Stares and Prayers

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Notes

1. Throughout this “Defining Moments” essay, I engage briefly with scholarly treatments of the subjects my narrative addresses in endnotes, inspired by Sandra Faulkner’s (2016) “TEN,” in which she presents narrative and poetry about her identity and experience as a bisexual woman and an interpersonal relationships researcher in/as the text of her article. In footnotes, Faulkner makes connections to scholarly sources. I simultaneously want my narrative to speak for itself, to affirm that narrative does its own kind of theorizing, even while I also point interested readers toward the scholarly conversations that have shaped some of my thinking, and indeed, my lived experience.

2. Communication and Disability Studies scholar Bruce Henderson (2010) has observed that

“Staring” transgresses accepted conventions and protocols of the ocular. We do not stare at the bodies that pass by, unnoticeable and unremarkable, analogous to our own. Instead, we stare at those bodies that point to our own sense of their otherness and hence, the fear of our own. (p. 457)

Feminist Disability Studies scholar Alison Kafer (2013) differentiates between a medicalized view of disability, which treats disability as a problem to solve, and a social model of disability, which instead problematizes the physical, social, and attitudinal boundaries that create exclusion. A social model of disability recognizes that people with disabilities will always exist, in contradistinction to the medical model’s goal to reduce or eliminate disability. Staring, in beholding the person with a disability as an Other, instantiates the medical model; at the same time, it represents one of the social barriers to accessibility for people with disabilities. Additionally, staring functions as a kind of denial of one’s own temporary able-bodiedness.

3. As a gay person with a disability, I have to wonder if my interlocutor’s supplication to God to strengthen me came from a presumption of my weakness both physically (as someone with a disability) and performatively (as someone whose everyday enactment of gender gleefully fails to meet the standards of hegemonic masculinity). Kurt Lindemann has persuasively shown that hegemonic masculinity discounts men with disabilities. A disability counts against one’s performance of masculinity and perhaps one’s performance of normative heterosexuality (Cherney & Lindemann, 2014; Lindemann, 2008, 2010; Lindemann & Cherney, 2008). Did this man in Starbucks pray for the strength of my back only because he saw a disability, or did he also perceive (other) transgressions against masculinity—the way I moved, my purple shirt, the linger of my gaze in his direction just a moment too long?

4. This was neither the first nor last time a stranger prayed for me in public simply because of the way I walk. I can recall a total of three times, all within the last seven years. I do not dispute the importance of prayer for many people of faith, including as prayer relates to their health. Health communication research has found that prayer often functions as an important part of people’s healing experience (Harris & Worley, 2012). In a study of family members’ final conversations with their dying loved ones, Keeley (2004) found that many talked about their shared religious and spiritual beliefs. I note, though, that these examples concern people’s individual uses of prayer or conversations about religious beliefs with close family members. Unsurprisingly, I find no support for the efficacy of unsolicited intercessory prayer at Starbucks.

Much more frequent than strangers who pray for me are people who ask what condition I have, how long I have had it, and whether it hurts, or people who tell me I inspire them or give them hope for their kids or grandkids with cerebral palsy. Although ostensibly a compliment, comments about inspiration are just as patronizing as unwanted prayers (Rousso, 2013).

5. See Mortimer (2016).

6. See Spencer (2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2017 [especially chapter 5], forthcoming), Spencer and Barnett (2013, 2016), and Spencer and Lynch (2016).

7. In “The Lord’s Prayer,” sometimes called the “Our Father,” Christians pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Christian theologies of shalom, referring to a whole or complete peace, understand this prayer as an invitation and opportunity for Christians to work with God to bring about the sort of kingdom, or kin-dom, the prayer imagines. See Isasi-Díaz (1993). I reflect further on this concept in Spencer (2017).

8. Here, I draw on the rich tradition of theologies of liberation that takes seriously the concept of imago dei from the position of the marginalized. The doctrine of imago dei holds that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. Christian theologies of liberation emphasize that God identifies closely with the people most marginalized in society (Cone, 1969, 2010; Johnson, 2002). In identifying Christ as queer, for example, Cheng (2012) pointed out the parallels between Christian theology and coming out of the closet: “the act of coming out reflects the very nature of a God who is also constantly coming out and revealing Godself to us in the Out Christ” (p. 87). In The Disabled God, Nancy Eiesland (1994) argued that Christ is disabled. Reflecting on the scene in the book of Luke when Jesus appears to the disciples after the resurrection, Eiesland (1994) wrote:

In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation. (p. 100)

From these images, for me as a gay Christian with a disability, I find inspiration in the idea of a queer, disabled Christ: God-incarnate, occupying a body whole and disabled and queer, full of love for a world not yet able to understand or accept a love so unbounded, so limitless, and frankly, so fabulous!