Saint Mychal: A Virtual Saint

Abstract

This article explores the representation of Mychal Judge, New York City Fire Department chaplain who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, as an example of changing processes of signification that result from the role that online media play in the development of identities and communities. Using Katherine Hales's concept of the “flickering signifier,” the article demonstrates how attempts to canonize Mychal Judge illustrate negotiations over ownership of images and notions of authenticity at the blurring boundary of secular heroism and religious sainthood. The appropriation of Saint Mychal within gay communities demonstrates how contestations over sexual and national identities are negotiated in the ongoing engagement with visual representations that makes possible the phenomenon of a “Saint Mychal.”

Notes

¹The term is most prominently found at http://www.saintmychal.com, a Web site that has promoted a call for sainthood and has served as a clearinghouse for information regarding the memory of Father Mychal Judge since fall 2001.

²The first book about Mychal Judge, Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero, was written by religious journalist Michael Ford and chronicles Judge's religious life while placing its significance in the context of national identity. Whereas Judge's life was complex and involved in many realms, only the circumstances of his death placed him in the realm of American nationalism. This sudden reframing of life stories as significant in a patriotic nationalist context can be observed with several cases of memorialization of “heroes” of 9/11, for example, Mark Bingham or Todd Beamer (Barrett, 2002).

³The artistic license taken successfully by the artist in this case differs from the contested and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at increasing the multicultural appeal of the image of three firefighters erecting the American flag on the rubble of the WTC in the first days after 9/11. The (racially unaltered) group image became the “Heroes of 2001” Semipostal stamp issued by the United States Postal Service on June 7, 2002.

⁴Although approaches like Anderson (1983) explain the use of signs and/or icons by the community in “imagining” its existence into being, increasing shifts to online and virtual media requires additional analysis.

⁵Hayles used and went beyond Lacan's argument of an absence of signifiers as things-in-themselves as well as an absence of stable correspondence between signified and signifier. Rather, Lacan imagined a network of signifiers that (here he followed Saussure) are defined by networks of relational differences between themselves rather than by their relation to the signified. For Lacan, signifieds also did not exist in themselves but only in relation to signfiers. Thus Lacan thought of signifiers as “floating,” as a flow (however ungraspable) beneath a network constituted through slippages and displacements (Lacan, 1975, pp. 22, 35).

⁶Recent research on religion and media has made a distinction between religion online and online religion, the former indicating official and organized religious bodies' use of online media and the latter pointing to the various modes of seeking or creation of meaning in online realms that can be characterized as religious or spiritual (see Brasher, 2001; Helland, 2000; Hoover & Park, 2004; Lawrence, 2002; Roof, 1999; Zalenski, 1997).

⁷Lentz painted other icons with explicitly gay content. Besides the icon of Harvey Milk (1987; prominently featured in the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society's exhibit “Saint Harvey” in 2005) he also painted an icon of the “gay saints” Saints Sergius and Bacchus.