Jesus ACTED UP and Any Possible Future of “Queer Theology”

Abstract

What can we learn about the prospects for “queer theology” from how Goss wrote Jesus ACTED UP into the future for which he hoped? Theology seems to add four things to the book's political arguments and exhortations. It deepens the analyses of oppression, provides stronger means for re-education, invokes divine help, and doubles political theater with sacrament. These tasks of critique, re-education, invocation, and ritual will continue to define any Christian theology that might be called “queer.” Each requires the transformation of language. In order to have a future, queer theology must undertake a poiesis outside the endless prattle that sustains present power. Its poetry may first appear as silence.

KEYWORDS:

• Althaus-Reid
• eschatology
• Eucharist
• Jesus ACTED UP
• political theology
• queer theology
• silence

Notes

1 Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, xii.

2 On “savoir assujetti,” see now Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société,” 8–9.

3 Metz, “The Church and the World,” 23–24. This English text appeared originally in The Word in History: The St. Xavier Symposium (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 69–85.

4 I quote, of course, from the conclusion of Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in the translation by Samuel Moore (London, 1888).

5 Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, 180.

6 Ibid., xviii.

7 Ibid., 69–70.

8 Ibid., 75.

9 See, for example, ibid., 144 and 149.

10 See, especially, ibid., 110–1.

11 Ibid., 109.

12 Ibid.

13 Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith,” 198–209.

14 See Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, 77–81.

15 Ibid., 84.

16 Ibid., 143.

17 Ibid., 144.

18 Ibid., 151–3.

19 See ibid., 146 and 150. The phrase is taken from Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 291 and throughout.

20 Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, xviii.

21 The best example of what I am calling the dance is the sequence, Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, chapter 3; Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, chapter 3; and Goss, Queering Christ, chapter 8.

22 For the citations of Jesus ACTED UP, see Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 81, 91, 93, 98.

23 Ibid., on libertinaje, see especially 24; on inter-textual permutation generally, 101, 108, 115; on Acker and Genesis, 94ff.

24 Ibid., 86.

25 Ibid., 59.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark D. Jordan

Mark Jordan is Mellon Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, Sexuality in Harvard University. His most recent book is Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford University Press, 2015).