“WE WON”: GAY TRIUMPAHLISM IN THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION, PART TWO
Public domain.
The first part of this piece can be found here.
To be fair to Bishop Robinson, his words “we won” also imply an eschatological hope for God’s full and final restoration of the world and humankind. For many Christians, this hope is both present (in some sense) and future oriented. We have won, not only in the sense of our inclusion, but also in the sense that we already anticipate God’s full restoration of this world. We can approach this eschatological confidence in two ways: by sinking into relatively passive tactics oriented toward inclusion, or we can use the tangled tensions of holding a gay identity in the Anglican Communion to help us understand and deploy our identities in primarily ethical terms.
Certain iterations of queer theory such as queer negativity help us along in this ethical quest. By “queer negativity”, I am referring to Lee Edelman and his work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (11) In No Future, Edelman lays out a theory of our social and political life, which he refers to as “reproductive futurism.” Reproductive futurism maps out the field of play for politics, placing all political activity under submission to the figure of the Child, onto whom the future is deferred. (To form an idea of Edelman’s future Child, it may help to consider sentiments such as “think of the children!” or, “Children are our future,” and the various situations these might be invoked. That schools serve as a site for culture wars over critical race theory, and rising anxieties over whether children will be corrupted by greater public acceptance of LGBTQ people may also be helpful examples). The Child of the future functions in our present in two ways: first, as a figure of the nuclear family, it “absolutely privileges” heterosexuality, (12) and second, the figure of the Child makes it exceedingly difficult to question—much less undo or overthrow—the present social and political order. Any hint of sustained radicalism is smothered by the figure of The Child. Thus, for Edelman, the political field of play is entirely conservative; at the end of the day, it affirms and validates the structures upholding our heteronormative social order, because those are (it is assumed) what The Child needs in order to grow and thrive. Within such a field of play, queer political resistance is always at best negotiating with heteronormativity and reproductive futurism. Queer resistance which does not negotiate with reproductive futurism, which does not seek assimilation at the expense of new “queers”, and which willingly takes its place as symbols of threat to the Child (or, the social and political order) is unthinkable (13) —and yet, it is necessary. What is of primary importance to our purposes here—figuring an understanding of a gay male identity in today’s Anglican Communion—is Edelman’s proposed solution to this paradox. For Edelman, the ethical value of queerness is in its ability to carve out a position from which queers might refuse to negotiate with or assimilate to that field of play which, by its own terms, seeks to foreclose the possibility of queerness. (14) How can one enact a queer resistance that does not negotiate, assimilate, or seek to shift the burden of queerness elsewhere? Put in more specific terms, how can gay Anglican men resist the Communion’s homophobia and colonialism without settling for winning via inclusion, without shifting the burden of queerness elsewhere, and without pitting victims of homophobia and colonialism against each other?
From Winners to Losers
The short answer is that Anglican gay men, especially those in less politically threatening parts of the Communion, such as The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Church of England, refuse to seek assimilation within the ecclesial structure of the Anglican Communion. In long form: similar to Edelman’s conception of a heteronormative political field of play that keeps queer resistance in a chokehold, the Anglican Communion is wracked by homophobia and colonialism which interact with each other in a vicious cycle. “Winning” in this unfortunate circumstance means, at best, assimilation/inclusion in some corner of the Communion that will have us. Settling for assimilation or inclusion disenfranchises us from the work of untangling Anglican homophobia and colonialism and forging new ways of relating as relatively autonomous churches in communion with each other. It separates us further from LGBTQ people in Nigeria and elsewhere suffering under the continued effects of colonialism and the nationalistic homophobia deployed for misguided decolonial aims. The wins offered by inclusion lead to this disenfranchisement and separation by muting us. Perhaps we are muted by our own complacency—lulled into a comfortable position within a parish and diocese, our spiritual and social needs met, we can at best only muster a bit of detached concern over the state of homophobia and colonialism within the worldwide Anglican Communion. Or, if we are not complacent, we perhaps are still muzzled by the losses we face if we reject inclusion as our goal. The painful paths many of us have taken toward our current places of refuge deserve respect and care—yet the race we run as followers of Christ toward the eternal prize we are promised (1 Corinthians 9) is not won by mere inclusion.
The turn I am suggesting, which is a turn away from inclusion as our ethical goal and toward something new, is sharp. We may be aided by Kent Brintnall’s work Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure, (15) in which he makes the case that Christ’s crucifixion, while certainly a site onto which visions of masculine triumph and unconquerable strength can and has been projected, can also be figured to unravel those same myths of masculinity. Beholding Christ on the Roman cross, we “behold the figure of the masculine subject incapable of sustaining the fiction of its coherence, uniqueness, and claim to power and privilege”. (16) For Brintnall, as much as Christian theology has been deployed to shore up human fictions of masculinity and its meaning, so too Christian symbolism can unravel such fictions—and ourselves.
Brintnall’s proposal helps us imagine how Christian identities and bodies can be the agents which begin to unravel entrenched Christian patterns of colonialism, homophobia, and purported inclusion. Perhaps the Christian ethic, especially as it relates to gay men in the Anglican communion, is not aimed toward winning but toward losing. Our work, no longer preoccupied with inclusion, may for some time be located at the parish and diocesan level, especially in diocesan anti-racism trainings, parish and diocesan reparations work, and coalition building between LGBTQ, refugee/expat, and BIPOC groups within the Anglican Communion. By using words and actions to critique the Anglican Communion’s disastrous relationship to colonialism and homophobia, we lose our chance at seamless inclusion, we lose an easy path to belonging and meaning, we lose self-assuredness, we lose a coherent narrative of our place in the Church. What follows these losses is unclear, aside from the hope that it includes our freedom from “winning”, if winning means reiterating the same patterns of relation across the Anglican Communion which currently ensnare us.
11. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
12. Ibid., page 2.
13. Ibid., pp. 2-4.
14. Ibid., pp. 4-10.
15. Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
16. Ibid., 188.
