44

Too Much Trouble? Negotiating Feminist and Queer Approaches in Religion*

Claudia

Schippert

feminist and queer theoretical approaches to religion, I they are neither totally different nor the same, but that specific points of tension exist that need to be addressed at the currently developing feminist/queer intersection within the academic study of religion. Narrowing my concern to the study of ethics, I focus on the question of norms and their potentially automatic implication in normalizing operations of power. I argue that we should not choose between one or the other, that is opt for ethical norms versus queer resistance to normativity in general. Rather, we need to address and reconfigure the relation of norms and normativity itself, for example, develop tools to recognize and differentiate between the specific effects norms and their deployment have in particular contexts and practices. I affirm the importance of what Judith Butler describes as a radical resignification of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain toward a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world.1 While I briefly review existing feminist and queer work in religion, my main argument is about the value of cross-reading in order to shift an impasse within the academic study of religion. In the context of rethinking relations between norms and normativity, I specifically draw on Evelynn Hammondss use of the metaphor of black (w)holes. I explicate connections to practices and strategies which may disturb specific discursive constellations, which I describe as taking on the abject position. I then suggest that my appropriation of both Butlers and Hammondss approach owes much to Katie Cannons Black Womanist Ethics which, I propose in this paper, is itself an excellent example for such a radical resignification-within the study

Discussing

argue that

This article was given as a paper at the American Academy of annual meeting, 1998. 1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 22.

Religion

45

of religion. However, in pondering the implications of either of these texts for troubles at the feminist-queer intersection in religion, I neither suggest that they are directly parallel, nor do I attempt some kind of application to feminist-queer troubles. Rather, they provide me with useful and challenging questions and indicate shifts in strategies which may push beyond the existing troubles at the feminist-queer intersection in religion. I am fairly certain that most of you will immediately recognize which book begins with the following sentence:

Contemporary feminist debates over the meaning of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism.
The preface continues:
trouble need not carry such a negative valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

Perhaps

Even if you never read the book it seems safe to think that this is how Judith Butler begins Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.2 The title of this paper is Too Much Trouble and points to a certain excessive deployment of this term.3 Trouble, Gender Trouble, or even More Gender Trouble-as a volume of differences in 1994 was entitled (not coincidentally edited by Judith Butler)-have become buzzwords for particular debates within feminism and at the intersection of feminist theories with the emerging field of queer theory. Too much trouble? Indeed, it may be time to ask, to quote Jeffrey 4 Weeks, [I]s the trouble worthwhile?4
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). The introductory quotes are from p. vii. 3. The title of todays session may be a case in point. The session is entitled

Disturbing Identities: The Politics of Relationality in Feminist and Queer Theories Although I was unaware of the exact content of the other two papers at the point of writing this essay, I suspected that mine is not the only one deploying terms of trouble to indicate some of the common—yet also potentially very different— approaches feminist and queer theoretical trajectories afford scholars in religion. 4. Jeffrey Weeks, Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 86.

46

Pondering that question I wonder, What exactly is the trouble?, specifically at the intersections of feminist and queer work in religion scholarship. Is it inevitable? What is being disturbed? If the feministqueer intersection spells trouble, what is the best way to be in it? Are some supposed to get into trouble in order for others to be kept out of trouble? Or is it that one is somehow constantly in trouble even while
trying to stay out of trouble? To address some of these issues, I want to explore one particular site which may illuminate some of the kinds of trouble queer and feminist trajectories in religion are getting us into, out of, or possibly over. Getting into Trouble at the Intersection
A while ago, I
was

gion-encyclopedia
ence

asked to write the entry Queer Theory for 5 and ended up stating the following:5

reli-

It is too early to predict if queer theory will eventually equal the influof some feminist theories in (these and other areas in) the study of Debates about queer theorys potentials and difwomen and ficulties occur, because queer theoretical conceptions of power, resistance, or identity may differ greatly from liberationist ones and questions regarding agency and social change arise. For example, a

religion.6

5. Queer Theory, in Serinity Young (ed.), Encyclopedia of Women and World Religions (New York: Macmillan Press, 1998). 6. Here, the time that routinely elapses between the writing of an article and its publication, particularly with encyclopedias, is unfortunate—I would have reformulated the areas of influence and the complex interactions between various trajectories in religion and queer theory vis-à-vis feminist theory was I to write this article today. It continues to be the case, however, that I find it less than obvious what the future of queer theory will be within or outside of religious scholarship especially in comparison to feminist theory, which is of course also not a singular or monolithic thing(or separate from queer theory for that matter). This is not to say that I have doubts about queer theorys value or critical impact. Yet the many difficulties in the constitution of the term/trajectory/ politics, may make this a much shorter lived endeavor than I may have thought five years ago. It may already have become necessary to find new terms, change political strategies, and form different alliances than previously imagined. Indeed, the very indeterminacy of causality in action, and problematic aspects of intention in

agency is one question at the center of my work at the intersection of feminist and queer theories of the body. 7. This claim is made in connection to the earlier assertion that queer theory has become influential primarily in gay, lesbian and feminist liberation theologies, biblical studies, and ethics dealing with sexuality. As I write this essay in November 1998,I would modify this to include, among other things, feminist theoretical

approaches

to

religion

and ritual which do not

necessarily deploy

liberationist

47
queer active opposition to normativity raises ethicists as to how to conceptualize values and on and reinscribing normativity.

questions for feminist

norms

without

relying

I want to look more closely at this question: are opposition to normativity and work in feminist ethics mutually exclusive endeavors? I continue to find this a central issue-one of the specific troubles we get into when negotiating queer and feminist approaches-particularly in ethics. Feminist and queer theoretical approaches are neither totally different from each other nor are they the same or even similar.8 What we need, I think, is a better grasp of the specific tensions which result from various moves to connect, combine, or explore the mutual impact of queer and feminist trajectories. This, it seems to me, is necessary especially if we seek further points of connection to other 9 areas of theoretical inquiries with relevance to work in

religion.9

rhetoric. Cf. last years panel in feminist theory and religious reflection on/with Butlers work. 8. An issue which I try to gesture at here but which would deserve more extensive discussion, is why it has become so easy to talk about feminist theory and queer theory as if they constituted two separate domains. Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin and other contributors to a recent differences issue entitled More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory explore the connections and necessary intersection of feminist and queer approaches to gender, sexuality and the body. Butler argues against proper objects for either field. It is certainly the case that, for example, poststructuralist discussion about subjectivity and agency (one of the crucial points of conflict at the feminist-queer intersection, particularly in religion) predate the emergence of queer theory. To separate queer theory from feminist theory would also be a genealogical mistake. Butler—a well-known queer theorist—is, after all, a feminist philosopher and theorist and the term queer theory first emerged in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Nevertheless, it has been common practice to think of feminist theory and queer theory as conflicting methodological approaches. And indeed, some real tensions exist and crucial problems need to be theorized at this intersection. Here, I attempt to address a particular issue of tension while trying to neither reinscribe the binary division (feminist versus queer) nor to erase it (as if there were no problems,

conflicts, or differences).
9. I want to

point out that I am not inventing these questions.

There are, in

fact, a number of scholars who have already worked at the particular intersections which I am also exploring. The work of Janet Jakobsen has been extremely influential and enabling for my own endeavors in this regard. See her recent book Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). See also Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (London: Routledge, 1997) and Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1997).

48

question then-does Michael Warners wellknown definition of queer theory as resistance to heteronormativity contradict/preclude the doing of ethics or other engagement with norms? There are plenty of examples which one could cite to suggest that while a good norm can be liberating in one context, it can also Returning
tool of domination in the same or another context. for example, the strange bedfellows that were produced (Remember, in struggles around pornography, anti-pornography, and anti-antipornography. I, at least, found the strategic alliance between Edward Meese and Katherine MacKinnon-well-disturbing.l) Actually, I began to obsess about this question after reading one too many texts that posit and defend a really good norm, texts that indicate awareness of power structures which reinforce the domination of othered bodies, feminist and liberationist texts that decry sexism, racism, imperialism, among other things, yet curiously-as I read them-end l up reinvoking and rhetorically relying on such bad others. 11 I have come to think of this tension between norms and normalization or the role norms may inevitably play in the configuration of normativity as one that lurks in many ethics texts, yet is often avoided or sidestepped. I think ethics is predisposed to get into this specific trouble. After all, we in ethics are supposed to do exactly what I claim to be so disturbing at the feminist-queer intersection: ethicists are supposed to deal with norms, find better ones, consider their be used
as

to the

10.

It is worth

out to form alliances with

mentioning, however, that MacKinnon and Dworkin did not set right-wing conservatives like Meese. In fact, the strug-

gles in the

sex wars

provide excellent examples for the ways in which some val-

strategies can be recruited for other purposes. The norm of womens bodily integrity, for example—which informed many of the discursive moves around MacKinnon and Dworkins work—was reappropriated (retooled) and cited in very different operations by legislators like Meese. For another reading of the strange bedfellows at this particular sex-wars moment, see Janet Jakobsen, Agency and Alliance in Public Discourses about Sexualities, Hypathia 10.1 (1995), pp. 133-54. 11. In a paper delivered a few years ago at the AAR, I read a particular piece in sexual ethics and described how its positive progressive feminist norm (mutuality) relies on a series of deviant others who, although elided in the text, functioned as a negative foil onto which the good norm is projected. See my Embodies Power, Queer Sex, in J. Michael Clark and Robert E. Goss (eds.), A Rainbow of Religious Studies (Dallas: Monument Press, 1996), pp. 103-18. My dissertation offers a more extensive reading of this problematic and makes some of the connections which I can only invoke as gestures here. See Transgressive Bodies, Queer Ethics: Cross Disciplinary Conversations about Resistance (PhD dissertation, Temple Univerues, norms or feminist

sity, forthcoming).

49

effects, etc. 12 How

other kinds of normativity while doing so, thus becomes something of a professional problem.13
to resist heteroor

Again-in Religion
Let me reiterate why I think this is such an address in ethics-and within the academic

important question to study of religion. In a

general way there are (at least) two kinds of reactions to the question are norms automatically recruited in processes of normalization, do norms always end up in dominant networks of norms and matrixes of normativity? Is it therefore impossible to have norms if we are committed to fighting hetero-normativity? One reaction, I suggest, is to answer yes. Yes, a conception of hetero-normativity which for example assumes queer or Foucaultian conceptions of power and unstable dynamics of domination is difficult or impossible to bring into correlation with attempts to hold
very
12. I even claim that this is an especially problematic recurring theme in sexual ethics—maybe because there is so much at stake in discussions about sexual morality these days—which was true even before Monica became a household
name.

13. Let me consider for a moment that the dilemma I am describing may not be problem at all—but merely a fact of life. Even if one were not to smooth over these questions and were to acknowledge directly that norms seem to require a constitutive other /deviant, one could think of this troubling relation in other ways: for example, in terms of the way language works. Citing Derridas difference, one could posit—forgive the gross oversimplification—that when you say something you necessarily exclude a set of possible meanings and other configurations. Or one could formulate this in more psychoanalytical terms by positing that within the formation of subjectivity, as part of the constitution of the subject, specifically in order to arrive at a semblance of stability, a process of foreclosure, Verwerfung, a casting out of the unintelligible into the realm of the abject is required. However, even if this were all true, being a fact of life does not mean it is not problematic or does not deserve our attention. My point here is that investigating the tension between norms and their potential implication in processes of normalization may not be a new question in some disciplinary conversations, but in the specific sites within religion that concern me right now we may
a

want, or need, a different set of answers. At the very least there is evidence that we need to address this issue (which is troubling) at the point of appropriation of queer in religion/feminist ethics—which in the process may shift the larger disciplinary field itself. We certainly cannot afford to elide or erase the troubles by smoothing over the tension in some kind of celebratory move to interdisciplinarity or cheerful substitution of queer for whatever fashionable term was used before. (Turning to Derrida or Kristeva no doubt can be quite useful here, but I think there are some other resources within religion-scholarship itself.)

50

norms, have values

or principles or formulate constructive ethics which address the complex institutions of domination and affirm (resistant) agency. Because of this, queer poststructuralist approaches and feminist or liberationist ones seem difficult, unlikely or even

impossible to bring together. One example for this kind of answer would be the by now familiar critique of the term or political concept queer as devoid of ethical meaning, as anti-ethical or as directly opposed to anything Christian. In this trajectory practices of resistance to hetero-normativity or opposition to the normal in general are taken to be distant and disengaged from feminist and liberationist concerns-so far, in fact, that they constitute realms which, although possibly interesting, have no direct implications for each other. From this perspective, active resistance to (hetero-)normativity is synonymous with opposition to any norms, values or ethics. For example, feminist ethicist Kathy Rudy writes that queer theory offers us little insight for ethics. She explains, Queers in principle are opposed to any ethical program that passes judgment on any sexual behavior...the new queer theorists today assert that it is time to eliminate the barriers presented by all
moral codes.14 It is the case that few explicit approaches to ethics have been developed from a queer theoretical perspective. Partly, this is due to the troubles which the relationship of norms and normativity poses for queer scholars as well. (And at least one of the books which attempts this, Jeffrey Weekss Invented Moralities: Sexual Value in an Age of Uncertainty, is problematic and, as I read it, fails.) Nevertheless, it is not therefore the case that queer as a term or queers as people are opposed to all norms, moral values, or ethics-as if on principle. 15

Characteristically, I think, Rudy writes this in the sadomasochistic pornography-consuming, child-abusing, invoking polygamous queers as examples for her not-quite-Christian references. I more explicitly analyze the dependence of (Christian) feminist sexual ethics on the abject leather-queers in my dissertation. 15. Rudy partially misreads queer theory. I would argue that this is not unconnected to her reliance on specific deviant others, specifically the leather-wearing sadomasochists and other sexual radicals who are so easily and so commonly invoked as negative foil onto which positive/good feminist values are projected. In her reliance on this particular invocation, she resembles many other scholars in ethics/religion and beyond. Actually, this phenomenon of specific bodies occupying the always already unethical position—the curious fact that certain material bodies are unthinkable in complex ways— be an issue of great interest to should ethicists. I would expect especially liberation ethicists and those interested in oper14.
context of

Sex and the Church, p. 123.

51

There are those in religion who would answer differently, No, do not necessarily effect normativities. Queer and feminist or liberationist vocabulary are not impossible to combine. Within the field of religion, a number of recent texts appropriate the term queer-without too many troubling thoughts and more as a replacement for gay and lesbian or maybe gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. However, foregrounding the promise of queers lack of specificity regarding (gender-)identity, these approaches often elide the challenges queer might pose to the methodologies or textualnorms

political strategies employed

ations of domination around categories of gender and sexuality to investigate and not replicate this discursive operation. One point in the larger context of my own work is to argue that stopping at the seeming incompatibility would be a mistake and misses challenges and important shifts in predominant (liberationist and feminist) conceptions of what ethics is, how norms are done, how alliances work, etc. It is very likely, however, that the kind of ethics which would be connected to a queer theoretical approach may look quite different from what Rudy thinks about—or looks for. 16. It is of course the case that one of the strengths of queer is its lack of specificity—in refusing a discourse of identity, series of categories such as lesbian, gay, bisexual (which seems always followed by the etc which elided/invoked those many others which are also somehow not part of the hegemonic group, yet too complicated to explicitly name) could be named not via an identity category, but through a shared (political) opposition to specific operations of power—and through shared active resistance to the very ways in which modern normalizing power produced and confined bodies in identity and subjectivity categories organized around normality and deviance. Nevertheless, the lack of specificity—par— ticularly the lack of homosexual specificity—also produced problems in the deployment of the term queer: see Jakobsen, Queer Is? Queer Does Normativity and the Problem of Resistance, GLQ 4.4, pp. 511-36, and the discussion of David Halperins Saint Foucault at the AAR in 1997. I need to point out that in reading the following texts, I at times directly negate some of their own claims, for example that Clarks book shows how theology and queer theory can inform and enrich each other (back cover). Actually, Clarks book begins much like Weekss. Clark writes, Life isnt safe. Certainly, life in the post-Holocaust, post-death-of-God, post-Christian, postmodern end of the twentieth century isnt safe (p. 1). Weeks, too, begins with the sense of uncertainty and contingency in a postmodern situation which has been deeply influenced by the AIDS crisis (pp. 1-14, esp. p. 13). Nevertheless, I consider these two texts to represent two different strategies of dealing with issues of postmodern uncertainty or lack of safety. Whereas Weeks addresses them, however unsuccessfully, I argue that he in fact cannot deal with uncertainty but merely tries to contain it. Clark, as I read his text, sidesteps the issue. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, Foucault and all references to queer are integrated into his liberationist theological framework, seemingly without much trouble.

52 For example, queer is used again and again as a fashionable label. It to signify something that is somehow defiant. At other times, queer appears as an adverb in a sentence like to act very queerly indeed, to act contrary to conventional wisdom. Or, we are informed about queerly defiant apparel which later is described as also queerly well chosen. 17 In a different text, Jesus Acts Up and provides legitimization for a lesbian and gay liberation theology in which queer is used almost interchangeably with lesbian and gay-again, possible tensions and differences vis-A-vis liberation and conceptions of power are elided. 18
seems

17. J. Michael Clark, Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998), pp. 5, 85. The books title initially was to be Queering the Darkness (I think). I am struck particularly by Clarks invocation of his own leather clothing as queerly well chosen directly after a number of pages of critiquing s/m and leather communities and their behavior. Although he counts himself among them(leather-folks) at that point, his narrative portrays sadomasochists as quite bad/unethical. He, after all, got out of that scene and

became

some way... Clothes which are queerly well chosen play on clearly but do not transport other meaning. Indeed, what linguistically
a

better queer in

me here is not an argument about leather or sadomasochism, but the fact that it is precisely a question of fashion. Yet, in this particular site, it is not about clothes at all, but about a strategy/politics of citation. Clark here invokes what seems to be the theoretical citation of the moment—or current term of defiance. Queer performs a function, it does some specific work in his theology. 18. In a more extensive discussion, I would want to consider how much this has to do with a particular citational chain, specifically the ways in which Foucault finds entry into these and other liberation theological and ethical texts. Queer theoretical texts are always blurred with Foucault, of course—and rightfully so, since queer theory can be taken to be a particular trajectory out of Foucaults work. It is interesting to me that both Goss and Clark use Sharon Welchs work as a way into Foucault. I appreciate Welchs A Feminist Ethics of Risk and in fact use her work as a corrective to Weekss text in the larger context of my work—and precisely as a transition to the concerns in a queer ethics which I address in this paper in discussing texts which take on the abject position. Nevertheless, I think Welchs appropriation of Foucault deserves some further attention in my own analysis and beyond. Welch draws (primarily) on Foucaults conception of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. Of course, this is something Foucault wrote about. However, Foucaults comments in Welchs text take on semblances of a hermeneutics of suspicion or related concepts in liberation theology or ethics—quite unlike Foucault intended it, I would think. Not that this makes it wrong or less appropriate. Faithfulness to Foucaults intentions cannot really be a criterion—since he himself wasnt exactly faithful to his own announcements or trajectories and meant his work to be a toolbox to be used. Nevertheless, what is interesting to me is that (I suspect) much of what appears as Foucaultian interpretations in Goss or Clark and some other liberation theological or ethical work is in fact Foucault-via-Welch.

matters to

53

Of

course

not the
ars are

not the only ways to answer the question and only examples to be found in the field of religion. Some scholdirectly addressing the tension I am pointing to in searching

these

are

for principled positions in a postmodern world.&dquo; Others assert that-while affirming theoretical commitments to conceptualize power as unstable operations and subjectivities or bodies materiality as effect of discursive configurations-it is not necessarily the case that any norm automatically effects dominant configurations of power, or reinforces normativities that rely on power organized around practices of normalization. We can describe specific practices that enact and deploy norms but do not depend on negative screens or the casting out of some to constitute the subjectivity of dominant positions. (How these explications relate to ethical systems-and how far existing conceptions of agency, subjectivity, or intentionality are altered within these shifts to specific practices-remains a challenge and to be addressed.) This is maybe closest to my own answer to the question and my own scholarly project. And it relates, among others, to Janet Jakobsens approach in Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference. Or to David Halperin, who in his recent book Saint Foucault suggests that this is precisely what Foucault thought about at the end of his life. Turning to ascesis for Foucault, and Halperin, is precisely this-explicating bodily practices that draw on and deploy norms, but do not effect dominant normativities; which, for a number of reasons, do not participate in processes of normalization. 20 My point in reviewing some reactions to the question of norms versus normativity in religion is not to come up with the correct answer-as if there was one. (Actually, questions which set up binary opposites as only two choices are mostly false anyway-or rather they
Her influential reading of Foucault partly enables the relatively unproblematic appropriation of the term queer for feminist and liberationist purposes. 19. A number of trajectories would fit into this category. Here, I am particularly thinking of Jeffrey Weeks and others who contributed to the anthology, Judith Squires (ed.), Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the Rediscovery of Value (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993). Within religion, one could refer to Marc C. Taylor as one example of work concerned with religion and postmodernity, specifically with regard to categories of meaning. 20. The ancient ascetics, for example, were not trying to become, nor were they effectively becoming, more normal by adhering to their ritualized and strict (norm-governed) practices. Halperin makes similar points for certain practices in contemporary queer contexts (practices like fisting or gay male bodybuilding). Although I disagree with him on some details, I, too, think that bodybuilding is a very useful site to investigate precisely these issues. See my Building Transgressive Bodies (paper delivered at AAR 1997).

54

function within the ways modern power is organized around various normativities-binary cross-referential pairs which limit possible categories and through their net-worked meaning confine the ability to destabilize particular connections or the larger matrix of operations.) I am also not trying to police the interpretation of queer or to insist on some kind of specific disciplinary rigor as if to proclaim what can and cannot be legitimately called queer within feminist theoretical work. (If I were to engage such a project, I would also want to travel in the other direction and explicate the many false or at least problematic appropriations of feminist or religionist work in queer approaches, but overall this is not the kind of approach I find useful or want to

take.) Rather, I care about the politics of citation involved in some appropriation of queer in feminist and liberationist work in ethicsand in religion studies more broadly. This is a pressing issue to me,
because queer citations in religion at times create or recreate tensions which resemble, involve and reinscribe the very operations of abjection which the queer project (if there is such a thing) tries to resist, subvert, or transgress. There is a difference, I think, between saying it is wrong (which I am not) and saying that it interests me, because one of the crucial operations with which I am obsessed is also operative in this disciplinary site (which I also care about a great deal)-and precisely because the tensions are not addressed. My interest, then, is not to have the best or most true access to the real meaning of queer-but the fact that certain/specific bodies continue to be cast out into the realm of unintelligibility. Which is to say that these questions are not merely about theoretical positions or methodological tools, but about material effects of discursive configurations and their production and reproduction of bodies.

Disturbing Disciplines
I have briefly indicated that my own direction in these matters parallels that of scholars like Jakobsen or Halperin. I, too find it useful to describe specific practices that utilize norms but do not effect normalization. Practices which may disturb, trouble-and ultimately shiftsome of the relations that make up dominant configurations of nor-

mativity. For example, Halperin writes about specific queer sex practices and mentions-what I also investigate-practices of bodybuilding. Jakobsen has described the complex ways in which specific sites and practices draw on multiple norms which may be contradictory or other-

55
wise undo each other-thus troubling the seeming coherence of normative matrixes. I think such an approach can have broader, and more disciplinary, implications as well (at least that is what I wrote in

that encyclopedia
How

article):

queering religion can be subversive and transgressive, and not merely an extension of existing projects, which might reinscribe the normalizing rhetoric they set out to challenge, will continue to be an important question as new sites of queer religious studies are opened up... As conceptions of what counts as religion or as women in religion are challenged, future queer work in religion will expand and explode disciplinary definitions and investigate new sites in which women in religion are gendered, raced, and in which bodies are produced and regulated.
The intended or hoped-for effect of such queering is to disrupt disciplinary rules and normal operations. The kind of sources and necessary resources which may facilitate such shifts may also transgress familiar boundaries or disciplinary rules. I do not mean to celebrate sloppy work or reject academic rigor. However, appropriating and rethinking disciplinary operations and strategies from other locations and vantage points proves useful in imagining relations of norms and power other than the dominant and (seemingly) only coherent ones. Often, starting at a point of incoherence-of which there are many-in fact raises and opens up new questions and helpfully challenges the recuperative operations of normativities. In this sense of reading across and from other starting points, I want to revisit the queer-feminist disciplinary trouble yet againbut starting from a different text. Contemplating issues at the feminist-queer intersection, specifically trying to get a better grasp of the impasse at the intersections in religion, I reread Evelynn Hammondss article in that second differences volume dedicated to queer theory, More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory. Here, Hammonds writes about black lesbian sexuality which, to summarize her argument, is elided in most accounts of lesbian sexuality, within queer theory, and also in other writings about black sexuality. Rather than theorizing the absence and its function for dominant normative discourse, specifically white (lesbian and generic/ hetero) sexuality, authors seem focused primarily on strategies to increase visibility. However, Hammonds argues, it is crucial for those who write about the complex configuration of the discourse of sexuality to address and account for the ways in which black lesbian

56

sexuality is absent or not there as a constitutively necessary function for the construction of (white/straight) norm/al sexuality. Hammonds connects her critique of feminist and queer theorists to something that would never have come to my mind: she moves into the realm of physics and links the apparent difficulties in theorizing black lesbian sexuality to the phenomena and characteristics of black holes .21 Black holes, after all, are thought to be void, empty places, gaps in space...yet we know that they are in fact complex, a dense and full place. But, an important question is raised, how do we observe or deduce the presence of a black hole? Hammonds explains that physicists observe binary star systems-in which one visible, white, normal star orbits in mutual gravitational attraction around another star which is not itself visible (the black hole). We can detect the presence of a black hole by its effects on the region of space where it is located. (p. 138) Black holes exert a distorting (and enabling) influence, they have a constitutive function for the being/existence of normal stars.22 Another troubling question for physicists, it seems, is that we do not know what it is like inside a black hole. However, Hammonds suggests that we may approach this by thinking of it as a realm in which everything operates according to an entirely different geometry. Appropriating this metaphor for her concern about black lesbian sexuality Hammonds writes:
Rather than assuming that black sexualities are structured along an axis of normal and perverse paralleling that of white women, we might find that for black women a different geometry operates. For example, acknowledging this difference I could read the relationship between Shug and Celie in Alice Walkers The Color Purple as one which depicts desire between women and desire between women and men simultaneously, in dynamic relationship rather than in opposition (p. 139).

21.

She credits Michele Wallaces

use

of the term in reference to black female

creativity.
22. I was immediately drawn to the image. I find this a very applicable metaphor for black lesbian sexuality and a number of racially othered or otherwise queer sexualities which dominant sexuality requires to establish and institutionalize the normal. However, I also share Hammondss reaction of being troubled—she remarks that a black hole could also evoke a negative image of black female sexuality reduced to the lowest possible denominator, i.e. just a "hole" (p. 142 n. 8). I also think it possible, and troubling, that the metaphor of black holes may merely invoke genital references without accounting for Hammondss careful addition of the (W), making it a more ambiguous term which also

invokes wholeness, i.e.

(w)holes.

57
Note that Hammondss article is entitled black (w)holes, which reintroduces the notion of whole-ness into the metaphor for distant

parallels the actual characteristic of the black holebeing perceived as void yet being full and complex. Hammonds writes about literary theory and about cultural criticism-and maybe about physics. But she doesnt write about ethics. Nevertheless, I find her metaphor striking and useful-specifically in illustrating (although with some tension) what I have always thought useful, yet underdeveloped, in Judith Butlers early formulation of the queer project as one aimed at resignifying the symbolic domain. Evelynn Hammonds writes that what is needed (in the work of articulating black female sexualities) is:
otherness-and

Disavowing

the

designation

of black female sexualities

as

inherently

abnormal, while acknowledging the material and symbolic effects of the appellation (p. 138).

This describes a strategy which is very useful-maybe beyond Hammondss particular concern-because she here engages the existence of norms, their legacy and implication in specific histories and discursive constellation, and their material and symbolic effect. Yet I read her to hold also that there is something like agency in-her sense of-disavowal.23 The disavowal of abnormality here, I think, is (or can be read as) potential refusal to reiterate/reintegrate that specific meaning of the appellation-to interrupt the very process through which abnormality is materially and symbolically effected. As much as Hammonds is writing about a specific (literary / theoretical) context, her insistence that what is needed are practices and theoretical trajectories which simultaneously disavow normative designations of abnormality while acknowledging their material effect(iveness), is an important one to pay attention to in ethics as well. Although it cannot be considered exactly parallel, I recognize in Hammondss formulation a conception of resistant relation to normativity similar to what I have previously tried to describe as strategies of taking on the abject position. (In appropriating her conception for my reading in ethics, together with Butlers formulation, I necessarily alter the original intent or specificity of context in both texts.)
At another point of the argument, Hammonds points to such a sense of agency as well: Since silence about sexuality is being produced by black women and black feminist theorists [which she argued earlier may or may not be to their advantage] that silence itself suggests that black women do have some degree of agency. A focus on black lesbian sexualities, I suggest, implies that another discourse—other than silence—can be produced (p. 137). 23.

58

Taking on the Abject Position I think of the abject as a realm of unintelligibility which contains that which is cast out-that which is the product of processes of Verwerfung-in the course of the discursive (and psychoanalytically conceptualized) formation of subjectivity, normality and material and psychic coherence. I then think of taking on as both embodying and as defying/ resisting. And in doing that to the position of the abject (which, technically, is not a position, since its constitutive feature is that of being un-intelligible) effectively producing it as a position and simultaneously working toward the unmaking of its very status of abject and the normalizing operations which involve/require abjection. In developing this phrase, I am (consciously) cross-reading: I am rephrasing Butlers description of a specific reworking of abjection into political agency which she also refers to as maybe the only normative dimension in her work assisting a radical resignification of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain toward a more possible future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body in the world,,24 and I draw on Hammondss suggestion, as I read her, that there is a (kind of) active disavowal that can or should take place. This cannot undo the production of deviance in dominant ideology/normativity, that is, in her argument the designation of black female sexuality as always already deviantyet-inherently-necessary-for-the-construction-of-white-normality. But it may enable resistance to that designations insistence on being the only possible category or reality. What I find useful in both Butlers and Hammonds approachesand in reading them together-is their insistence that identities and bodily materialities are characterized by contingency and a certain unpredictability of signification-while both theorists simultaneously hold it imperative to address and attack precisely the contingent, contradictory characteristics. Norms and their enactment, and the kinds of normative relations that are (re-)configured through practices which deploy specific sets of norms-which in themselves contain
various tensions and other sets of norms-are relations and effects which are not monocausal or linear. But they have to be engaged nev-

ertheless.

Additionally, what Hammondss formulation raises, I think, is that

24.

Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 22.

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important way it is not clear which of the appellations or their effects becomes real. There is a tension-filled legacy and process of material and symbolic effecting of inherent abnormality-yet there is also the possibility of simultaneous disavowal-which opens up (or takes account of) the existence of a different real(m) with a different
in
an

geometry.

Trying to relate what I value so much about these two approaches,

formulation which is indebted to both, to the site I am currently investigating, that is, ethics within the field of religion and specifically the feminist-queer tension, I need to account for yet another connection. To me, what I am now thinking of as taking on the abject position is not a new strategy in religion. Let me propose that, and explain why, Katie Cannons Black Womanist Ethics may do precisely that-taking on the abject position. Of course, I may be getting myself in trouble here, since Katie Cannons book is, strictly speaking, neither feminist nor queer. After all, the 1988 publication of Black Womanist Ethics predates any recognizable queer theoretical vocabulary and itself constituted one of the crucial events which we may attribute to the emergence of womanist ethics as a distinct trajectory within the academic study of religion. Nevertheless, I suggest that it is not merely a coincidence that I return again and again to this book when contemplating ways in which ethics can work out to take on the abject position.25 I need to point out that personal biography does play a part in this matter, since I essentially learned feminist ethics from Dr Cannon. Thus I learned feminist ethics from a founding scholar of womanist ethics-and always connected or in relation to womanist ethics. In ways that I can probably never entirely retrace, reading Black Womanist Ethics enabled me to begin to think-or to imagine and make connections to-what I now refer to as queer ethics and my conception of what I came to call taking on the abject position is part of that move. (Which is also a move away from Katies Cannon, if you
and my
own

Will.)26
25. Although it may not be faithful to the intentions or implications contained within Cannons text, I find useful direction here for imagining ways to think about what ethics may look like when one would take a queer impulse seriously within religious ethics—in a disciplinary sense—and take on the abject position— as opposed to more extensions of liberal democratic projects or ultimately liberal sexual ethics. 26. This play on Katie Cannons name is borrowed from her own invocation of it in the title of her second book, Katies Cannon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995).

60

disciplinary sense, I consider womanist ethics to have funcsomething like a supplement to feminist ethics in religion. Historically and in terms of academic generations, womanist ethicists like Katie Cannon or Emilie Townes added their work, they supplemented the growing body of feminist ethical work in religion. However, as is the case with a supplement, this was no mere addition. The entire thing changed in radical ways. In going where nobody
In
a

tioned

as

had gone before, womanist ethics altered the parameters of the universe of the academic study of religion and ethics. Cannon introduces her project with the following crucial observation :

assumptions of the dominant ethical systems implied that the doing of Christian ethics in the Black community was either
I discovered that the

immoral or amoral. The cherished ethical ideas predicated upon the existence of freedom and a wider range of choices proved null and void in situations of oppression. The real-lives texture of Black life requires moral agency that may run contrary to the ethical boundaries of mainline Protestantism. Blacks may use action guides which have never been considered within the scope of traditional codes of faithful living (p. 2).

Throughout the book, Cannon develops an ethics which is grounded in this real-lives texture and describes operative values and norms which may sound and in fact are contradictory to dominant
ethical discourse yet are the foundation for survival in black womens moral agency: invisible dignity, quiet grace, unshouted courage. 27
27. My narrative of Cannons book as enabling discourse for my attempts to think about queer/ing ethics should not be taken to suggest a direct application of womanist ethics to a realm outside its original scope, lets say, an application of a womanist ethical framework to the problem of specific norms and their effect on sexually deviant bodies (I do not doubt that this is possible, in fact it might be a really interesting project—but that is not what I am doing). I am also not indicating a recognition of a parallel analysis precisely because my starting-point in a place of refusal of dominant normative configuration and a place that is and can be moral and ethical, although it may be in conflict with various rules of normative operations, is indebted to and was enabled precisely by insights gained from womanist ethics. Maybe my relation to Cannons text is similar to Sharon Welchs who also explicitly draws on Black Womanist Ethics in order to rethink a particular aspect in dominant ethics. A Feminist Ethics of Risk, Welchs attack on an ethics of control which is dominant in Western hegemonic ethics, owes much to Cannons work. However, I tend to think that there is also a quite different relation—which is actually to the point of the argument I am making here: it would be wrong to say that I cant think about feminist ethics without womanist ethics. But I have learned ethics

61 I see some methodological similarities or possible connections between Evelynn Hammondss reflection on the issues involved in inducing the presence and conceptualizing the inside-operations in black (w)holes and Cannons text about womanist ethics which draw on rich and complex spheres of moral wisdom-which seem to be outside of definitions of morality-according to the normal or dominant narrative. In a sense, Black Womanist Ethics provides useful insight into some characteristics of taking on the abject position. Insisting on (and embodying) the reality of a different geometry, while refusing the immorality attributed to it through the process of abjection, womanist ethics describes this sphere of moral wisdom as a position-and thereby establishes it as something altogether different than a/immorality. It simultaneously enacts a shift in ethical vocabulary and opens up a new trajectory to approach normativities and the ways in which norms are deployed in their operations. (And how the construct of immorality of black life/bodies/decisions is a necessary and constitutive factor in dominant conceptions-and operations-of moral agency and value.) Of course, Black Womanist Ethics is not an anti-ethics book. It would be wrong to suggest that the primary concern is resistance to normativity, since it is in fact an attempt to reformulate and shift specific constellations within normative ethics.28 Nevertheless, in shifting claims of validity and ethical vocabulary, Black Womanist Ethics enacts in a specific realm-and possibly participates in variously interconnected processes of-resignifying the realm of the symbolic. In my attempt to avoid the binary set-up of having to choose between norms or normativity, Cannons text is an instructive
endeavor from a starting-point that was always already other than dominant ethics and was distinct and different from dominant and feminist ethics in that, although I may not have had the tools to describe other geometries—in Hammondss imagery—I certainly could not pretend that I did not know that there were other realms that operated according to different geometries. This meant also to question radically whatever dominant discourse attempted to portray as real and normal and take account of the contradictory, incoherent, yet complex and enabling relations of norms and abjects in various discursive realms. The issue of both Welch and myself, as well as Janet Jakobsen, drawing explicitly on Cannons book remains an interesting and important question to investigate. 28. And as far as I can tell, dominant ethics has not been blown up or destroyed due to the publication of Cannons book. (Although what I have remarked earlier about its supplemental character is certainly significant.) And neither has Butlers book a few years later—or the emergence of queer theory as a distinguishable academic specialization—resulted in the destruction of academic business as usual.
as an

62

example of how to enact shifts inside a specific normativity-how to rethink and reconfigure the ways in which norms, sets of norms and larger matrixes are connected, enable each other, preclude certain possibilities, and set up coherence. Starting somewhere other than in that place of coherence is useful and can help in enacting and deploying various sets of norms which may be contradictory and simultaneously unmake each other. Let me note before I conclude: what I have been describing here as taking on the abject position is not meant as a celebratory description of an unproblematic endeavor. Cannons approach in Black Womanist Ethics, Hammondss thought on the operations of in/visibility of black lesbian sexuality, what Butler describes as the necessary project of resignifying the realm of the symbolic-and my own concern about the effects of abjecting operations in queer citations in religion and beyond-involve the em-bodying and concrete materializing of precisely that which is unaffirmable, un-ivable, non-existent. This is about real bodies which cannot be-yet are constitutively required for the very formation of being and normal subjectivity. (Since normativities depend on the appearance of coherence, the mere existence or being of incoherent or abject entities constitutes a major problem. For this reason abject-ness is not like marginality or even invisibility-but is that and more, that is, simultaneously closely related to being a specific target.)29 I dont know what physicists think happens when you fly into a black hole, but I am certain that it is much more problematic than what such things look like on Star Trek. Therefore, let me be clear and say this again: in real life, living according to a different geometryand insisting that such lives are real and worthy nevertheless-is a dangerous endeavor. Normativities may be unstable and shifting and there may be ways in which performative contradictions can effect shifts and may alter some of their operations, but they nevertheless exert great force. To embody/defy the abject is rarely a voluntary act .30 And there is most certainly no guarantee and maybe not more
29. In a similar way the operations of subjection or subjectivation make possible the—however unstable—formation of a subject, yet this is accomplished within and as result of normalizing power operations which form traces and dominations on the subject which is bound to it in its very constitution. 30. This would also be part of Cannons point, i.e. that we cannot think along the lines of free choices from among multiple options if we are to consider black womens moral universe. I think this is increasingly applicable to more groups of people who do not or no longer fit definitions of normal morality or worthiness. The welfare reform is only one of the troubling examples for the effects of pro-

63

than tentative hope (to use an uncharacteristic term in this context) that processes of abjection can/will be subverted. I, for one, am much too skeptical about conceptions of intentionality, subjectivity, and agency to know if or claim that one can plan and intend such shifts. Nevertheless, there is a promise that lies in moves to validate and think from within a realm that is considered a void, to insist on speaking in terms of a different geometry, and to theorize the very terms according to which such speaking, embodying and defiance

operates.31
What does this have to do with feminist and queer work in relidifferent kinds of trouble we need to look to, and from, sites that have succeeded (however par-

gion ? I suggest that in order to get into

tially or potentially) at shifting specific aspects of normativity, not because they provide blueprints for whatever issues other perspectives seek to address, but because they may provide useful case studies for altering (recalibrating) our tools of detection-for shifting our attention, for example, from attempts to finding a better norm to sustained attention to the very normativities which form, reproduce and shift within the fields of our interactions-and the interactions of at
contradictory norms. reworking produces previously unimaginable alliances and requires multiple geometries and points of vision to be variously disturbed. Expanding the very meaning of what counts as valuable bodies (to invoke Butler with whom I began this paper) will, without a doubt, get us into more, and different kinds of, trouble. But, finally to answer the other questions I asked earlier: yes, it definitely would be
Such worthwhile.
times

resignifying the symbolic domain. The rhetoric and moral vocabulary deployed by a (democratic) president in the devaluing of welfare-bodies, it seems to me, operates in a register heretofore unimaginable. I thank Traci West for pushing me to think more explicitly about these particularly important conneccesses

of

tions. 31.
or

This is also

task that all of

us—physicists, womanists, ethicists, feminists

queers—may want to take seriously. What I am suggesting is not an approach to ethics which draws on experience (and that is something that Cannon would, I think, criticize about my appropriation). Even if—or precisely because—we may have no clue what living in a specifically different geometry is like, we need to refuse to trust that our tools of detection are capable of describing it, or are the only tools of detection out there—what we can see in specific alliances will be

produced in those specific sites where norms reinforce, contradict and undo each
other.