Pride month is a chance to celebrate the contributions LGBTQIA+ people make to the world. Through a variety of learning offerings, Sarum College highlights the often-underrepresented voices of queer people in the theological disciplines. During Pride month in 2024, we hear from LGBTQIA+ theologians who are making major contributions both to the study of theology and to the Church.
Our third blog post comes from Dr Penelope Cowell Doe (she/her) who, after working for the BBC, gained her PhD at the University of Exeter, and now teaches courses including in New Testament studies within the Exeter Diocese. Penelope’s new book, published in the last fortnight, is Queering the Church: The Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure.
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by Dr Penelope Cowell Doe
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.(1)
In this second blog I will unpack, a little, what I mean by the queer art of failure and how I believe this trope can help the Church be redeemed from the pursuit of the goals of progress, success and growth, disguised as Christian narrative.
The queer art of failure recognises that failure is part of the human condition and for Christians an inherent part of our fallen nature. Failure may be faithfulness to a belief that ‘God’ is beyond human understanding, inhabiting the unknowingness of Holy Saturday and the queer temporality of living in the ‘not yet’.
Columbia University Professor Jack Halberstam offers the queer art of failure as an antidote to capitalist and cisheteronormative practices which create a marginalised group outside of what is deemed worthy and successful. I use his work to interrogate the authority of a Church in which certain groups – such as queer folk – are dependent on the doubtful goods of inclusion and welcome and expected to be grateful for the crumbs. Halberstam’s queer art of failure work disrupts
commonsense narratives about emergence and suppressions … [where] redeeming the gay self from its pathologization have been replaced by emphases on the negative potential of the queer and the possibility of rethinking the meaning of the political through queerness precisely by embracing the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated and the melancholic formulation of selfhood that it sets in motion.(2)
Adopting the potential of failure might allow the Church of England to embrace ‘the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated and the melancholic’. Church Reports, General Synod debates and many blogs and articles showcase mostly those voices whose authority and status come from neoliberal ideas of progress and success that are represented as Christian – and often as traditional or orthodox Christianity.
Enquiries and narratives considered ‘common sense’ to the authors and creators of church reports and the debates that ensue often exclude those who do not conform to the dominant narrative. These prevailing ways of knowing disregard the possibilities suggested by the failure of progress, success, knowing, agreeing, and predominating. The institutional life of church reports and debates, which is predicated on the belief in the unassailability of church, governance could seek for ways of knowing outside dominant assumptions. Rather than ‘success’ and ‘progress’, failure’s art embraces the queer hope of unbecoming, undoing, unknowing; the ways of negativity, passivity and immaturity. It is ironic that a religion that encourages its followers to be childlike has such a problem with the radical and anarchic potentialities of childishness.
In my book, Queering the Church I work with the ‘queer art of failure’ to suggest alternative ways to pursue theological and ecclesial answers to questions on (homo)sexuality.
In my next blog I will turn to Holy Saturday as redemptive space and practice for a neoliberal Church.
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Notes
(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty.
(2) J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 147-148.
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This is the third blog in a series to mark Pride Month
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