The power of poverty: queer religious agency past and present

ABSTRACT

As a form of resistance against heteronormativity, queer theology has often also been very critical towards colonialism and capitalism. The queer perspective thus became a privileged standpoint of critique of these three levels of oppression. However, it seems that today, capitalism itself has been “queered”: the hierarchy of the heterosexual “core family” has been replaced by a global hymn of diversity and flexibility centred around consumerism. Within the context of neoliberal capitalism, queer theology seems to have lost its queerness. This contribution is inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s book The Highest Poverty (2011), in which he presents the evolution of the Franciscan rule from a “form of life” (forma vitae) to a “rule” that is a form of proto-capitalism. The Franciscan ideal of poverty is corrupted as soon as the hierarchical Church (the instance of power) affirms this rule, thereby taking it up within a discourse of the law: poverty is no longer a theological concept, but an economical one. Following Agamben’s strategy, I will ask how another spiritual movement of around the thirteenth century, the Beguines, attempted to live an alternative life, a vita apostolica, and understand this as a form of queerness. The Beguine model, I will argue, can help us imagine a deepened queer theology today that cannot be captured and rigidified by the logic of capitalism, but continues to be able to critique it.

KEYWORDS:

• Beguines
• queer theology
• religious agency
• poverty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributors

Kristien Justaert (Belgium, 1981) is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders. At the Catholic University of Leuven, she conducts research, teaches and publishes in the areas of liberation theology, feminist and queer theologies. More concretely, her research project is on new philosophical mediations for liberation theology after Marx. In this context, she has published on Gilles Deleuze, Michel Henry, Julia Kristeva, feminist, queer theory and new materialisms in relation to liberation theologies. In 2012, she published the monograph Theology after Deleuze (Bloomsbury).

Notes

1 Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 8.

2 van Klinken, “Queer theologie,” 215–25.

3 Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages; and especially Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Whereas Grundmann describes these movements in a more or less “neutral” and nuanced way, Cohn, in the aftermath of World War II and the fear of fascism, paints a very negative picture of the religious movements.

4 See, for example, McGinn, The Presence of God.

5 In his lecture The Church and the Kingdom, Giorgio Agamben calls the Church to return to its vocation of incarnating the Kingdom of God and proclaiming an economy of salvation instead of being an institution prone to the “worldly” economy. See Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 41: “Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?” For Christian life, this means starting to live in the world again “as foreigners” with a different conception of time, namely, messianic time. Agamben’s call is completely in line with the call for an apostolic life around the beginning of the second millennium.

6 See, for example, Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Queer Theology and Althaus-Reid, “Queering the Cross,” 289–301. I will elaborate on the complicated relation between queer theory/theology with colonialism and capitalism in the next section.

7 See, for example, treeck, Buying Time. In this book, Streeck demonstrates that democracy and capitalism are irreconcilable logics, and that citizens are neglected by a “transnational plutocracy”. Even without consumerism, the logic of capitalism would persist. The fact is that individuals, and individual differences, do not matter anymore within this logic. Indeed, all critical potential is threatened to be subsumed by capitalism logic, for this is the way capitalism works – always expanding its boundaries. On a philosophical level, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have addressed this in their Anti-Oedipus; on a cultural level: See Heath and Potter, The Rebel Sell.

8 McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 1. McRobbie writes: “In actuality the idea of feminist content disappeared and was replaced by aggressive individualism, by a hedonistic female phallicism in the flied of sexuality, and by obsession with consumer culture which in this current book I see as playing a vital role in the undoing of feminism.’” Ibid., 5.

9 McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 7: “The movement of women is a key aspect of the new forms of gender power that have emerged and that seek to manage the requirements of the new global economy and the availability of a feminised workforce through producing and overseeing changes for women, young women in particular”.

10 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xii. Puar interprets the body of the suicide bomber as a queer form of resistance (a “queer assemblage”), the only resistance that is left for people that are not listened to, thus relocating queerness from the Western world into the “Subaltern”. Puar refers to Gayatri Spivak’s text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and cites: “Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won’t respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death”. Ibid., 218).

11 Petrella, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” 37.

12 Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism, 140. “The market is not all or only capitalist, commodities are not all or only products of capitalism, and the sale of Barbie dolls to Indian girls or boys does not at all or only presage the coming of the global heterosexist capitalist kingdom. A queer perspective can help unsettle the consonances and coherences of the narrative of global commodification”. Ibid., 144.

13 Ibid., 4–5.

14 The recent Amazon series “Transparent”, about a Californian artistic family in which the father outs himself as transgender, is also a good example of this: being queer is bereft of its critical power, it becomes an individual psychological “problem” that can be solved without many problems within such a rich, frivolous context as the Californian society offers.

15 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3.

16 Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”; Edelman, No Future.

17 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 162.

18 Hollywood, “Queering the Beguines,” 164.

19 Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine,” 515.

20 Ibid., 516.

21 See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Asad, Formations of the Secular, especially chapter two: “Thinking About Agency and Pain,” 67–99; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

22 See the forthcoming book of Sarah Bracke, http://wsrp.hds.harvard.edu/people/sarah-bracke.

23 Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine,” 522: “Hence my reading of women’s claims to divine agency in terms of women’s own agency, legitimization, and authorization”. Hollywood refers to subaltern historiography in this context.

24 Brintnall, “Queer Studies and Religion.” My definition of queer in this chapter, as Brintnall shows in his article, is thus in line with Judith Butler’s and Lee Edelman’s conceptions of it.

25 See Dussel, Ethics of Liberation in the Era of Globalization and Exclusion, in which he describes, adopting a Levinasian ethics, the “becoming-subject of the victim”. In my view, this is a modern and moralistic discourse.

26 Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? 75, quoted in Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America, 308.

27 McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 2–12.

28 Ibid., 12–30.

29 Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 1–5.

30 For this evolution, see, for example, Desbonnets, De l’intuition à l’institution.

31 Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 109–122; see also ibid.

32 Mueller, A Companion to Clare of Assissi.

33 Ibid., 74.

34 Ibid., 75: “Gregory’s hope was to endow women’s monasteries with adequate resources to enable the sisters to live a regular lifestyle that was not stressed by the precariousness of poverty. Well-funded monasteries ware a credit to the church, a conduit of resources from the wealthy, and a practical means for providing pastoral care to the laity”.

35 Ibid., 55: “Sister Filippa testified that when Clare was very close to death, she learned that a brother had come with letters bearing the papal seal. She reverently took the papal bull and pressed the seal to her mouth in order to kiss it. Clare died on the following day”.

36 Kotsko, “What St. Paul and the Franciscans Can Tell Us.”

37 Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 123.

38 Ibid., 137: “One can say that from this point of view, Francis was more prescient than his successors, in that he refused to articulate his vivere sine proprio in a juridical conceptuality and left it completely indeterminate”. This “indeterminateness” will come back in the beguines’ way of life, in that they did not take the vow of poverty and had very varied and flexible rules (see further).

39 Hollywood, “Queering the Beguines,” 165.

40 Ibid., 172: “The ecstasies of religion and those of sexuality are metaphorically linked at least in part because of their shared bodiliness, intensity, and tendency toward excess, and excess that, in the case of Marguerite Porete, leads to the subversion of the very grounds from which it emerges”.

41 Quintijn, Normen en normering van het begijnenleven.

42 Philippen, “Begijnhoven en Spiritualiteit.”

43 Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, 133.

44 Ida van Leuven (ca. 1211–1290): Latijnse vita.

45 Mommaers, Hadewijch, 23–8. (Published in English: Mommaers with Dutton, Hadewijch.)

46 Ibid., 29.

47 See, for example, Jahae, Sich benügen mit dem Ungenügen. See also Fraeters, “Woord vooraf bij de nieuwe editie.”

48 Hadewijch, Vision 6, in Hadewijch, 82–8.

49 Hadewijch, Letter 12, in Hadewijch, 65–9.

50 Hadewijch, Letter 16, in Hadewijch, 17–18.

51 Hadewijch, Letter 18, in Hadewijch, 82–93.

52 Hadewijch, Letter 29, in Hadewijch, 79–82.

53 Hadewijch, Letter 30, in Hadewijch, 30–4.

54 Hadewijch, Stanzic Poem 16, in Hadewijch, 75–7.

55 Rob Faesen confirms this when he stresses the unity between ghebreken and ghebruken in the experience of Minne. See Faesen, Begeerte in het werk van Hadewijch, 315: “In sommige passages zegt Hadewijch weliswaar dat er twee momenten zijn in de minnebeleving, verlangen (in ghebreken) en ghebruken, maar wanneer men deze passages van naderbij bekijkt en ze begrijpt vanuit het geheel van haar benadering van de begeerte, dan wordt het duidelijk dat deze twee onderscheiden aspecten voor haar geen chronologisch gescheiden momenten zijn – integendeel: dat ghebreken van dien ghebrukene dat es dat suetste ghebruken (16de brief, 17–19).

56 Hadewijch, Letter 6, in Hadewijch, 86–127.

57 Ellacuría, “The Kingdom of God and Unemployment in the Third World,” 95: “A civilization of poverty, in which poverty would not be the deprivation of necessary and fundamental needs, a deprivation caused by the historical action of social groups or classes and nations or alliances of nations. Poverty would be a universal state of things, in which the satisfaction of fundamental needs was guaranteed, and also the freedom of personal choice and an atmosphere of personal and communal creativity, which would allow for the appearance of new forms of life and culture, new relations with nature, other people, ourselves, and God”. Both Hadewijch and Ellacuría (as well as myself), of course, occupy a position of privilege, in the sense that they do not have to struggle for their material existence. However, it is my conviction that a struggle against poverty as an economic category and reality starts with another vision. Since the opposite of material poverty, richness, does not bring full liberation (from capitalism), it is necessary to move beyond the rich-poor dialectic in the development of an alternative.

58 Mommaers, Hadewijch, 5–7 and 58–76.

59 Ibid.

60 Within queer theory, this intuition is expressed in the concept of “queer negativity”, which can be interpreted as a kind of “poverty” in its world-renouncing character. See, for example, Edelman, No Future. An introduction of this current in queer theory can be found in Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies.”