This morning we reflected on the emergence of postcolonial queer theology. Last night's reading was on the theology of sexual stories, from Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics.
Althaus-Reid asserts that theology, especially liberation theology, "is a passionate and dangerous business," akin perhaps to sticking your tongue in a wall socket. She compares the passionate commitment to justice and solidarity with the poor to sexual passion, where "desire is intense, and carries that of life in itself."
She talks about how "abnormal" stories (those of women and sexual minorities) may be ignored or suppressed in liberation theologies. There is the story of Father Mario, a young gay Roman Catholic priest working in a Christian base community. Mario is murdered by a rent boy, the police allude to him being a faggot, and the church covers things up as usual. But the local community have embraced Fr. Mario as one of their own. They care not whether he was gay, only that he had to suffer alone. They speak to the TV media of his love and generosity of spirit, and how they wish they had been able to help him in his loneliness. Althaus-Reid approvingly refers to this resistant telling of his story as "indecent theological thinking."
Elsewhere in the reading she talks of the sexual pyramid, the invisible hierarchical privileging of some people's sexual stories over others. The class broke into groups to draw up our own sexual pyramid based on our perception of privileged story-telling in our own society.
The obvious truisms emerge: rich, white, powerful, heterosexual males sit at the apex of the pyramid; poor, disenfrachised women, queers and people of color near the base. But it is difficult to draw such a pyramid on paper, since there are so many different intersecting axes of privilege. At a minimum these might include: race, assigned gender, sexuality, adulthood, class, wealth, beauty, health.
And some dimensions are probably more significant or influential in conferring privilege than others. Is a white woman more privileged than a black male, if all other dimensions are ignored? Probably, given the dynamics of race. But this shows how difficult it is to map the relations of privilege. And there may even be pyramids within the larger pyramid (wheels within wheels?) that have their own special, internal (and damnable) logic.
Individuals and classes of people may sometimes move up the pyramid by passing (e.g. light skinned African-Americans, or masculine gay men) or through inherited or earned relational proximity to privilege (the lesbian daughter of a US Vice-President, or a black, female Secretary of State).
All of this is illuminating how structures of privilege and modes of story-telling operate in our own church communities. Are some voices privileged while others are not heard? Why? The obvious point from a theological perspective however, is that the gospel of the kingdom calls us as Christians to work to turn these pyramids upside down and inside out.
This is also both the challenge and the dilemma of postcolonial queer theology.
We talked about the impact of European colonialism on the churches planted in Africa, Asia and the Americas. One example: colonial structures were supported by imported, monotheistic, patriarchal religion. European cultures were so successful in this theological heterocolonialism that the colonized cultures usually abandoned their indigenous understandings of sex and gender in favor the colonizer's.
As a consequence, and somewhat ironically, Christian churches in postcolonial countries view non-heteronormative sexual expression (which may once have been tolerated or accepted) as simply "decadent, Western perversion". Queer social justice efforts are likewise viewed (or at least labeled for public consumption) as "foreign" imports. The brunt of state and church power is brought to bear to brutally silence grassroots queer voices.
Postcolonial issues are going to become increasingly important for MCC to understand and respond to thoughtfully, the more we reach out globally. But this is emerging, largely uncharted territory. Apart from the work of Althaus-Reid and perhaps one or two others, very little theology has yet been developed from a queer postcolonial perspective. Bob believes that it will be ten years, perhaps, before a body of work begins to emerge.
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