“Strange” But Not Queer: Intellectual Disability and Participation in the Body of Christ

Abstract

This essay examines Brian Brock’s use of imagery and symbols in Wondrously Wounded to explain reception of the Spirit’s gifts. By recovering the symbol of wonder, Brock intervenes in discussions among disability theologians about participation in Christ’s body. Above all, he avoids normative discursive forms that work to subordinate those marked disabled. Recent directions in queer theology, however, show that images of wounding and assault reinstate logics of opposition, subordination, and subjection. Drawing from Linn Tonstad and Ashon Crawley, this essay modifies Brock’s proposal by suggesting that images of abundance and excess better illuminate the reconfiguration of community in Christ.

Keywords:

• Disability
• theology
• inclusion
• Christ
• grace
• queer theology

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Medi Ann Volpe, Jana Bennett, and Kathryn Tanner, who read early drafts of this essay. Their comments greatly improved the paper in organization and content. I am also grateful to the Religion and Disability Unit of the American Academy of Religions for the opportunity to present an early draft of this essay at the 2020 Annual Meeting. Responses to that draft helped to further develop and hone the argument.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In her review of the book, Emily Kahn expresses feminist concerns regarding Brock’s use of violent imagery and its effect on those who have suffered sexual abuse/domestic violence (Kahm, 2020).

2 Brock makes a crucial distinction between potential energy (latent capacities) and enacted energy. He says that gifts are “neither potentials nor capacities, spiritual gifts are always and only acts” (Brock, 2019, p. 204).

3 See Belser (2018).

4 For another argument along these lines, see Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep (2002).

5 For more in this direction, see Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014).

6 Crawley defines otherwise possibilities saying: “Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology. But if infinite alternatives exist, if otherwise possibility is a resource that is never exhausted, what is, what exists, is but one of many. Otherwise possibilities exist alongside that which we can detect with our finite sensual capacities.” (Crawley, 2017, p. 2)

7 The phrase “regimes of normativity” comes from queer theory. It can be traced to Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet (1993).