Hope in complexity: a Response to Timothy Radcliffe

Talking about LGBTIQ in a context such as Africa where discussing sex and sexualities is a taboo is a difficult task. Talking for this community is an acrimonious task because of historic rhetoric that are very contemptuous of minority sexual identities of men and women within a heterosexual society. A theological discourse on this issue is considered 'indecent' because its transgression from the normative of alliance between church and governments who through law and scriptures perpetuate heterosexual oppressive ideology. Yet there are many people who openly live in same sex relationships, albeit with stigma, discrimination and fear, and at some times assaults. The position of the government and the church is informed by the view that this manner of relationship is not culturally acceptable and not biblically faithful. A lot of historical research on Sexuality in Africa, and textual criticism and hermeneutics of scriptures have challenged these positions. However, the culturally conversant and biblically faithful contours in the debate have not yielded the desired outcome of inclusion. This paper uses liminality theology as a hermeneutical paradigm to explicate a third dimensionality in the LGBTIQ debates for the African church. This paper argues that the church in Kenya must take a prophetic stand in three levels: Promote faith that does justice, be vigilant and committed to social change and transforming factors that perpetuate discrimination, and be in solidarity with its people as an agent of hope and salvation.

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HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015

In 2012 the Bologna chapter of We Are Church, a group of lay liberal Catholics who lobby the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality, sought to pursue a dialogue with the city’s LGBTQ community. The relative success of those conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors, whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity to the Catholic “hierarchy.” But in prevailing in this endeavor, they created a further obstacle for themselves: the more convincingly they distinguished themselves from orthodox Catholicism, the less convincing was their eponymous declaration of “We Are Church”; the further they traveled toward the positions held by their LGBTQ activist counterparts, the more likely they were to be dismissed as unrepresentative of Catholicism, and thus irrelevant. Thus in this case ethics across borders depends not only upon finding affinities and sustaining differences but also upon finding affinities over how to sustain differences. Similarly, I suggest that debates in anthropology surrounding radical difference may benefit from attending to the ways in which such difference itself can be the subject of agreement or disagreement.

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STJ | Stellenbosch Theological Journal

The human dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people are threatend on the African continent. The sexual orientation, gender identity, expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) of LGBTIQ persons are seen as un-African. Religious communities are one of the biggest perpetrators that violate the human dignity of LGBTIQ people. For the past fifteen years the Uniting Reformed Church in South African (URCSA) made policy decions and compiled research documents that envistigates the SOGIESC of LGBTIQ people. The URCSA failed multiple times to affirm the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. In this article I’m asking, whether the recognition of LGBTIQ bodies in the URCSA is an indecent proposal. This paper is theologically underpinned by late Latin-American bisexual theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Bi/Christology. Starting with my own queer autobiography, I position myself from below and outside in doing theology. Secondly, I engage shortly with the history ...

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HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020

This article is a response to the roundtable about my book Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa. In the roundtable, six anthropologists engage the book critically. In the response, I address some of their criticisms and the questions raised, focusing on three central themes: Christianity and the postsecular turn; queer theory and the theological turn; interludes and the self-reflexive turn.

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2014

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2015

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Proceedings of the Junior College Multi-Disciplinary Conference: Research, Practice and Collaboration, Breaking Barriers, 18-20 September, 2018, pp. 265-275., 2018

This paper explores how lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) Catholics deal with the intra-personal conflict that emerges from the incongurence between their faith and their sexuality. When they start experiencing sexual desires for persons of the same sex, their inner state of being is shattered as they are engulfed with feelings of guilt, fear, anger, doubt and anxiety. They have to deal with their apparently irreconcilable sexuality and faith as they feel judged by God and by his Church. The LGBT Catholics in my study are spiritually profound, introspective, faithful beings. Yet they are not afraid to engage with the Church’s teachings to develop their own individual morality. Drawing upon the Catholic tradition itself, they seek to develop an alternative, LGBT-affirming moral hermeneutic, a process aided by therapy, reflection, prayer, priestly advice and other techniques which enable them not only to find themselves but to relocate themselves within Catholicism. Through what Foucault calls “practices of the self” such as self-reflection, self-knowledge and self-examination, individuals engage with the established and prescribed moral code in a process of “moral subjectivation”. Such processes enable them to reconstruct their fragmented self and to ‘reclaim’ their rightful place in religious texts which was denied them through heteronormative theological interpretations.

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Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender and God, 2017

This chapter examines the incorporation of LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex, and queer) subjectivities into nationalist imaginaries in the aftermath of the ‘‘war on terror’’ and the subsequent complicity of queer politics in Islamophobia. Queer studies scholar and political theorist Jasbir K. Puar calls this incorporation ‘‘homonationalism,’’ defining it as ‘‘the dual movement in which certain homosexual constituencies have embraced U.S. nationalist agendas and have also been embraced by nationalist agendas’’ (2007, xxiv). Homonationalism enables the presentation of Western liberal democracies as exceptionally tolerant on the basis of their enfranchisement of lesbian and gay citizens, in contrast to the allegedly brutal and barbaric homophobia of Islamic countries, a representation that justifies racist, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic policies. The incorporation of LGBTIQ subjects into heteronormative domestic institutions in liberal states via various forms of enfranchisement is what Lisa Duggan terms the ‘‘new homonormative’’ (2002) and what David L. Eng calls ‘‘queer liberalism’’ (2007). Both terms signal the inclusion of queer individuals in concepts of normative citizenship, which, while extending the benefits and rights of heteronormative identity and social practices to gay and lesbian citizens, also sets the regulatory terms (requiring conformity to heterosexual norms) in which they are able to acquire these rights. The term heteronormativity refers to the assumption that heterosexuality is the ‘‘normal’’ form of desire/sexual orientation, which permits marital relations and reproductive kinship only between people of opposite sexes. The relatively recent extension of rights to marriage, for example, to LGBTIQ couples is thus arguably predicated on the extent to which these citizens conform to or mirror the patterns and requirements of heteronormativity and its models of domestic sociality and sexual norms. This chapter offers a consideration of the ways in which heteronormative ideologies are aligned with the nationalist secular liberal policies of the nation-state and examines the intersection of these ideologies and policies with race, religiosity, and sexuality. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of scholarly debates that address the centrality of gender in the formation of the nation-state historically. Gender underpins discourses of heterosexual national inclusion and exclusion and makes compliant and conservative heteronormative subjectivities the ground of citizenry. The next section extends the analysis to an assessment of the ways in which sexuality also provides a means of drawing up national boundaries where the nation-state is represented as intrinsically heteronormative. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, concepts of national identity have been extended to allow for the incorporation of homonormative models of citizenship. This section provides a detailed overview of the concept of homonationalism in the post-9/11 political context, setting out Puar’s (2007) theorization of the three phenomena that structure homonationalism: sexual exceptionalism, queerness as a regulatory norm, and white ascendancy. These three phenomena map the interweaving of race, gender, class, nation, and religion, enabling the self-representation of the United States as a civilized and civilizing force for good. This section also attends to the ways in which homonationalism functions both biopolitically (Foucault 2003, 2008) and necropolitically (Mbembe 2003)— that is, as determining which populations are worthy of life and protection (biopolitics) and which are seen as threatening and thus targets for elimination or subjection to colonial domination (necropolitics). The subsequent section deals with the relationship between religion and the particular nationalist imaginary that claims ‘‘God is on our side,’’ a claim that supports discourses of nationalism, racism, and homophobia but also latterly homonationalism. The hostile attitude of mainstream US Christian discourse toward homosexuality and gender equality are highlighted. The following and concluding section then lays out the ways in which gay and lesbian theologies, seeking to counter Christian homophobia, nonetheless engage in the elevation of homonormativity and homonationalism. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of radical queer theologies, exemplified in the work of Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, which undo conceptions of God as being on the side of the imperialist nation-state.

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Journal of Catholic Education, 2019

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Theology & Sexuality, 2015

Published in 1993, Goss’s Jesus ACTED UP was one of the first attempts to articulate both a radical queer theology and a mission of mainstream social transformation. The subsequent 20 years have revealed gaps between the two, precisely as mainstream LGBT politics has embraced (or perhaps exploited) religion. I focus on four tensions for those straddling the scholarship/ activism lines. First, what we are doing: queer theology, and academic discourse generally, value that which is nuanced and complex; mainstream activism prefers the simple and clear. Second, what we want: radical liberation requires systemic change, while mainstream activism works pragmatically and incrementally within the system. Third, who we are: queer theory and theology emphasize the socially constructed and mutable natures of the subject, but mainstream social transformation has “won” with essentialism (“Born This Way,” love is love, etc.). Fourth, what about God: the queer, ironic, eroticized God of queer theology remains, thus far, incomprehensible in the public square where only the unreconstructed God is known. These tensions have erupted in numerous political and social contexts in the two decades since Bob Goss tried to bring radical theology and mainstream activism together, though I conclude by noting that only now might the public square be ready for what he and other queer theologians have to offer.

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