CONVERSATION

is our BLOG for the All School Conference. 

Please take time to read at least ONE of the articles from theologians who have written about our conference topics HERE. After reading and thinking about the topics, we want to hear from you! What specific ideas do you hope our Keynote Speakers address? What questions should we investigate further in our small groups? Please post below. We’re listening…

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West’s Black Bisexual Ethics

West calls for us to decolonize our own theology by challenging the hegemonic hold that white theology – and, one might argue, the cult of whiteness itself – claims over Christian teachings and practices. We cannot afford to pretend that toxic theologies of supremacy – white supremacy, heterosexual supremacy, cisgender supremacy – do not have concrete and destructive impacts on embodied lives, particularly the lives of black and brown people. The devaluation of the “other” that allows for a belief in the “white entitlement to the status of permanent cultural insider (16), is problematic on its face and devastating in its consequences. It is our job, both as people who claim to be responsible academics and engaged, faithful Christians, to deny and defy these principles and practices.

West proposes a form of anti-violence Christian ethic which she calls a black bisexual queering. In the face of a reality wherein violence against black trans women is at an all-time high, West sees queering as the “destabilizing [of] norms of domination,” and further, as rejecting “any sexual or racial identity category as a static or morally praiseworthy standard” (18). West calls for a “shared values of respect, equality and wholeness” (22). However, I would argue that there is often a fetishization of equality, to our detriment. We must commit, therefore, to an ethic which moves beyond the ideology (idolatry?) of equality into one of equity. Targeted communities do not need the same “equal” treatment as those living in safety; they require the equitable protections that lead to the same outcome of living in safety – even if it requires more effort, financial commitments, legislation, etc.

Ultimately, our commitment to an ethical framework is a commitment to living with one another in community. I would argue that an ethic which doesn’t serve the marginalized is not an ethic worth the paper it’s written on. As we work to engage in work that is meaningful, life-giving, and significant, let us keep that always in mind.

Imagine in New Ways

In Dr. Amaryah Shaye Armstrong’s article “Thinking Practice: Method, Pedagogy, Power and the Question of a Black Queer Theology” I was stirred by Armstrong’s analysis of the imagination and how our imagination is formed. Armstrong writes that theology, “concerns how our imaginations of what is of the utmost value – what is worthy of our time, attention and devotion – do or should shape our lives.” (8-9)  What we understand to be important in our lives or what shows up to us as having value is uniquely linked to what we can imagine about ourselves and the world. Theology, in our context at Yale Divinity School, is certainly one element that shapes our imagination, but so do the circumstances we are thrown into whether it be historical, sociological, or political etc. These circumstances give us assumptions about how the world is or about who we are constricting our imagination to a narrow understanding of ourselves and others. It is only when we are confronted with the unsettling reality that our imagination is built on assumptions that are harmful to marginalized communities and ourselves is the moment where we are able to start James Baldwin’s challenge to “do our first works over.” During this conference I hope we as a student body can take seriously Dr. Armstrong’s suggestion of finding new discourse in a/theological thought so that we can imagine in new ways. I hope in disrupting our imagination and then initiating a new one we can break down and let go of the assumptions that have been given to us by the oppressive systems of the world. In discussion and developing what it looks like to imagine outside of what we have inherited, I hope we will be able to choose ourselves for the first time free of constraints on our imagination and, in so doing, imagine a new community together.

Community Compost

As we head into this conference, I’m being held by–or perhaps not yet released from–Armstrong’s question in “Thinking Practice”: “What has to die in our theology in order for a black queer theology to live?

Armstrong offers a few starting points. To interrogate our methods and pedagogy as sites of power, and therefore as potential sites of justice. To recognize how Christian “theological imagination is inseparable from modernity’s racial imagination.” And to stop treating blackness and queerness as merely trendy add-ons to theological discourse. The deaths found in critically analyzing these could be the fertile soil, per Baldwin via Armstrong, of doing our “first works over.” It seems then that our task–as common but unequal inheritors of a tradition of theology that has long survived on structures of inequity and whiteness–is to survey what we practice and what we possess, to determine what is waste, and then to reimagine that dead material as the necessary for growth. Just how are we to handle the inedible egg shells, the poisonous fruit pits, and the spent coffee grounds of our desire for authority, for power that comes with whiteness, and for relevance? If this composting metaphor holds and I can invite you into my mind and into my memories of turning tall, smelly piles of a community compost in the summer heat: it will require some skill, it will look and smell ugly for a long while, and it is best handled with other people.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to considering this question further with all of you. As Armstrong notes, “This power of accepting dying ‘as a life process’ becomes a lesson in thought–an occasion for study.”

 

Imagining Theology

After reading Armstrong’s article, I was hesitant to write a response because I feared that my public musings on the topic, and my particular questions, would do more to recenter whiteness in the conversation than adequately attend to what Armstrong has written. My concerns- that of a straight, white woman, certainly are rooted in my positionality, and my key question lies in the role of whiteness in these conversations. How can I genuinely engage in theology that is rooted in blackness and queerness, and not recenter the conversation around whiteness. I wonder, too, if by writing this blog post I have again centered my white experience.

And yet, I think I would be remiss to not engage with the ideas presented here. I am only able to speak from my own experience, and it is important that I recognize this and wrestle with this as I enter the conversation. For so long, white, straight theology has been touted as the norm, as the basic, orthodox theology. However, we know that this does not capture the totality of the human imagination of the divine, and quite often these limited vantage points have been wrapped up in dangerous and dehumanizing imaginings of human relationship. Theology, in its most basic form, is the practice of imagining the divine, and speaking about what a relationship with the divine looks like. As Armstrong says, “[Theology] is, in large part, a process of evaluating how what is imagined is made real. It concerns how our imaginations of what is of the utmost value – what is worthy of our time, attention and devotion – do or should shape our lives.” (8) Here, Armstrong points to the role theology plays in the construction of ethical practice. She goes on to say that “At the same time, however, this very same theological imagination is inseparable from modernity’s racial imagination, and the theological management of race and sexuality is a key component of enduring anti-blackness.To turn these general insights regarding theology into a particular question is to bring together the question of how people are formed by political and theological imagination and the means by which people come to claim and be claimed by others” (9).

We cannot step outside of our own experience, but how do we broaden our ability to become attuned to the imaginings of others? And, furthermore, what is the relationship between identity and experience in the theological imagination?

Listening to the Silence

Renée L. Hill’s article examining multi-faith practices as a valid way of questioning Christian hegemony gave me helpful insight about what posture to adopt in order to find something of God, outside of the language that seeks to confine God.

In particular, I found her way of making listening into an act of agency, and silence into a realm of communication helpful. She writes:

I have come to understand that a Black queer feminist theological
method means being committed to listening deeply to silences, those
of both self and community. Sometimes we commit to breaking those
silences. And sometimes we must seek to understand these silences
as short-termed tactics in longer-termed strategies in struggles for
liberation. A Black queer feminist methodology also requires us to listen
for silences as places in which persistent and ongoing oppression lingers.

One of the first things I realized when I was at YDS was that I had become a listener in a new way. I started to recognize that I had physical postures of listening. I had never been part of a community where I heard so many real voices digesting their experiences all the time. I have been so grateful to join this concert of voices in the middle of a time in media where so many voices seem so shrill. And yet, I always wish that I could know what more to do than listen, or how I could listen better to everything that I hear.

I have never before encountered the idea of listening to silence, rather than speech, as part of the work of understanding resistance. Hill compels me not to seek silence as a way of avoiding speech, but to respect silence, both enforced and chosen, as heavy work, and to offer places for silence to transform into speech, with lots of room for the fullness of the silence to make change.

Hill further writes:

The contradictions and complexities that I live in, that we all live in,
challenge us to redefine and reclaim that which has been taken from
us, that which has been defined for us by those who would rather we
did not exist. Theology is not the sole possession of the Church or any
other religious institution, although it might be found there.

By listening, by opening more places for silence to take hold of us, to let us all sit without trying to explain, to sit in the silence of our bodies, to comprehend the physical postures that we all bring with us to defend ourselves against the words we here, the clothes and the companions and the caffeine that help us all figure out how to raise our voices–what happens when we stare down someone else’s silence, when we let their silence take hold of us, without explanation, for a moment, so that God and we can meet outside of the words that so many people control?

What could we do to offer each other more healthy spaces of silence, more places for our Godselves to show up and commune, before we get back to explanation? What could we do to recognize all of the weight that shows up in those who are not allowed, or do not dare to speak? How would it change us?

Ceremony>capitalism

After reading Ashton Crawley’s “Held in the Vestibule,” I told myself, Self, you need to go meet with some professors to figure out what this human is doing so you know how to find more of it. This is as precise as I can be about what’s happening here: He weaves together an economic understanding of the Body–which bodies, what they’re good for, what they are wonderfully “useless” for, how they can be a living rejection of capitalism–with theologically informed takes on the connective tissue between blackpentecostalism and blackqueerness, namely a flagrant, exultant embrace of excess, the fully fleshed body, and the kind of performance you can lose yourself in.

I am reminded in the recesses of my queer little heart that what I most deeply desire is perfectly aligned with my fullest self-expression. Needs and wants are not so different in the queer, queer heart when the world anathematizes my desire, for my self, for my body, for other. But let’s not overaggregate our data here. I want to appreciate the very specifically Blackqueer context, audience, and authorship at the center of this paper, with this great line: “…to riff on Hortense Spillers, that if the black church did not have us, we would have to be invented.”

The world will not be all right without queerness. Both for the fact of us and what it means when the world tries to scrub queerness from its face. And blackqueerness offers something singular because of its convergence of identities that share in exile, non-normativity, strangeness…two ways of being set against the world by the world and yet they “mutually constitute” in an “affectional set of intensities.” Double self-love in the face of impossibility is maximum combustion.

Crawley offers an invitation, I think, for everyone to participate at some level: “To practice directing as excess is to attempt to approach radical humility. It feels like a lot to relinquish manhood and masculinity for the joy of the unknown.”

Racialization and capitalism are working double time, in an ensemble, to deny the value of the economic zero of flamboyance. Crawley, with the work of Sylvia Wynter, offers an antidote in the form of Ceremony, based in queerspace and queertime, that rejects hierarchy and the impulse to purify and taxonomize.

That is what my heart needs this weekend. That the talks and small groups and social events will be transformative and engaging is a given at this point. I most fervently desire for the consummate experience to lift up and out and down and around in collective exuberance, like one big improvisational performance, that reminds me of the spiritual potency of queerness, of blackqueerness, of otherwise, and to be in communion with others as we witness and create that together.

 

Method in Theology

James Baldwin tells us to do our first works over. That’s the theme of this year’s all school conference and a call to which Amaryah Shaye Armstrong references as fundamental in “Thinking Practice: Method, Pedagogy, Power and the Question of a Black Queer Theology.” Thankfully, I have been forced to do my first works over at YDS when confronted by the sheer abundance of life and faith which have met me in the minds and bodies of my black and queer friends.

Armstrong writes that the point of doing our first works over is “to make our words more adequate to our realities and imaginations of life, death and God.” It is truth-telling with regard to our history and our selves. The truth of my reality and its relationship with death is that I too am near death – the death of the “we” and the “us” and the “our” in Armstrong’s article – death at my hands. I have been socialized for and inhabit white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, Christian identities. My social and imaginative world has given me and continues to offer the same thing it has for centuries: power and security (corrupt power and false security; it remains the goal nevertheless). It is still mine for the receiving.

Given these difficulties articulated by Armstrong, what is my role in ongoing theological discourse and imagination? How do I participate in or facilitate Christian theological discourse capable “of funding a black queer theological imagination” or which “does justice to the black social world and imagination that black life and death witnesses to?”

On the Partition between Description and Norms

The question I’d love to examine deeper this All School Conference emerges from discussions Professor Clifton Granby has been facilitating in (at least) the two classes I have taken with him (Virtue, Vice, and Epistemic Injustice; and Experience in Ethics). In both, we have started with “foundational” critical texts that examine the particular phenomenon (whether epistemic injustice or experience) theoretically. These texts are often (but not always) a step removed from vivid and thick description and are usually clouded by a swirl of analytic distinctions, consequences, and ripostes against methods. In other words, they operate in the headspace of norms: the class abstracts the subject at hand (epistemic injustice, experience) so we can wrestle with it as an object of analysis. This is often followed by what I have come to characterize as “the problematizing turn,” where theoretical discussion of norms is eclipsed by thick descriptive accounts of what a subject testifies to experiencing. Emphasis is given to the opposite end: to the experience of the subject in this space, surrounded by these contextual details, formed by experiences that are unique to each individual. The tension between the two stances is not easy to reconcile. The abstracted comes from a place of experience and context, and the descriptive is evaluative even as it describes. It is less a matter of picking a stance, and more of noticing how each stance is deeply indebted to, and in need of, the seemingly opposed stance, in order to render an account. However, a tension often exists in the academy between descriptive and normative analysis.

I see this tension at work in Dr. Craig Ford’s review Jeffrey McCune’s Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing. Ford highlights how DL men and McCune, who writes about them, are already in the midst of this mix of description and norms. Media engagement about DL men is constituted around panic, a panic which then causally constructs further stigmatization of both black men and women. Engaging with this reality requires overcoming one’s personal or cultural “selective amnesia,” naming and interpreting this panic that stigmatizes as one of the diffusive consequences of heterosexism or white queer subjectivity. As Dr. Ford notices, these normative heuristics guide McCune’s description of DL men’s “architextures” even as it attempts a critical distance from normative claims. As Dr. Ford concludes: “This would seem to involve a veritable balancing act, since, on the one hand, ethicists would certainly want to address the heterosexism and misogyny written into the architexture of DL spaces, but, on the other, they also wish to be mindful of the fact that DL spaces are enclaves of resistance and pleasure excavated out of an abjecting heterosexual culture.”

My question centers on this balancing act. It seems that descriptive and normative methods are theoretically at odds. However, description is always informed in previous normative assumptions, and norms are always informed by a context. This distinction in method seems to partition experience even as contextualizes or assesses experience. How can students integrate this balancing act into our own writing and scholarship? It seems that doing our first works over means we have to seriously engage with the partition that exists in the academy between descriptive and normative analysis. How do we virtuously engage in this work?

Does Black Queer Theology Fulfill Black Theology?

An Aside: Armstrong starts her article off with a quote from Audre Lorde: “There is no room around me in which to be still…?” Those eleven words hit me in the feels. It is hard to find a moment to be still and be, and if I’m being honest, it’s been hard to find a moment to take time to read any of these articles for the All School Conference, but I’m so glad I did. I’m glad that both the words of Lorde and Armstrong have reminded me that “we cannot afford to elevate our lives above examination”(14), and I hope this post encourages you to read and wrestle with your own questions alongside me.

I could write about so many things this article brought up for me, but I will keep this post short because 1) Ain’t nobody got time to write super long blog posts in the middle of the school day, and 2) I look forward to continue engaging with these thoughts and questions in-person with y’all at the All School Conference ;). 

The quote that stuck out to me was on page eight, when Armstrong writes, “A common way of bringing race, sexuality and theology together is to begin by positing queerness as fulfilling blackness in some way.” Immediately my mind jumps to the words of Jesus, “I have not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). Armstrong writes that she believes the approach of seeing queerness as fulfilling blackness as one that “casts [blackness] as incomplete..too primitive, too backwards” (8), making clear the dangers of positing queerness against theology, yet her discussion makes me curious about how one might imagine the relationship between black queer theology and black theology. I am wondering what Armstrong, and y’all–my beautiful classmates–would think about the claim: Black queer theology has come not to abolish black theology but to fulfill it. After reading this article, it makes me think about the important work that black theologians have done, and how that work can be made even more full (dare I say fulfilled)  by the types of questions being asked and perspectives/life experiences held by black queer theologians. Just as Jesus came not in opposition to the truths spoken by the Hebrew prophets, but to reveal even deeper truths, may not black queer theology operate similarly–to come alongside black theology and uncover the possibilities of even deeper truths? What is lost in a claim like this? What is gained?

My Experience In Deconstruction

I’ve been thinking about how difficult it feels, and how much fear I have around engaging with black queer theology. Where does this come from? Why do I hesitate to embrace? I suspect because it calls me to change very deep parts of my understanding and expression of ‘self’. This assignment highlights how important it is for me to continue forth with the work of deconstructing the whiteness, and heteronormativity that is embedded in my history, in my theology, in my bones, in my imagination, and inevitably in the way I see and treat people. Dr. Armstrong writes “we cannot afford to elevate our lives above examination” and it strikes at the heart of my hesitancy. My hope is that in naming, bracketing, and setting aside my self centered fear of difference and fear of change, I can begin to discover and “make room to displace Christian hegemony in black queer theological discourse.” If I understand death as a ‘living process’, faith should assure me that there is joy, and great fruits in doing my first works over, continually undoing so that I may redo.  If the central message of Christianity is liberation of the oppressed, my journey to the cross involves letting large parts of myself, and my culture die to bring that truth to light. In this work I have the opportunity to transcend the confessional, making room in myself and in the communities I am a part of for black queer people and theological practice to liberate and flourish.

Recent Comments

Imagining Theology

After reading Armstrong's article, I was hesitant to write a response because I feared that my public musings on the topic, and my particular questions, would do more to recenter whiteness in the conversation than adequately attend to what Armstrong has written. My...

West’s Black Bisexual Ethics

West calls for us to decolonize our own theology by challenging the hegemonic hold that white theology – and, one might argue, the cult of whiteness itself – claims over Christian teachings and practices. We cannot afford to pretend that toxic theologies of supremacy...

Let’s Hear from YOU

The vision for our all school conference is not merely to discuss the subject of black queer theology. We intend to look through the three lenses of blackness, sexuality, and the sacred to imagine how our own theologies and traditions consider and engage the realities...

Imagine in New Ways

In Dr. Amaryah Shaye Armstrong's article "Thinking Practice: Method, Pedagogy, Power and the Question of a Black Queer Theology" I was stirred by Armstrong's analysis of the imagination and how our imagination is formed. Armstrong writes that theology, "concerns how...

Community Compost

As we head into this conference, I'm being held by--or perhaps not yet released from--Armstrong's question in "Thinking Practice": "What has to die in our theology in order for a black queer theology to live?" Armstrong offers a few starting points. To interrogate our...

Method in Theology

James Baldwin tells us to do our first works over. That’s the theme of this year’s all school conference and a call to which Amaryah Shaye Armstrong references as fundamental in “Thinking Practice: Method, Pedagogy, Power and the Question of a Black Queer Theology.”...

Listening to the Silence

Renée L. Hill's article examining multi-faith practices as a valid way of questioning Christian hegemony gave me helpful insight about what posture to adopt in order to find something of God, outside of the language that seeks to confine God. In particular, I found...

All School Conference 2019!

Our annual All School Conference returns this fall. Building on the foundation and momentum of the Dr. M. Shawn Copeland lectures and luncheons, this two-day conference is the brainchild of Professor Linn Tonstad (Faculty Advisor) and Dean Jeanne Peloso. They wanted a...

Does Black Queer Theology Fulfill Black Theology?

An Aside: Armstrong starts her article off with a quote from Audre Lorde: “There is no room around me in which to be still...?” Those eleven words hit me in the feels. It is hard to find a moment to be still and be, and if I’m being honest, it’s been hard to find a...

On the Partition between Description and Norms

The question I'd love to examine deeper this All School Conference emerges from discussions Professor Clifton Granby has been facilitating in (at least) the two classes I have taken with him (Virtue, Vice, and Epistemic Injustice; and Experience in Ethics). In both,...