69: Queer Faith, Queer Love [yes, it was Panel 69, I’m not making this
up—jbl]
This was one of the many
panels the membership of which was altered by severe weather. Kris Trujillo was
stuck in the air, and Eric Selinger was attending by phone. About 20 people
were in the audience.
Carrie Shanafelt began her talk on “Jeremy Bentham’s Queer Christ” by
addressing the current thinking about queer sex. Queer sex, it is said, is
Defiantly Useless in the face of the order in which sexual desire serves to
perpetuate patriarchy. Queer scholars in the tradition of Lee Edelman refuse to
instrumentalize pleasure; in the wake of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s God Between Their Lips, they assert that
the queer subject is put beyond discourse. In a friendly addendum to the
monasticism of queer discourse, CS wants to present an excerpt from her Bentham
project. All this uselessness prompts the question, What is utility? Utility to what end? In Bentham, the end is not
economic productivity or bare life or the bourgeois order: it’s the greatest
happiness for the greatest number, among whom Bentham explicitly includes
women, disabled people, people of color, and sexual minorities.
Bentham approaches queer sexuality from a great many angles and in
less-than-flowing prose: he says he wishes for a great literary author like
Beckford (then in exile for sodomy) to help him convey his ideas. He finds
himself mobilizing an excess of methodologies to defend sexual freedom.
Bentham’s Not Paul but Jesus, as
published, is 500 pages refuting Paul and dismissing such Pauline ideas as the
antichrist, asceticism, and self-denial. But Bentham originally intended for it
to include more Jesus, depicting Jesus as a champion and practitioner of queer
sex. To Bentham, Christ is a prophet and apostle of noneconomic pleasure, Who’s
entirely at odds with colonialism, patriarchy, and empire: He encouraged His followers
not to surrender their capacity for pleasure to those institutions. The
religion of Jesus has been perverted into a religion of self-denial used for
dominance, which saddened Bentham much as the results of the U.S. and French
revolutions had saddened him by ultimately creating new small dominant groups.
Bentham is trying to understand the reason for homophobic violence—vide Paul Kelleher’s Making Love on how love became more
heteronormative in c18 literature—and points out, We don’t gang up to attack
drunks: their pleasure costs money, which entitles them to enjoyment. Queer
sexual pleasure somehow becomes associated with love, luxury, and an excess of
pleasure; but if it were a luxury
good and fit into the capitalist order, Bentham observes, no one would begrudge
it. Unlike Old Testament prophets who tended to use miracles as witnesses to
the Lord’s power, Jesus instructed His followers not to tell anyone that He had
lessened their suffering: let’s not force pleasure to stand for something
else—let it be an end in itself [Here Shanafelt delivered a great final line
that I did not manage to take down: my notes just say “great final line”—jbl].
Rev. Justin Crisp, the panel’s token theologian, spoke of “Joy and Jouissance:
Mystical Theology and the Ecstatic Politics of Leo Bersani.” He observed that
most early Christian thought about sex is notable for its astonishingly low
expectations. Like queer theory, it dissociates sex from intimacy. The
patristic thinkers find the good of sex outweighed by the sin or the
incontinence associated with it: look at Augustine, for whom even marital sex
bears the mark of sin. Sex, they teach, is not capable of fostering the kind of
intimacy that Christ has with his Church. Couples should have as little sex as
possible: look at Joseph and Mary, according to the doctrine of Mary’s
perpetual virginity. The Eastern church also perpetuates this stigma against
sex: Gregory of Nyssa says God did not originally intend, before the Fall, for
us to reproduce this way and as it is, it just propagates our mortal forms and
ultimately adds to the number of corpses.
Queer theory shares the antipastoralizing attitude of Christianity. Sex to
Freud and Lacan is not about a union with the other but is something more
solipsistic: “There is no sexual relation.” What are its effects on the subject of pleasure? For Bersani and
Laplanche, sex = masochism, the shattering of one’s ego and fantasy of unity
via confrontation with a jouissance .
. . it is a mode of askesis! Christians and psychoanalytic scholars reduce sex
to pleasure and notice how much disciplining has been required to make a
discourse in which it is instead all about reproduction. Consider Tertullian on
ejaculation! Both the Christian and the queer theorist see pleasure as a threat
to the self. Of course, they have different feelings about that self: Augustine
likes it, seeing the self as manifesting reasoned sovereignty over the will.
And we know Bersani’s so not into that.
St. John of the Cross identifies pleasure as problematic not in that it overwhelms the self but because, in pursuing it, we value
attachment and possession, as “Dark Night of the Soul” suggests. These are the
root of the spiritual sins: he enumerates all the self-denials that are made in
the service of egoism. Active asceticism reinforces the very self that must be
destroyed for our union with God. Life makes ascetical selves of us all. The jouissance shows sex as an act of
dispossession rather than possession. It’s compatible with other ascetic
techniques that help us prepare ourselves for grace. Theology opens up a range
of ways jouissance can be
experienced: ego-based agency, for example, is destroyed in a transcendent jouissance. The progressive Christian’s
usual YAY SEX approach has an alternative, uniting two forms of sexual pessimism.
Eric Selinger’s “Abundant Life and Metafictional Aplomb: Deployments of
Christianity in Queer Popular Romance Fiction” looked at the genre that’s
marketed as “M/M romance by straight women for straight women” but that is in
fact by two bisexual women, a gay man, and an asexual individual who’s unsure
about this whole gender concept. One of these novels, Alex Beecroft’s False Colors, contains theological
arguments between two self-punitive 18th century sailors: “Would a
good God have created an appetite within us but forbidden us to satisfy it?”
Beecroft’s Blue Steel Chain actively
disaggregates the generic features of queer romance novels listed by [Roche?].
Invoking Christian discourse, it subverts the association of intimacy with sex.
Whereas Beecroft identifies as a “committed Christian,” Alexis Hall styles
himself a blasphemer. The hero of Hall’s Glitterland
is felled by mental illness and poststructuralism. He and romantic love both
have to be redeemed by a Saviour in the form of an “idiotic glitterpirate from
Essex.” The novel makes overt and oblique allusions to Scripture as well as to
Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, C.S. Lewis, et
alia. Hall celebrates the use of dialect, and Christian discourse here is
to some extent just another lexis.
A member of the audience asked Reverend Justin, Was early Christian
sex-pessimism an aversion to the act of intercourse, to bodies, or to pleasure?
Justin said, Pleasure is that which the ascetical life is supposed to
extinguish. Augustine thinks that the chariot of the passions has run away from
its driver. Pleasure coincides with concupiscence and therefore sin.
Another asked Dr. Shanafelt whether “this Bentham” was accessible to 19th-century
readers. She said no, it’s from just-released notes and drafts. There were
quite a few published Bentham works that suggest
these points, but no it was not. And if you’re interested, the Bentham project
is still seeking help in transcribing millions of words and deciphering his
terrible handwriting. The newly-published stuff is very very messy, but some of
it is so powerful that Shanafelt, reading it on a friend’s porch, fell out of a
hammock. His concern with the rights of women and of sexual minorities is
remarkable; his radical attention to people who are not himself is amazing.
A guy in the audience whose demeanor had reminded me of Narrative Medicine
maven Rita Charon asked about the panelists’ reductionism, specifically the
liberatory potential of reducing sexuality to pleasure, citing a “spiritually
curative orgasm” such as appears in that one painting of Saint Teresa: is there
a difference among these ideals of liberation? Shanafelt said Adam Kotsko had
just blogged that morning about how the punishment of Eve is “And your desire
shall be to your husband”: heterosexuality is a curse. “We fell into
patriarchy,” Not-Rita agreed. Shanafelt paraphrased Bentham saying We can’t
claim that two political equals desiring to have sex with each other is harm,
especially when we don’t even claim that heterosexual intercourse is harm.
Justin said he was trying to make a critique of the liberal Christian take on
sex that’s analogous to the queer critique of foregrounding marriage rights,
but he’s in favor of freedom to
rather than freedom from. What we see
in Saints Teresa and John is freedom to feel joy. But he admitted to liking
prayer more than sex as a route to this jouissance.
A question was posed about affective experience beyond psychic organization.
What about Tomkins and views that assert the primacy of affect? Affect as
characterized by intensity, as opposed to pain/pleasure? I mean, it’s not as if
we lack pleasure under late
capitalism. Justin replied that he’d been thinking hard about Bersani’s attempt
to synthesize the late Foucault and early Freud, and a move into the space of
affect could be very productive. Eric suggested that the asexual hero of Blue Steel Chain may be going back to
that line in Genesis that Augustine said was not about sex but about the societas of the married couple. Then he
asked his copanelists, There’s been a lot more talk about sex and pleasure than
about the “love” in the panel’s title: why is that? As the panel’s time slot
came to an end and I departed, someone was asking about coming-out narratives
and whether this is not a good discursive moment for love and whether there’s
F/F Christian romance fiction . . .
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