10 June 2024
Introduction by Dr Michael Hahn
Programme Leader, MA in Christian Spirituality Programmes
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 second 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.
=========================================
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)
Praise Him (or Them) indeed in Pride Month as we celebrate all that is counter, original, spare, and queer. Thirty days in which to rejoice in the beauty of God’s strange creation while lamenting all those who have been traumatised by patriarchal heteronormativity often disguised as ‘Christian doctrine’ or ‘Biblical teaching’. But ‘queer’ isn’t just a noun delineating what is often considered marginal, liminal and abject, but better figured perhaps as a verb; a doing rather than a being. Since queer theory is disruptive, transgressive, and troubling, it can have no definitive logic, discourse, or end.
David Halperin apprehends queer’s slipperiness in his statement that the concept owns no stable reality:
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices; it could include some married couples with children, for example … it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.(2)
In my recently published book, Queering the Church: The Theological and Ecclesial Potential of Failure, I use que(e)rying to interrogate the constructions of authority, power, and privilege which are embedded in Church and construed as normal, natural and unmarked. This is the method that the authors of church discourses adopt – maybe unwittingly – to privilege heterosexuality as the canonical sexuality; it is the unmarked category not only because it is regarded as normal, but also because it is being presented as being divinely ordained.
My book is a counter to the discursive constructions of church reports in that it seeks to find a lens (or lenses) that would enable bodies like the Church of England to adopt queer methods of transformation. These methods involve the undoing of dominant theological and cultural precepts that have resulted – whether inevitably or contingently – in a sexual (and non-cisgender) precariat and would expose Church institutions to the experiences of abjection, of powerlessness, and of irresolution. They attempt this, firstly, by challenging the hermeneutic and epistemological lenses that ‘other’ and pathologise sexual behaviours and identities that are construed as aberrant. Secondly, they make a suggestive move towards queer transformations in particular discourses and practices where intersectionality and multiple identities are not only acknowledged, but also valued, as part of the democratic and diverse voices of experience within the body of the Church of England. And, in the final chapter, I explore ways in which transformation may be realised through the precarity of non-resolution to reach a ‘solution’ (3) that recognises and lives with unknowing and undoing – what Professor Jack Halberstam terms ‘the queer art of failure’.
My next blog will reflect on what the queer art of failure is, and on what it may offer the Church.
—
Notes
[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins,Pied Beauty.
[2] David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62, emphases original
[3] A solution is not just a means to solving a problem, but also a mixture in which other components are dissolved in the solvent. Dissolution seems, perhaps, a more appropriate metaphor for non-resolution than the solving of problems.
===========================
This is the second blog in a series to mark Pride Month.
Leave a Reply