Queer Madonnas, Nonviolence, and the Macho Christian Right; or “How to Do Mariology Without Men”

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether Adriana Cavarero’s invocation of the Christian Madonna to inspire a pacifist feminist ethics could help counter the ever-strengthening alliance between Conservative Christianity and the radical right which I refer to as “Macho Christianity.” To flesh out Cavarero’s undeveloped invocation of the Madonna’s love as “non-stereotypical” I turn to queer and non-dominant indigenous Mariologies to provide a novel reading that demonstrates, against the dominant exegetical tradition, the radical absence of normative Man at the heart of the Christian story. This indicates that for too long the normative Man of patriarchy has held Christianity hostage, limiting and contorting its message. In response, I use these alternative Mariologies to develop Cavarero’s “non-stereotypical” love via a novel interpretation of the Christian love of enemies as a nonviolent, militant, performative political practice of interruption, from which less dominatory ways of relating to one another could emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• queer mariology
• Adriana Cavarero
• Macho Christianity
• authoritarian politics
• love of enemies
• erotic love
• maternal love

Introduction

Adriana Cavarero’s recent book Inclinations takes inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. The painting depicts the infant Jesus playing with a lamb alongside his mother Mary who sits in the lap of her mother Anne. Mary and Anne’s figures are depicted as entwined around one another, as Mary gazes at and reaches out towards her son, who in turn bends his head back to look up at her. Cavarero uses this version of the iconic image of a mother inclined over her child to exemplify an ethical relation of interdependency and care that she hopes might counter the violence of patriarchy. In her use of the image, Cavarero distances herself from the religious significance of the painting, arguing that her theorization draws on its evocation of an everyday, ordinary, experience of motherhood. In this article however, I suggest that recognizing the centrality of its Christian significance makes Cavarero’s argument all the more pertinent at this time when, across the globe, Christianity is mobilized in support of violent and exclusionary right-wing politics – a form of politics that I refer to as macho Christianity. The article’s contribution is first to explore whether Cavarero’s deployment of this Marian image as the quintessential symbol of her feminist theorization of “a foundation for peace”¹ could contribute to debates around Mariology and the significance of Christianity today. I argue that acknowledging the specifically Christian significance of this image develops Cavarero’s argument, highlighting the oft-overlooked potential that the Marian tradition offers for intervening in and potentially transforming violent relations. This argument confronts macho Christianity directly by pluralizing the Christian tradition, refusing to cede it to the right, and thereby undermining one of right-wing politics' key mechanisms of legitimacy.

The article’s second contribution lies in its methodology of queering. Although it is not elaborated by Cavarero, I note that her theorization of Madonna’s love shifts from a stereotypical self-sacrificing model of maternal love to a non-self-sacrificing model. In seeking to develop this second model, I suggest it indicates a rather more queer Madonna than we often find in Mariology literature today. Instead of a docile, self-sacrificing servant, we find a serene, un-suffering, “disquieting” woman who is not afraid to follow her own path, even if that means defying her expected gender role.² A woman who, it would seem, will always embody the potential to disrupt and undermine patriarchy’s attempts to hold her hostage. Furthermore, in the context of this collection of essays, asking what it would mean to do political theology without men, queering the role of the Madonna helps us to see the queerness of the other central characters in the Christian story. Neither Jesus nor Joseph are normative “Men” of the sort valorized by patriarchy. As such, I suggest that despite the dominant understanding of Christianity as a deeply patriarchal religion, bringing Madonna’s queerness into focus helps us demonstrate a radical absence of patriarchal Men at the heart of the Christian story.

In taking an approach that emphasizes the ambivalence of what is signified by the Christian Madonna, it is worth asking why she has so often been interpreted as submissive, self-sacrificing, oppressed, or a sexless coercive tool of patriarchy³? Perhaps because we so often draw on sources from within the very patriarchal structures we seek to challenge, which restrict Mary’s radical political potential, converting her and the Christianity of which she is part, into an oppressive force. Given her years of captivity and contortion within the patriarchal structures that are also home to much Christian theology, it is helpful to turn to popular and folk Mariologies if we are to discover more about the potential of this non-stereotypical version of Mary. The lens they provide indicates how the Christian Madonna might offer a potent tool of transformation. Against the stereotypical self-sacrificing Madonna, the queer Madonnas of popular and folk traditions can evoke a performative opening from which to transform oppression through its representation of Mary’s own relationality, and in particular, her sexual identity, underlining an allegiance and sympathy with people’s everyday lives. I observe that the accepting yet ruptural model of love we find in these traditions is less associated with affective maternal love, rooted as it is in a possessive desire for the love object. In considering what other type of love it might invoke I investigate whether it might be derived instead from Mary’s own always overlooked maternal practice, the outcome of which has echoed through the ages in Jesus’ teaching of the love of enemies. My argument thus draws on popular and folk traditions to release the Christian Madonna from captivity by rediscovering her radical potential to counter patriarchal logics, interrupting violent structures and relations to open up possibilities for their transformation via a novel interpretation of love of enemies understood as a practice of interruption.

In making this argument I acknowledge the difficulties of theorizing pacifism and nonviolence, which are both disputed concepts. Whilst Cavarero draws on Levinas to define her project as aiming to construct a “foundation for peace”,⁴ my understanding of pacifism as a way to intervene in and transform violence draws me more towards the term nonviolence, which Judith Butler defines as “a physical assertion of the claims of life … [that seeks to] recast the living as worthy of value”⁵ even as we acknowledge and engage in debates concerning whose lives are valued.⁶ Despite the difficulties of such a task, the urgency to respond to violence is such that we cannot wait for consensus on our terms and instead need to accept the difficulty of securing definitions as we proceed.⁷ For Butler, nonviolence requires us to act, to enter the field of violence but to find strategies to meet, whilst not engaging with violence. The theorization of love of enemies that I develop below is one such strategy.

Mariology against macho Christianity

Cavarero’s application of Leonardo’s painting proceeds from her argument that appreciation of the human disposition for care, peace, and interdependence, is too often missing from patriarchal Western culture. Through history, such a disposition has been subordinated to the assumption that humans are naturally independent, violent, and competitive. She argues that this absence of care from the dominant symbolic tradition is due to the dominance of the male, patriarchal viewpoint that characterizes care, peace, inclination, and dependence as feminine weaknesses that need to be overcome, denied or subordinated. If we can recognize the “everyday”⁸ scene of maternal care as necessary for human life then Cavarero hopes we may use it to beget a “fundamental schematism”⁹ of peace where we would all care for one another, as a mother cares for her child. Cavarero follows Arendt to recognize that human lives are far more interconnected – as demonstrated by the interwoven female figures in Leonardo’s image – than acknowledged by the patriarchal ideal of the upright, independent, adult male individual. Rather than upright and aloof, the maternal image illustrates how human beings so often actually and analogously, incline, or lean over and towards one another, as we move through our lives.¹⁰

Cavarero insists that her ethics of inclination is exemplified most strongly, not by any mother and child relationship but specifically by the image of the Madonna in the aforementioned painting. Although it may seem like a stereotypical image to us, Leonardo’s composition of the image, according to Cavarero, subverted the dominant convention which required Jesus to be seated on Mary’s lap with both figures facing outwards. The same convention dictated that all figures should be structured vertically. In contrast, Leonardo portrays them inclined around each other, responding to each other’s gaze. Cavarero thus selects this image due to its emphasis on the human aspect of the relationships portrayed. She does not seek to harness the Madonna and child icon as a religious image, but as an easily recognizable cultural image of motherhood.

Despite Cavarero seeking to distance herself from the religious significance of this image she argues that the love characteristic of an ethic of inclination is an “enigmatic” love as demonstrated in Madonna’s facial expression,¹¹ I argue that the sense of mystery she evokes here is romantic, poetic, but, given its context, can never be totally separated from the spiritual. Indeed, the curling river that wends its way from background to foreground, from the heavens to the feet of the painted figures, could be taken to demonstrate the spiritual aspect of the relationship between humans and the earth.¹² Its depiction of figures central to the Christian story mean that it could be interpreted to show a specifically Christian formulation of a spiritually-founded ethical relationship of care for the other. In addition, the composition of this image does, as Cavarero emphasizes, show Madonna’s relationship to her child as profoundly more human than convention dictated, a trait for which Leonardo was renowned. Yet, for that exact same reason, I suggest his painting renders the sacred aspect of these figures even more intensely than much other religious art since the emotive experience of the religious story is communicated in such human terms. The infant Jesus is portrayed leaning away from his mother and towards a lamb, which as Cavarero notes represents his future crucifixion.¹³ Whilst Cavarero first suggests Mary leans over her child “as if to spare him from his fate”¹⁴ she later suggests that Mary is “serene” and that her face “almost shows a smile.”¹⁵ I note further that the infant Jesus looks back at his mother’s face for reassurance as her softly curved hand and poignant expression gently and ambivalently supports him as he reaches to grasp this symbol of his destiny. Dwelling on this interaction between the lamb, the child, and his mother, I push Cavarero’s interpretation to suggest that the image is unavoidably religious in Leonardo’s heart-wrenching combination of the sacred with the human.

I suggest that retaining the Christian significance of Leonardo’s painting renders Cavarero’s motivation to provide a female-centered imaginary of peace against the violence of the world even more striking, since at our current time Christianity is often mobilized in support of a growing movement of violent and exclusionary right-wing politics. Across the globe,this politics blends Christianity with nationalism and neoliberal economics, authoritarian leadership, condemnation of democracy, misogyny, and homophobia.¹⁶ Variously referred to as new right, alt-right or right-wing populist by scholars, it is first characterized by a certain caricatured macho male identity (perhaps most clearly epitomized by leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Vladimir Putin); and second, frequently describes itself as Christian or rooted within a Christian tradition. I therefore refer to this phenomenon as “macho Christianity.”¹⁷

Although scholars agree that right-wing invocation of Christianity is merely instrumental rather than inspired by theology or faith, Christianity still features prominently in right-wing rhetoric as a means of legitimation,¹⁸ helping to construct a common cultural identity to provide a veneer of naturalness and authenticity. This helps distinguish the identity of its supporters from immigrants and foreigners who, in the main, are associated with Islam, and sometimes with Judaism. In addition, references to Christianity are thought to help ensure acquiescence from church leaders. Although it is evident that any counter-theology derived from queer Mariology would be of no interest to macho right-wing Christians, my aim is more to theorize a tool to counter right-wing Christianity than an attempt to convert its supporters.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to acknowledge an obvious obstacle that Mariology might face in countering right-wing politics. The utility of Cavarero’s argument would vary depending on the forms of Christianity espoused. Although the global turn to the right encompasses various Christian denominations, it is still the case that the Christianity espoused by right-wing parties in the US and Northern Europe is more likely to be Protestant whilst in Central and Southern America and Europe it is more likely to be Catholic. Despite deep divisions between these groups, cooperation is growing even amongst those who hold right-wing political views.¹⁹ However, Mary remains a particularly divisive figure. Whilst Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians venerate Mary and may be more open to an argument for pacifism derived from the Madonna figure, Protestants are less enthusiastic about Mary’s role, and evangelical Protestants are often deeply suspicious of what they might claim to be a Catholic and Orthodox Marian “cult.” Whilst recognizing these differences, I argue that Cavarero’s Mariology offers insights into the Christian faith that extend beyond the figure of Mary and therefore that my turn to Mariology may offer a resource against macho Christianity that can appeal across and beyond Christian denominations.

From sins of the fathers to love of the mothers

To begin, it is helpful to clarify Cavarero’s argument by responding to some obvious concerns. First, Cavarero acknowledges that she may be accused of employing an outdated stereotype in a way that could be damaging to women’s rights. Her model of maternity, exemplified in maternal care, could be taken to imply that a mother’s role is solely to care for her family. Her argument that motherhood exemplifies what is distinctive about female experience could be taken to imply that women should bear children. Her claim that women can be associated with inclined posture could be interpreted to mean that women should incline which is – in the patriarchal symbolic order – understood to signify subordination, physical labor, discomfort, inferiority.

Furthermore, utilizing the deeply controversial religious figure of the Virgin Mary risks entrenching what already appears to be this stereotypical model of maternal love in an institutionalized history of oppression and abuse of women and minorities. The Christian Madonna has been invoked to justify oppression, imperialism, massacres, sexism, misogyny, submissiveness, and abuse of all kinds.²⁰ Marian worship will always be haunted by its associations with a violent history of fascism, colonialism, and authoritarianism, used for centuries to justify the sins of the fathers and chastise and oppress women or girls who are seen to have strayed from the Virgin’s pure example. In stark contrast to Cavarero’s argument that the Madonna’s relationship to her child exemplifies everyday motherhood Althaus-Reid argues that the Virgin Mary is actually “a woman who does not reflect the human experience of womankind in the least.”²¹ She is a

stone-hymned icon against which generations of young women have crashed their heads and their hearts in infinite desolation and terminal sadness. We have made of her the lust-killer, the destroyer of surplus pleasures and the legal clause of woman as property in family structures.²²

Althaus-Reid’s Madonna is a tool of patriarchal capitalism; a phallus of male power hidden beneath her painted, plaster skirts.²³ Her collusion with patriarchal violence makes her the ideal poster girl for the macho Christian project and thus appears to pose a challenge to anyone wishing to use her to counter it.

Cavarero, however, insists that she does not intend to use the maternal image of the Madonna to reinforce gender stereotypes and hierarchies.²⁴ She is not claiming that women ought to bear children, ought to be caring, ought to recognize human interdependency or ought to incline towards others. Instead, she observes that according to “ordinary experience” through childbirth and motherhood, women do bear children, they do care for them,²⁵ and they are prompted by their experiences to confront the way that their lives are crisscrossed with relations of dependency. Thus, for Cavarero, the maternal female experience is a potent, accessible resource that can help inspire a politics of nonviolence, and the image, she argues, that most encapsulates this female experience is an image of the Christian Madonna. Methodologically, Cavarero thus aims to exaggerate the stereotypes that patriarchy has constructed of women as caring and motherly in order to deploy them against it.

Yet crucially, although unnoticed by commentators, following her reading of Levinas, I note that Cavarero’s Madonna becomes less stereotypical. Although her first references to the image of the Virgin and child emphasize Madonna’s love as self-sacrificing,²⁶ after reading Levinas, Cavarero transforms this into an altruistic love that does not appear to be self-sacrificing. Instead, it is “a type of altruism that is not abnegation and martyrdom, suffering, and renunciation.”²⁷ It would seem that as long as maternal love remains self-sacrificing it can be subordinated within patriarchy. However, when it rejects self-sacrifice it

presents itself as unusual, problematic … a sure and practical love, so every day and spontaneous that it does not express signs of suffering or self-sacrifice, and even less of excessive self-awareness.²⁸

The promise that this second Madonna is neither stereotypical nor self-sacrificing appears in startling juxtaposition to much of the Marian tradition. Although Cavarero describes Mary’s “problematic” love as calm, confident, relaxed, gentle, yet exuding strength in its self-assuredness she has not developed this model of maternal love in any more detail. She merely tells us that we should rethink our assumption that this is a stereotypical form of altruism.²⁹ In attending to this task, I begin by re-examining Cavarero’s description of this so-called non-self-sacrificing form of love and then seek to further elucidate this description by locating the Marian tradition from which it is drawn.

Beginning with Cavarero’s description, I note another feature that has not yet merited discussion. Cavarero’s development of the second, non-self-sacrificing love is inspired by her reading of Levinas’s example of a mother who fears for the life of her child.³⁰ Crucially, for Levinas, this love is “non-concupiscent.” His aim in distinguishing between concupiscent and non-concupiscent love was to distinguish a concept of selfless love from the violence of selfish interest and objectification that can be entangled in our love relationships.³¹ Although Cavarero notes that inclined love has always been identified as erotic by the patriarchal philosophical tradition, she opts to follow Levinas and proposes that the love associated with her inclined ethics must be non-concupiscent which she specifies excludes the erotic.³² Although she does not elaborate her reasons, it can be assumed that the absence of eros is necessary for Cavarero because of the strong relationship between eros and violence that she identifies in Horrorism. Thus, to inspire peace she assumes we need a model of love that does not entail violence.

However, I am concerned that this turn to maternal love may not provide the bulwark against violence that Cavarero seeks. Indeed, Cavarero recognizes the ambivalence of maternal care. She argues that the maternal scene – like the Levinasian encounter that inspires it – presents a dilemma in the form of responsibility to either respond to the other with care or violence.³³ However, she argues that in most cases “according to ordinary experience” a mother does care for her child in response to its vulnerability³⁴ and if we could recognize that all humans are vulnerable to one another, then we may be more likely to respond to future encounters with care rather than violence. Nonetheless, it is not clear what determines our response to the dilemma.³⁵ Although Cavarero seeks an ordinary, everyday, human love for her ethics of nonviolence to make it approachable, I am concerned that it may take something more extraordinary to counter violence.

To investigate this concern more carefully we need to elaborate Cavarero’s non-stereotypical and non-self-sacrificing love to understand how it might provide a counter to the violence of patriarchy. Given that it is embodied by the Christian Madonna is it perhaps possible that we can uncover more about this love if we identify the Marian tradition from which it is derived? It is notable that despite Althaus-Reid’s pessimism, the Christian figure of Mary has proved an emancipatory, empowering, and protective figure for the vulnerable “the oppressed, the poor, the indigenous and women.”³⁶ This is recognized by the emerging field of what is termed queer Mariology³⁷ which argues that Mary can prove a resource against patriarchal and sexual oppression, heteronormative reason, gender, and family relations. This is not to ignore the concerns raised by Althaus-Reid and others, but to recognize that Mariology provides access to a multiplicity of narratives and with them multiple possibilities for human relationality. Let us turn then to consider who this queer Madonna might be.

Queer Madonnas

Our starting point is the observation that even within the confines of the approved teaching of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, we can find a less conservative Madonna than Cavarero’s – particularly in terms of gender or what Althaus-Reid refers to as her “unwomanly” aspects. Mary is an unusual woman. A woman, so-called, who not only speaks with angels but is pregnant without the obvious presence of a man, transmitting no human ties of patriarchal kinship to her child through blood. She is betrothed, not married; appears as a disloyal fiancée, and disobedient daughter; she is often depicted in an inclined posture, cradling her baby, but also at other times upright, awkwardly clutching a wriggling infant; proffering or brandishing her baby forward into the world. This Madonna rejects the authority of patriarchy, of kinship and cultural expectations. Her queer maternity raises a son who will refuse to favor his family over others, including his enemies. She also rejects the property laws by which her son should have a blood father from whom to inherit wealth and prestige. There is an unruliness here that runs counter to any attempt to institutionalize the Madonna as subservient, controlled, or dominated.

This is not just a story of a queer Madonna but in recognizing how queer this orthodox Madonna is, we bring into focus two other queer characters in this story. If we add Joseph and Jesus to the image of the Madonna, we see even more strongly that Madonna’s child is a child with no lineage, despite the inability of biblical texts to comprehend this, insisting on the importance of Joseph’s lineage from Adam. But the child is not Joseph’s child. There is here a queer patronage – the patronage of name bestowed without blood tie to break the line of Adam. The man who was never born is superseded by the man who will never die. Here Joseph is portrayed as a man with perhaps no procreative powers of blood. A man often portrayed inclined over his work. A man who willingly relinquished blood ties to play a supporting, ignominious role. In the doctrine that Jesus is both human and God we have an insistence that he is a human man like no other. Born from a woman but without a biological father. A man who cannot be overcome by death. A man whose love is not bounded, loving not just his family, his friends, but his enemies too. Here we have two men who challenge the stereotypical macho Male identity. Indeed, there is a radical absence of normative human men at the heart of the Christian story, which is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

Due to the context of today’s so-called culture wars and the divisive, hyper-aggressive politics of post-truth, leading to an increasingly fragmented and polarized social existence, it is necessary to clarify that what I refer to as the absence of Man at the heart of Christianity is not to denigrate or exclude men. In clarifying her sexual difference feminism Cavarero explained that her understanding of the term woman does not assume an essential female identity as much as names the identity of those who do not identify and are not identified as men – whose experiences from living as not men have often been ignored by the dominant view that has shaped our culture, and as such can offer valuable and novel insight into how we might transform that culture.³⁸ Developing this concept of the non-man from Cavarero in a way that avoids the perceived exclusivity of the term “woman,” I seek to apply it in the capitalized formulation non-Man to help us articulate the chasm between the hyper-masculine parody that masculinity becomes in the macho Man identity so prevalent in macho Christianity. This process of exaggeration has been further exacerbated in recent years due to the proliferation of misogynistic and sexist views on social media and in popular culture which renders a peaceable, gentle, caring masculinity all but invisible in our contemporary world. In this sense, the perspective of the “non-Man” provides a place from which to critique the exaggerated stereotype of masculinity that patriarchy thrives upon, whilst also emphasizing that against all conventional understandings of Christianity, what we might understand to be normative human Men are not central to the Christian story at all. Queering the Madonna reminds us, through Mary’s biography, that loving God can never equate to obeying Man, since God’s way is the opposite of Man’s. To love God is to disobey Man and to obey Man is to reject God. Madonna’s unruly love destabilizes the violence upon which patriarchy is based refusing to accept patriarchal limits on what is deemed possible.

Furthermore, the Queer Madonna does not just provide examples of alternative gender identities. The Queer Madonna and her queer spouse challenge gendering within relationships too. We see here a woman, unlike all women before or since, in some form of partnership with a man that, according to orthodox teaching, she never had sex with; and a man that seems to oppose gender stereotypes too. Thus, rather than the property, blood, and land, of the patriarchal order we have here an other mother, and an other father, who rupture what it is to parent for patriarchy. Central to the ability to disrupt is a form of boundless love exemplified in the awe-inspiring trust between Mary and Joseph, from the moment Joseph agrees to remain with Mary despite her carrying a child that is not his. This is a remaking of kinship beyond patriarchal understandings of blood ties and property.

This orthodox, yet queer, Madonna queers gender stereotypes, kinship, property relations, and gender relations, yet she disrupts human ideas of sexual relations too. She held in her womb a baby to end the need for any more babies. The early Christian church often rejected family groups and instead advocated communalism, holding property in common, with no more need for outdated practices of marriage and kinship, yet this also implied no need for sex, which can appear challenging today. Indeed the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity has led theologians to suggest that she “is totally dissociated from sexuality.”³⁹ This could be taken to reinforce the patriarchal objectification of women. It could also be interpreted to run counter to Cavarero’s claim that this love was not self-sacrificing. In order to escape the theological narratives which themselves are so often located within the same patriarchal structures that we are seeking to challenge I turn instead to popular practices of Mariology to consider if they help to shed light on this conundrum.

Popular and folk Marian traditions focus less on the tidy, patriarchal narrative of a dutiful, docile mother, and instead draw on interpretations of Mary that acknowledge the messiness and imperfection of the reality of human relations. First, many local traditions blend the figure of Mary, who in the Christian tradition has a special sacred status but is not a deity, with pre-Christian Goddesses. This can be seen in examples of Catholic folk Mariology from around the world. For instance, in Ireland, Mary is believed to have re-emerged in the person of St Brigid⁴⁰ whose symbolic identity as patroness of home, healing, mothers, babies and midwives is well known to have been merged with the pagan Celtic fertility Goddess of the same name. In Cuba, Mary is combined with two sister spirits of the African-origin Santeria religion: as the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, she is understood to represent Yemaya, whilst as the Virgin of Regla she is identified with Ochun. Both spirits are associated with love, fertility, motherhood, marriage, and are also known revered as protectors of gay men.⁴¹ In Mapusa in Goa, India, Mary Our Lady of Miracles blends Marian tradition with Santeri, a Hindu goddess. Santeri is believed to be a manifestation of the Mother Goddess Parvati, consort of Shiva. She is associated with peace-making and – via her association with ant hills which are believed to represent the female womb – with fertility.⁴² In addition, the teaching that Mary is the embodiment of the Catholic Church which is also figured analogously as the bride of Christ, could be seen to fulfill another trope associated with several pagan Goddesses including the Hindu Parvati mentioned above where a mother becomes her son’s lover.⁴³

Further, the images used to depict Mary in high and low art in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, including on the walls of many churches and cathedrals, often depict Mary as a sexual and desirable woman despite her status as a virgin. This characterization of Mary is also supported by the courtly love traditions of Medieval Europe that portray Mary as an untouchable but sensuous beauty, an object of romantic affection. Thus, claims that Mary is dissociated from sexuality appear to have had little consequence for the way many people do perceive her to have a sexual identity.

Second, images and shrines to Mary are found across the Christian world in profane settings such as homes, public spaces, shops, streets, bars, prisons, restaurants, and workplaces. The integration of Marian worship into everyday life has invited discussion by theologians who observe that she often appears alongside everyday objects and images and in places that would be disapproved of by Christian morality, such as brothels or the homes of people who do not live stereotypically Christian lives such as transvestites and criminals.⁴⁴ Mary further rubs shoulders with profane life in the statues, vignettes, and costumed figures who portray her in processions and carnivals, which thread their way through the spaces in which people live out their daily lives. The rowdy, pleasure-seeking and joyful festival atmosphere of these occasions give rise to distinctly unconventional portrayals of the Virgin, the most distinctive of which might be her striking portrayal by drag queens.⁴⁵ Yet in all these ways we see a Marian model that is not primarily docile and self-sacrificing. Many lay people appropriate Mary as a joyful, passionate, and unruly source of hope, inspiration, and strength, against her capture and use to oppress them. Ordinary (by which I mean non-religious and non-elite) people invoke Mary’s help in the complications of every part of their lives and invoke her as approachable, understanding, and non-judgemental.

This then could be why Cavarero refers to Madonna’s love as “problematic.”⁴⁶ In her unruly and uncontrollable fashion, we have seen that the Madonna turns up in all the wrong places, dressed for the wrong occasion, at the wrong times – when and where the theologians are least expecting her. These folk traditions pluralize and destabilize the Virgin’s identity indicating once again that Mary is an ambivalent signifier. Although she has been, and is, used to oppress, she is not simply an oppressive tool. Marian worship can be a site of resistance against oppression and simultaneously, of resistance to her own capture by patriarchy. Her popular appropriation mobilizes her as a tool against Church and cultural hierarchies to express ordinary people’s spirituality and its relationship with other aspects of their lives, however mundane or outrageous. The fluidity of gender roles seen in these traditions indicates that fixed, traditional gender stereotypes are less important for the practice of Christianity than we might think. The blending of cultural tradition implies that Christianity does not have to be opposed to pre-Christian and non-Western cultures but can also incorporate a continuity with ancient practices and beliefs. Finally, popular Marian worship indicates that Mary is believed to have a sexual identity, and this perhaps adds to her availability as a resource for those who suffer. In particular, with our focus on the potential that Madonna’s love may offer, the blurring we see here between roles and relationships reflects the difficulties and messiness of human social relations. Rather than require us to explain away the contradictions and challenges that we face as humans, her location within the disorder demonstrates an acceptance of the excess and messiness of human love which evades any strict definition as either eros or maternal love, concupiscent or non-concupiscent. Human relationships, affects, and gender roles do not fit templates. In the story of the queer Madonna and its absorption into popular traditions we see that the Madonna dwells with the people whoever, wherever, and however, they are.

Sex, violence, and two types of love

Reading Cavarero through the lens of queer Mariology indicates that interpreting Mary’s perpetual virginity to mean she was ultimately sexless is deeply reductive. Mary’s virginity instead could be interpreted to attest that she is “outside the domain of the phallus”⁴⁷ – that she never had sex with a human man and resists the patriarchal nexus of sex and power. Notwithstanding that it is notoriously difficult to precisely define what is understood by the phrase “to have sex,”⁴⁸ her virginity does not need to mean that she was not a sexual being. As we have seen in the narrative of the queer Madonna it can also signify confrontation and rupture since it enables Jesus’ birth to break with patriarchal genealogy.⁴⁹ Theological assumptions that Mary was not sexual is to ignore Christian practice, giving too much weight in its place, to the diffraction of what Foucault has identified as a certain culture of sexual control from the Modern age onwards, back into Christian institutions and theology.⁵⁰ Popular traditions that pre-date this cultural conservatism help us reawaken the potency of the Madonna by indicating that her virginity is a far more nuanced signifier.

This detour through queer Mariology prompts us to return to the question of whether erotic love could provide a better model of nonviolent love than Cavarero’s maternal love. Cavarero’s assertion that Madonna’s love is non-concupiscent is drawn from her reading of Levinas. Given the frequent use of a sexual encounter as an analogy for love in Levinas’ work there is an extensive debate between Levinas scholars concerning whether non-concupiscence excluded all forms of erotic love or not. The issue here is whether eros must always be selfish and objectifying. Those who argue that eros and non-concupiscence could be compatible suggest that ethical, or non-concupiscent, love could be present in an erotic encounter: that non-concupiscent love can occur alongside concupiscent love or even that they are mutually supportive.⁵¹ Indeed, much contemporary queer theology explores how erotic love may provide access to a non-concupiscent care for the other that avoids connotations of self-sacrifice.⁵² Perhaps this is what is indicated by the popular tradition’s acceptance of Mary’s virgin status alongside her sexual identity: that she possessed a capacity to experience erotic love in a way that is free of the objectification so often associated with human sexual relations.

Yet the scholars who debate whether Levinas’s view of erotic love can avoid the violence of objectification question whether it is ever possible to identify eros solely as non-concupiscent, even if non-concupiscence may occur alongside or within eros.⁵³ Indeed, it was in part to circumvent the ethical challenges of theorizing the sexism and violence that is so often associated with erotic love that led Cavarero to suggest that maternal love, with the female subject at its center, is a better example of non-concupiscent nonviolent love than Levinas’ erotic encounter. Indeed, my above concern that maternal love can tend towards violence because of its intensity as an affective site in its aim to possess, preserve, and protect the child, holds true for erotic relations too, since they also seek to possess, preserve, and protect the other as an object of desire. It would seem that concupiscence is always present in affective human love, whether erotic or maternal. Perhaps Mary’s virgin status can be taken to signify her resistance not just to the objectification that occurs from the conjunction of sex and power within patriarchy, but to the objectification and power inequalities that emerge from human affectivity more generally. Just as it would limit her political potential if her pacifist love were modeled on maternal love, so it would be limiting to model it on erotic love.⁵⁴

How then to understand the non-concupiscent love that Cavarero identifies with the Christian Madonna? Tina Beattie argues that the virgin birth narrative bestows a certain “creative freedom” to Mary.⁵⁵ Interpreting this claim alongside the narrative of the queer Madonna as unruly, disruptive, and confrontational, we see that her fecundity, when allowed to roam analogously beyond the domain of sex, has the capacity to generate possibility where patriarchy sees only impossibility and proscription. The narrative of the queer Madonna helps us identify the Christian story as a political challenge to a violent world. In the dichotomy it poses between God’s way and Man’s way it also highlights the absence of the normative patriarchal warmongering Man at the heart of the Christian story.

Let us consider what form of love is at work here. The Leonardo painting that is so central to Cavarero’s work depicts the Madonna as a loving mother, but somehow, as able to enact an alternative form of motherhood to human maternal love, overcoming patriarchal familial relations whereby a child is raised to favor family over all others. Her arms, poignantly, support Jesus to fulfil his destiny to die for others. Whilst the understanding that Jesus sacrificed himself is central to Christianity, Mary’s sacrifice, despite her reported presence at the foot of the cross, is often overlooked. Mary did not have to be present at her son’s death, to witness or endure it, yet she chose to remain. Mary’s role as witness to Christ’s passion helps bring into the frame a part of the Christian story that I suggest is almost always overlooked – Mary’s part in raising Jesus.

As Cavarero’s feminist project emphasizes, motherhood, albeit romanticized, is everywhere undervalued and overlooked. Why do we so rarely consider that Mary may have been at least part of the source of Jesus’ teachings? Inspiring and supporting him to accept his destiny, to refuse to retaliate to the violence of his enemies by accepting his death in such a striking way that the awe his actions evoked continues to resound through the centuries. Leonardo’s painting places center-stage Mary’s role in raising Jesus, challenging us to consider her overlooked maternal influence on the formulation of his teachings. I therefore posit that the love she practiced might be most clearly identified in the surprising and confrontational form of love that preached by her son: love of enemies. Perhaps this could be the “enigmatic” love that Cavarero observes in the face of Leonardo’s Madonna.

Love of enemies has been the subject of much theological discussion, with perhaps the most notable recent contribution by Derrida who observes its aporetic structure – its impossibility which cannot negate its importance as an ethical motivation.⁵⁶ Yet is there a risk that, despite the ink spilt through the ages, Derrida’s work exemplifies the way love of enemies is too often endowed in the ethical tradition with an unnecessary impossible quality such that we may be so overcome by awe at its apparently superhuman challenge,⁵⁷ that we may be discouraged to even try to enact it? What happens, I wonder, if we seek to interpret love of enemies through the lens of the aforementioned ruptural love of the queer Madonna’s confrontation with patriarchy?

We have seen that both eros and maternal love operate via inclination and inclinations are understood to emerge in response to others – to the way they affect us. Whether an ethics of care is modeled on eros or maternal love, the inclination that leads us to respond with care or hatred is understood to attract us to or repel us against or away from the object of our affection. Affective love is a felt response to the external world, yet rather than love for our enemies, our affective response would more likely be to either incline away from them in fear or to incline over them in rage. This implies that, with regards to the flow of affect, love of enemies as a model of love must necessarily operate quite differently from erotic and maternal love since it runs counter to our affective flows. Furthermore, since emotions cannot be conjured up as an act of will, love of enemies cannot be instructing us to somehow force feelings of affection for our enemies, to somehow be affected contrary to our inclinations. Reading love of enemies through queer Mariology helps bring into focus the possibility that the model of love at work in the Christian love of enemies may not be affective but ruptural. Butler has recently argued that at times morality requires that we distinguish our bodily actions from our affective inclinations.⁵⁸ Could it perhaps be that love of enemies operates as a call to respond in a way that is contrary to affective inclinations?

The most quoted section of Christian scripture on the love of enemies, Matthew 5:38-48, is not clear about whether Jesus is asking us to feel care for our enemies as much as to refuse to act violently towards them; to refuse to stand against them or retaliate, despite our likely inclination to fight or flee. This is still, arguably, a form of love since it is a commitment to remain in some form of relationship with those who mistreat us (not in the sense of requiring us to remain directly in harm’s way but recognizing that our destinies are inextricably bound up together) and holds out hope that the relationship could one day be less dominatory. Jesus’ observation that the sun rises on bad men as well as good prefigures Hannah Arendt’s argument that if we are not going to submit to a never-ending cycle of vengeance, then at some point we have to accept that we must find a way to cohabit the earth even with those we may hate or who hate us.⁵⁹ Recognizing the ruptural spirit of the queer Madonna in Jesus’ love of enemies indicates not that we submit to our enemies, but that we assertively refuse to let them set the terms of our engagement. The example Jesus gives of turning the other cheek could then be read as an attempt to enter into this relationship as an active rather than a passive participant, taking charge of one’s own destiny.

When the subject neither removes itself from a relationship nor bows to the oppression of its enemy it recreates the relationship between them – such that one party is no longer entirely dominated by the other. Rather than self-abasing, suffering, or objectifying, such an intervention could be seen to render the subordinated subject newly equal to their oppressor. Understood in this way, love of enemies as a refusal to act in violence towards the other creates an aesthetic rupture with expected relations, with the order of Man that expects submission or retaliation.

This reading offers the possibility to make a distinction that is often overlooked in the exegetical literature. It indicates that a refusal of violence need not be the same as compromising with, succumbing to, condoning, or encouraging, those who act in enmity towards us. Its potency lies in its ability to give pause to an encounter because it throws into disarray the expected relationship between self and other, providing an opening for both subject positions to be reformed (and thereby the possibility that we might dissolve the hierarchy between them). Unlike the love of a mother for a child or the erotic love between lovers which all follow expected patterns of behavior, love of enemies, similar to other forms of Mary’s queer relationality, operates against cultural expectations.⁶⁰ This interpretation of love of enemies as a performative interruption in cycles of hatred and violence offers potential for us to find new ways to cohabit the earth with one another that need not feature subservience. It provides an opening for us to begin to live together differently: an opening from which new relations of care could emerge. This perhaps makes love of enemies a little less daunting, albeit not easy and likely to always be enacted in a partial orflawed manner. It also pluralizes its availability as a practice. Reading the spirit of the queer Madonna into love of enemies makes it less necessary to conceptualize it as an ethical precept stemming from Christian faith, and more available as a political practice available to anybody since, figured as a strategy rather than a commandment, it requires no a priori faith to transform social relations.⁶¹

Although Cavarero claims that Mary’s “problematic” love does not appear to be self-sacrificing, this need not mean that sacrifice is not involved at all. Just that our stereotypical way of understanding sacrifice as destructive or damaging towards the self needs to be rethought. The sacrifice – if it is one – engendered by love of enemies involves a reformulation of subject positions. It is not self-sacrificing as much as self-remaking. Sacrifice, after all, originally denoted an active process of creation (facere from the Latin verb “to make or do”), of making something holy. If we recognize this moment as one from which new selves can emerge, we can recognize it as less a moment of privation, of self-sacrifice and subordination, and instead identify within it a subjectivating empowerment that endows the “weak” with the capacity to intervene in violence and oppression, creating an opening in which new relationships could be formed.

This queer Marian-inspired love of enemies presents us with one way to respond to Butler’s aforementioned call to elaborate a strategy of meeting violence without engaging it. I do not imply that practicing nonviolence as love of enemies would be easy or can guarantee success. It can only ever be a subjective calculation, which seeks to find “the tipping point of not creating more injustice.”⁶² Yet it offers a way to break with the logic of violence that affective love comprises and also to circumvent the concern that love of enemies requires a certain weakness, a vulnerability and self-sacrifice, whilst reshaping what we understand by weak.⁶³ As such, love of enemies offers a possible explanation of how Cavarero’s second Madonna could be altruistic without self-sacrifice.

Problematic love

As a counter-theology, the queer Madonna’s “problematic” nonviolent love offers to undermine both of the ways macho Christianity uses religion to support its right-wing agenda. First, whilst queer Christianity is not a Christianity that macho right-wingers would want to be associated with, the Christianity of the queer Madonna indicates less that the politics of right-wing nationalists is rooted in the cultural traditions of the Christian world, rather that our patriarchal capitalist traditions – whether in liberal or authoritarian form – have successfully captured and neutralized the Christian tradition’s opposition to the sort of politics that macho right-wingers espouse. Furthermore, by popularizing a Christian narrative that is distinct from patriarchal Western culture it could help to make it more difficult for macho Christianity to invoke a monolithic Christianity or an avowedly post-Christian secular society as a “natural” demarcation from what is seen to be a “foreign” or Islamic identity.

Yet how might this Marian-inspired counter-narrative of nonviolence become popularized so as to be in a position to impact macho Christianity and deeply entrenched Christian institutions? What would prevent its rendition of Christianity from being dismissed as subversive and dangerous? We have seen that Mariology – and the Christianity from which it derives – performs an optical illusion. There is more than one image available simultaneously and what you see depends on your already existing perspective. How to bring the queer Madonna into view for those who can only see the patriarchal Madonna? How to change macho Christianity’s perspective?

Rather than assume its counter-narrative might persuade opponents through rational argument, a queer Marian love of enemies operates aesthetically. Perspective change occurs via the interruption of affect. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity demonstrates that norms can be changed through enacting them wrong such that our perceptions of what is possible are changed.⁶⁴ Love of enemies effects change on the world through its practice. Whilst more work is needed to explore the wider implications that this reading of Mary’s “non-stereotypical” love could have for Christian theories of relationality, with regards to Cavarero’s aim to promote a more peaceful world, Mary’s “non-stereotypical” love could be used to inform a pluralist, grassroots, nonviolent yet militant, movement of interruption. A movement that refuses to be drawn into the polarizing discourse that macho Christianity espouses, instead remaking social fault lines by living out this method of intervening in, and seeking to transform, violent relations alongside working to create conditions more conducive to positive affective social relations in the future.

Second, given the accordance of queer Mariology with much approved religious teaching, its denial by representatives of the Catholic and orthodox churches indicates a puzzling suppression of their own orthodoxy. Further, queer Mariology could have ramifications for Protestant Christian institutions too. If we accept Weber’s analysis of the relationship between the development of Christianity and capitalism then it is no surprise that as patriarchal capitalism advanced, Mary, with her unapologetically unruly love, was further and further suppressed, in the emergence of Protestantism and then in post-Vatican II Catholicism.⁶⁵ Perhaps there are questions here for Christian institutions of all denominations to consider how their interpretation of religion has been shaped by the culture in which they operate, and to consider how they may act on that culture rather than acquiesce with it. Rather than blame secularism for the ills of the world, the way that these institutions have internalized patriarchal capitalist culture against their own belief system has certainly played a part in neutralizing the potency that so many thinkers, both religious and secular, have identified with Christianity’s promise to transform the violence of our world. Perhaps those who represent Christian institutions could more often take a leaf out of the unruly queer Madonna’s book and stand up against, rather than incline towards, the dominant culture (which is not to overlook those who have and continue to do so – just to observe that more is needed); to defend the queerness of their faith against the violence of society.

Conclusion: a militant mariology for peace?

At a time when macho Christianity, in the form of an ever-strengthening alliance between Conservative Christianity and the radical right is expanding across the globe I have explored the undeveloped potential of the love of the “non-stereotypical” Madonna that Cavarero invokes in support of her feminist, pacifist ethics. In an attempt to understand what this love consists of and who Cavarero’s Madonna might be, I turned to queer and non-dominant indigenous Mariologies. There I discovered a Mariology that suggested Man has for too long held Christianity hostage; limiting and contorting its message. Arguing that if we are to counter “macho Christianity” we need an account of Christian love that recognizes the radical absence of Man at its root, I use these alternative Mariologies to develop a performative political practice of nonviolence. Following Leonardo’s indication that Mary’s influence is too often overlooked in Jesus’ teachings, and recognizing Mary’s spirit of rupture at work in Jesus’ love of enemies, I suggest that love of enemies is a likely contender for the “problematic” love that Cavarero identified. This argument contributes an original theorization of Mariology and a reworking of Christianity (without Men) that offers to deactivate its mobilization by the right. More than a retheorization, reading love of enemies through the queer Marian tradition reinterprets it as a pacifist yet militant performative political practice which, in contravening social norms, offers an opening through which anybody might begin to transform the violence and oppression of our world today.

Acknowledgements

I owe a big thank you to Tina Beattie for inspiring the interpretation of Leonardo’s painting developed below, during a private conversation with the author. I am also indebted to Lorenzo Bernini, Mark Devenney, and Bonnie Honig, and participants at the 2017 CAPPE Giving Life to Politics Conference, University of Brighton, for comments on earlier versions of this article that prompted me to develop it as I have here. Finally, I want to thank Luke Edmeads, two anonymous reviewers, and series editors Brandy Daniels and Karma Ben Johanan for their insightful comments and feedback on this version, which have made it inestimably stronger.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Clare Woodford

Clare Woodford is Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) School of Humanities, University of Brighton.

Notes

1 Inclinations, 2016, 173.

2 Ibid., 174.

3 See classic texts Daly’s, The Church; and Warner’s, Alone of All Her Sex which elaborate the argument that Mary has been used to oppress and control women within the Catholic Church.

4 Inclinations, 173.

5 Butler, “Leaning Out,” 24.

6 Butler, Frames of War, 13–32.

7 Butler, “Leaning Out,” 6–7.

8 Inclinations, 174.

9 Inclinations, 129.

10 Inclinations, 5–6.

11 Inclinations, 174.

12 Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci, 322.

13 ibid.

14 Inclinations, 97.

15 Inclinations, 174.

16 Eksi and Wood, “Janus-Faced Masculinity in the Leadership.”

17 I refer to this as ‘macho Christianity’ rather than Christian Nationalism to focus on the caricaturing of gender roles that macho Christianity relies upon. Relatedly, although it shares some features with White Christian Nationalism in particular, my focus here is on primarily Catholic and orthodox communities, including non-white communities, whereas WCN is primarily associated with White, Protestant culture. It is also important for me to distinguish macho Christianity from concepts such as muscular Christianity or masculine Christianity, which focus more on the physical human male body in Christian beliefs and practice.

18 This is found in a variety of studies, each focusing on different right-wing movements e.g. Zoltan and Bozoki, “State and Faith”; Haugen, Sweden Democrats; Ozzano and Bolzonar, “Religious Dissent”; Lamour, “Urbi et Orbi”;; Schworer, “Defender of Christianity?”

19 Espinosa, “Pentecostalization”; McLoughlin and Pinnock, Mary is for Everyone.

20 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology; Daly, The Church; Taylder, “Our Lady”; Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.

21 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 39.

22 Ibid., 78.

23 Ibid.

24 Cavarero, Inclinations, 10.

25 Cavarero, Guslandi, and Bruhs, “A Child,” 24.

26 Horrorism, 27; Inclinations, 102, 103.

27 Inclinations, 174.

28 Inclinations, 174, italics added.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 166.

31 Levinas, Entre Nous, 131, 113.

32 Inclinations, 10.

33 Inclinations, 105.

34 Cavarero, Guslandi, and Bruhs, “A Child,” 24.

35 I have explored this aspect of Cavarero’s work in more detail in Cavarero’s Puzzle.

36 Taylder, “Our Lady,” 355; see also Gerbera and Bingemar Mary, Mother of God, Cunneen, In search of Mary, Johnson, “Mary and Contemporary Christology”; Del Prado, I sense; Aquino, Our Cry; Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, Johnson, Truly our Sister; Hamington, Hail Mary; Lara, “Goddess of the Americas”; Rey, “‘The Virgin’s Slip’.”

37 See for example, Cheng, Radical Love; Blackwell, “Towards,” and Beattie, “Queen of Heaven.”

38 Cavarero, “Theory of Sexual Difference.”

39 Vuloa, “Seriously Harmful?” 153; see also Daly, The Church; Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.

40 O’Brien, “Life of St Brigit,” 348.

41 Rey, “The Virgin’s Slip,” 969.

42 Sahni, Multi-Stories, 104; Couto, A Daughter’s Story, 206; Kamat, “Ecotheological Dimensions of the Ant-Hill,” 2.

43 See also Althaus-Reid’s discussion of gender fluidity in the traditions of Santa Librada and La Difunta Correa (Indecent Theology, 79–85) which although not quite so directly associated with the figure of Mary blend iconography and symbolism of Mary with Jesus.

44 Ribas, “Liberating Mary,” 126 and Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology.

45 Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology.

46 Inclinations, 174.

47 Beattie, God’s Mother, 125.

48 Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 32.

49 Gebara and Bingemar, Mary, Mother of God, 104. There is something notable in the attempt to read Mary’s virginity as disruptive, given that rupture is so often analogized from a male sexual perspective, to indicate the act of penetration.

50 Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1.

51 Beals, Levinas, Ch.3.

52 E.g., Cheng, Radical Love; Diaz, Queer God.

53 Beals, Levinas, Ch.3.

54 Interpreting erotic love as a site of objectification is not intended as a moralizing claim whereby just because the domain of sex is a domain of objectification, freedom can only be found by avoiding sex altogether. It simply acknowledges, as attested by Foucault, that human relations, and particularly sexual relations, are power laden, and whilst may be more or less objectifying, will struggle to escape objectification. Positioning the Madonna at a distance from these relations need not be interpreted as a denouncement of eros, or of affectivity. It simply avoids reducing her love to merely the human erotic or affective experience, and when paired with her recognition as a sexual being, makes her available as both an understanding companion as well as an ally against sexual oppression, as we navigate the complexities of human desire.

55 God’s Mother, 126.

56 Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 285.

57 Ricoeur, Memory.

58 “Leaning Out,” 56.

59 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 277–278.

60 ‘If you love those who love you … are you doing anything exceptional?’ Matthew, 5:46–47.

61 Which is not to deny that faith might be a valuable way to provide the strength required in the most challenging contexts.

62 Butler, “Leaning Out,” 22–23.

63 Butler, “Leaning Out,” 23.

64 Butler, Gender Trouble.

65 Taylder, “Our Lady,” 354.