-poetics, the male colonisers genderised their subjects as women, depriving them of the male status of their own patriarchal societies and therefore produced in them a reinforcement of heterosexual stereotypes.7

The liberation theologians have interpolated in the Christ figure the beauty and the strength of manhood that they feel have been threatened. Marcella observes that a Christ dressed as a Peruvian peasant can still be understood by and may even court the empathy of the theological establishment, because it subscribes to the same binary gender system. But Christ portrayed as the lesbian Xena, the warrior princess of the popular comic strip, would surely be seen as perverse and outrageous.8 By questioning the binary construction of gender, Marcella goes one step further than those white feminist theologians who are troubled by Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology , p. 172. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Outing Theology: Thinking Christianity Church-Closet, Feminist Theology 27 (2001), pp. 58-59.
7.

8.

out

of the

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155 and yet obsessed with the maleness of Christ. Her suggestions of the Bi/ Christ, a transvestite, a butch lesbian, a gay man9 lead us into theological obscenity, defined as dis-covering of grace and per/ version.l If these images are shocking to some of us, this only reveals the degree to which we have been indoctrinated by the patriarchal and heterosexual myth-making of the Church. If Christ is a subversive figure, Christ must transgress and disrupt the gender and sexual boundaries that dominant ideology has comfortably constructed. The sexuality of Christ, which Leo Steinberg says is the greatest taboo of Christianity, must be demythologized and exposed. The image of Christ as asexual, celibate and without sexual desire and passion separates Christ from the rest of humanity and from materiality and physicality. Such an abstract Christ, stripped of all the Jewish particularities, can be easily universalized and packaged as the savior of all the world. It is hypocritical and ironic that colonial Christianity preached about such an asexual Christ, while at the same time condoned sexual violence and rape during colonial conquest. Marcellas work on the intersection between sex, politics and theology is significant because she takes into serious consideration the integral relationship between the sex/ gender system and economic and political

Many male theologians have regarded socio-economic analyprimary concerns, while treating the issues of gender and as sexuality something private or affecting women only. But Marcella turns the argument upside-down by arguing that sexual ideology pervades economic and political theories and undergirds the epistemological foundations of theology, including liberation theology. Therefore, a social analysis that understands poverty only in economic terms and ignores genderized and sexual terms is not only incomplete, but mystifies the complex web of human relations that both constitute and sustain the social conditions that effectively keep people poor. While I greatly appreciate Marcellas work, I have some reservation about her use of the work of theologians in the North. She has repeatedly cited the works of Mary Daly, for example Dalys Gyn/Ecologyl2 without being aware of some of Dalys colonialist tendency in her represtructures.
ses as

their

sentation of Third World women as victims.13 While she uses the works
9. 10. 11.

Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 114. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 111.

Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christin Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1996), p. 219. 12. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology , pp. 146, 175. 13. See Kwok Pui-lan, Unbinding Our Feet: Saving Brown Women and Feminist Religious Discourse, in Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (eds.), Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 62-81.

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of queer theologians in the North, her work differs from theirs in that she consciously relates sexuality to political economy and to the suffering of the South. Her project is a sexual political theology, which she claims as both a continuation of liberation theology and a disruption of it.14 No one who has read her book closely will ever say again that sexuality is an issue for white, middle-class privileged theologians in the North, which does not concern the emancipation of the majority of the people in the world. By placing sexuality in the political and theological contexts of liberation, Marcella can call those gay and queer theologians into accountability when they perpetuate a vanilla sexual theology by separating sex from economic oppression and political dictatorship. As she rightly points out, sexuality has much to do with the globalized economic structures, political terror and violence, as well as colonial and imperial interests. I also hope that Marcella will enter into deeper dialogue with other Third World feminist theologians. Except for her critique of Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemers book on Mariology, she has seldom discussed feminist theological texts both from Latin America and other contexts. While she criticizes her male colleagues in Latin America for writing for the consumption of the white academy, her heavy reliance on white queer theory and theology and continental philosophy may also be open to similar criticism. I do not subscribe to the nativistic position that one should not use Western theories, but I think one should be constantly vigilant of their racial and even colonial biases. As someone who has grown up in an Asian culture which constructs sexuality and gender in different way, I cannot help but think that some of the queer theorists, such as Judith Butler, are Eurocentric. Marcella has written a wild and courageous book. Some will want to dismiss or ghettoize her work by saying it is another outrageous text from a queer theologian, while others may appropriate her per/versions of theology while leaving behind her liberationist concerns. A theological text that cannot be easily classified, her work transgresses the customary boundaries of theological genre. The topic she treats is very serious and her analysis sophisticated, but her book is also hilarious and fun to read. My favorite example is of her lifting up the skirt of the Virgin Mary and finding with bewilderment a phallus beneath it.15 By poking fun at the sacred and treasured religious symbols of Mary and Jesus, she restores the humanity to these religious figures and her playful irreverence exposes the fact that symbols are human-made constructions and must be constantly demystified. Having been put on the pedestal for too long, Jesus and Mary perhaps want to have some fun too.
14. 15.

Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 5. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 62.

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