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ОглавлениеFor the last three years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a mentor at the Human Rights Campaign Summer Institute at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. Each summer, the HRC Summer Institute brings together fifteen talented doctoral and advanced master’s degree students who do work in LGBTIQ theology and religious studies. The students live and study together for a week, and they have a chance to network among themselves as well as with prominent scholars from across the country who are doing similar work in LGBTIQ theology and religious studies.
For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of serving as a mentor at the HRC Summer Institute has been working with queer students of color who are interested in the intersections of race, sexuality, and spirituality. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to work closely with many LGBTIQ and allied Black, Asian American, and Latina/o students, and it’s been interesting to observe how many similarities—and differences—there are in terms of our research agendas.
For example, in 2012 the LGBTIQ and allied scholars of color at the HRC Summer Institute worked on a dizzying variety of projects, including the reclaiming of queer Black voices in the Civil Rights Movement, examining how LGBTIQ Asian Americans use religion as a means for decolonization and healing, studying the religious lives of LGBTIQ Muslims, examining methods of Latin American queer biblical interpretation, rethinking sexual ethics in Korean American churches, recording and archiving oral histories from queer spiritual leaders, analyzing the practices of radically welcoming spiritual communities with respect to race and sexuality, studying the work of North American Two-Spirit activists, and examining notions of sexual purity in the context of global sex trafficking.
This experience of working with younger queer scholars of color across different racial and ethnic groups has led me to think deeply about whether it is possible—or even desirable—to construct a queer of color theology.1 On the one hand, all of us share an acute awareness of the ways in which issues of race and sexuality mutually reinforce each other with respect to oppression. On the other hand, these scholars each have very different research topics, methodologies, faith traditions, and communities of accountability. So is it possible to construct a queer of color theology? It is to this question that we now turn.
1. Is “Queer of Color” a Valid Category?
Is it even possible to talk about a queer of color theology? On the one hand, the very notion of queer is to “denaturalize or de-essentialize formerly stable identities such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, race, nationality, woman, and man.”2 In other words, the term “queer”—at least in the academic discipline of queer theory—challenges notions of fixed identity. It would seem, therefore, that using a term such as “queer of color” is to reinforce “natural” identity categories, and not to further the understanding that such categories are socially constructed. As such, it would seem that the term “queer of color” is highly problematic.
Furthermore, it could be argued that the use of the term “queer of color” as an umbrella term for LGBTIQ people of color does violence—metaphorically speaking—to the particular social contexts for each subgroup (for example, queer Asian Americans) within the umbrella. That is, it is important for any given marginalized group to name itself and come to voice about its own particular experiences. Take, for example, the parallel example of womanist theology. Womanist theology arose out of the fact that neither Black (male) liberation theology nor (white) feminist theology spoke to the experiences of African American women. Thus, to use the broader categories of “Black theology” or “feminist theology” would fail to honor the womanist experience.
In my view, the “queer of color” category is an important one, and I believe that the above objections to its use can be addressed in a number of ways. First, Gayatri Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism can be helpful with respect to the issue of fixed identity. That is, it is possible to speak about “queers of color” for strategic purposes—such as in the context of “struggles for liberation from the effects of colonial and neocolonial oppression”—without reinscribing essentialist notions of identity.3 For example, an April 2012 report by the Center for American Progress shows that LGBTIQ people of color are often the very ones who are “left behind” with respect to educational attainment, economic insecurity, and health disparities.4 Thus, it is vitally important to speak about “queers of color,” as long as we do so in a strategic manner.
Second, with respect to the umbrella term issue (that is, whether the category of “queer of color” does violence to its subgroups), it can be argued that “queer of color” does in fact serve a useful function while also honoring the experiences of its various subgroups. There are in fact important similarities among the work done by LGBTIQ scholars of color across racial and ethnic boundaries. For example, there is a deep “family resemblance,” to cite the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on language theory, with respect to this scholarship.5 This can be seen in the secular academy in which a “queer of color critique” movement has arisen among LGBTIQ scholars of color. This movement has recognized the importance of bringing together similar voices while also preserving their differences.6 Thus, it makes sense to look more closely at queer of color work as its own category.
Third, it may be the case that “queer of color” is less about an identity—that is, constructing yet another identity-based theology—and more about positionality. That is, LGBTIQ people of color share a unique “in between” position with respect to both the queer community and communities of color, and thus may actually require a unique signifier that discusses the specific issues that arise out of this social location. For all of these reasons, I believe that “queer of color” is a valid category that can—and must—be used.
2. Shared Scholarly Heritage
In addition to the above theoretical issues, LGBTIQ people of color also share a common genealogy, or heritage, with respect to scholarly writings about living at the intersections of race and sexuality. Although this genealogy is not as widely known as the more “canonical” works in queer theory by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David M. Halperin, this history of queer of color scholarship does in fact exist and can help LGBTIQ people of color find a sense of community and belonging.
In the 1970s, there were few, if any, writings by LGBTIQ people of color about their experiences. As Barbara Smith wrote in her groundbreaking 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” it was “unprecedented” and “dangerous” to write about the Black lesbian experience because “these things have not been done” by Black men, by white feminists, or even by Black women.7 Smith writes poignantly: “I finally want to express how much easier both my waking and my sleeping hours would be if there were one book in existence that would tell me something specific about my life.”8
In the thirty-five years following the publication of Smith’s essay, however, there have been many books written about the queer of color experience. These books include anthologies on the queer Asian American experience such as Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998);9 the queer Black experience such as The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (2000);10 the queer Latina/o experience such as Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (2011);11 and the Two-Spirit Indigenous experience such as Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011).12
In addition to the above anthologies, there have also been works written by key queer of color theorists such as Audre Lorde13 and Gloria Anzaldúa.14 In fact, writings about the LGBTIQ of color experience—including spiritual experiences—can be traced back at least a half-century, with the publication of Another Country by the gay Black writer James Baldwin in 1962. The gay Latino scholar Michael Hames-García has assembled a remarkable timeline of key works by queer writers of color from the 1960s through the 1980s, including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Cherríe Moraga, and Glora Anzaldúa, that predate the appearance of canonical queer theory in the early 1990s by several decades.15
As noted above, there is now an entire movement within academic queer studies—“queer of color critique”—that is dedicated to the work of LGBTIQ scholars of color on the intersections between race and queer theory. In a special 2005 issue of the journal Social Text entitled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” the editors noted that queer studies have moved beyond issues of sexuality and now cover issues “on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics.”16 In sum, LGBTIQ people of color share a common scholarly heritage, and it is important to recognize and honor this history in constructing a queer of color theology.
3. Some Definitions
Concepts relating to race, sexuality, and spirituality are often more complicated than they initially seem. As such, it may be helpful to set out a few definitions of key terms that are used in this book.
First, the term “race” as used in this book is taken from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal text, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. In that text, Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” Although this definition refers to “biologically based human characteristics” or “phenotypes,” Omni and Winant remind us that the “selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.”17
Indeed, contemporary racial categories have their roots in the colonial expansion of western Europe starting in the fifteenth century. As Roger Sanjek has argued, race is a socially-constructed “framework of ranked categories segmenting the human population” that was developed during the 1400s and that “imputed racial quanta of intelligence, attractiveness, cultural potential, and worth.”18 Although none of this scaling is “real” from an anthropological perspective, Sanjek notes that race has “become all too real in its social ordering of perceptions and policies” and in the “pervasive racism that has plagued the globe.”19
Thus, it is fair to understand the term “race” as referring to categories (for example, “Asian American”) that are based upon “physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type” as well as the “generalizations and stereotypes” that arise out of such racial categories. By contrast, the term “ethnicity” (for example, “Chinese American”) refers to a group that shares “common experiences” such as language, culture, national origin, religious affiliation, or other factors that over time comes to “distinguish one group from another.”20 The term “people of color” refers collectively to those persons—including, but not limited to, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Indigenous people—who belong to racial and ethnic groups that have been historically marginalized within the United States and/or colonized by European and North American powers around the world.21
Second, the term “sexuality” as used in this book is very broad and refers to, on a societal level, “the bundle of social phenomena that shape erotic life: laws, religion, norms and values, beliefs and ideologies, the social organization of reproduction, family life, identities, domestic arrangements, diseases, violence and love” as well as to, on an individual level, the related “pleasures and pains that can shape our lives for good or ill.”22 As with race, sexuality is very much a social construct that changes with place and time.
As noted above, the term “LGBTIQ” is used in this book as a collective term to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer persons. This book also uses “queer” interchangeably with “LGBTIQ.” (“Queer” is also a catch-all term that includes those individuals who identify themselves as pansexual, asexual, questioning, allied, and Two-Spirit.)23 And, as I have discussed elsewhere, the term “queer” also has other more specialized meanings within the realm of queer theology, including transgression as well as the dissolution of binaries with respect to sexuality and gender.24
As it may be fairly obvious by now, the subcategories that make up the terms “LGBTIQ” or “queer” are actually quite different from one another. That is, the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” and “bisexual” refer to sexual orientation (that is, the object of one’s attraction on a physical and emotional level). By contrast, “transgender” refers to gender identity and expression (that is, the gender(s) with which one identifies and/or expresses to the world). “Intersex” refers to biological sex (that is, one’s sexual organs, hormones, and chromosomes). What binds these various terms together, ultimately, is a sense of marginalization with respect to dominant societal norms with respect to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and/or biological sex.25
Third, the term “spirituality” is used broadly in this book to describe “those attitudes, beliefs and practices which animate people’s lives and help them to reach out toward super-sensible realities.”26 That is, spirituality refers to one’s engagement with an ultimate reality that is beyond the realm of senses. This can include organized religions—whether the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism—or it can involve more personal or individual spiritual practices.
It should be noted that these definitions are not intended to reinforce essentialist thinking about racial, sexual, and spiritual categories. That is, rather than pointing to something “essentialist” about a person (for example, a person’s inherent “Asianness” or “queerness”), the categories of race, sexuality, and spirituality are actually fluid and highly dependent upon social context such as “time, place, and situation.”27 Although racial, sexual, and spiritual traits may be grounded in physical characteristics or experiences, the significance of such characteristics is socially constructed and changes over time.28
4. Scope and Limitations
Having discussed definitional issues, I believe that it is also important to describe the scope and limitations of this book. First and foremost, although this book does cover a number of very broad issues such as race, sexuality, and spirituality, it is ultimately a work of Christian theology. That is, this book is ultimately grounded in my own identity as a follower of Jesus Christ, which has shaped my vocation as a systematic theologian, a seminary professor, and an ordained minister.
That being said, I am deeply committed to bringing interfaith perspectives and sources into my work. Although I cannot speak on behalf of persons from non-Christian faith communities, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with my maternal grandparents who had spent much of their adult lives in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They never converted to Christianity and maintained a hybridized view of religion as a blend of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. My brother, as I have written elsewhere, is a convert to Judaism.29 Accordingly, I am sensitive to interfaith issues, and I discuss them in greater detail in the second part of this book.
Second, I write from my own social location as an openly-gay, cisgender (that is, non-transgender), Gen X, and able-bodied Chinese American man in academia. I realize that within the hierarchy of power within communities of color, I occupy a relatively privileged position with respect to my sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, age, ability, ethnicity, class, and occupation. Although I have tried my best to step outside of my own social location and include perspectives other than my own in this book, I will inevitably fall short in terms of my sources and examples. For that I ask for your patience and understanding, and I invite you to contact me with comments and additional perspectives that I may have overlooked.
Third, the examples in this book will focus primarily on communities of color within the United States. One of the reasons for this focus is that most of the writings by LGBTIQ theologians of color have been produced within the United States. Another reason for this focus is that I have spent virtually all of my life living within the United States, and thus my own experiences are limited with respect to transnational issues. That being said, Part II of this book discusses the importance of cross-border issues for queer theologians of color. It also acknowledges that the United States vs. international divide is not so easy to draw, particularly in the case of queer Asian American and Latina/o theologians.
Having addressed a number of theoretical issues, definitions, and limitations of this book, particularly relating to LGBTIQ people of color, we now turn to a survey of queer of color theologies. In the remaining four chapters of Part I of this book, we will explore queer Black, queer Asian American, queer Latina/o, and Two-Spirit Indigenous theologies and religious scholarship.30
Study Questions
1. What are your reasons for reading this book? What do you hope to learn from queer of color theologies?
2. It might be argued that the concept of “queer of color” is not a valid conceptual category. Do you agree or disagree? What are some reasons in favor of using this category?
3. Name some key scholarly works relating to the experiences of LGBTIQ people of color. Which of these works, if any, have you read in the past?
4. Explain, in your own words, how the terms “race,” “sexuality,” and “spirituality” are used in this book.
5. What are some limitations of this book as described by the author? Which of these limitations concern you the most?
For Further Study
Queer Theology and Religious Studies
• Cheng, Radical Love, 9–11
• Lowe, “Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Theologies”
• Schippert, “Implications of Queer Theory for the Study of Religion and Gender”
• Schippert, “Queer Theory and the Study of Religion”
• Schneider, “Queer Theory”
• Wilcox, “Queer Theory and the Study of Religion”
Queer of Color Scholarship
• Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
• Constantine-Simms, The Greatest Taboo
• Driskill et al., Queer Indigenous Studies
• Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”
• Eng and Hom, Q&A
• Hames-García, “Queer Theory Revisited,” 26–27
• Hames-García and Martínez, Gay Latino Studies
• Lorde, Sister Outsider
• Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
Race
• Gregory and Sanjek, Race
• HoSang, LaBennett, and Pulido, Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century
• Omni and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States
• Sanjek, “The Enduring Inequalities of Race”
Sexuality
• Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace, xvi–xviii
• Cheng, Radical Love, 2–8
• Farajaje-Jones, “Loving ‘Queer’”
• Palmer and Haffner, A Time to Seek
• Weeks, “The Social Construction of Sexuality”
1 As I have written elsewhere, “queer theology” can be defined in a number of different ways. First, queer theology is LGBTIQ people “talking about God.” Second, queer theology is talking about God in a “self-consciously transgressive manner, especially in terms of challenging societal norms about sexuality and gender.” Third, queer theology is talking about God in a way that “challenges and deconstructs the natural binary categories of sexual and gender identity.” Cheng, Radical Love, 9–11. For overviews of queer theology and/or queer religious studies, see Mary Elise Lowe, “Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Theologies: Origins, Contributions, and Challenges,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 48, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 49–61; Claudia Schippert, “Implications of Queer Theory for the Study of Religion and Gender: Entering the Third Decade,” Religion and Gender 1, no. 1 (2011): 66–84; Claudia Schippert, “Queer Theory and the Study of Religion,” Rever: Revista de Estudios da Religião 5, no. 4 (2005): 90–99; Melissa M. Wilcox, “Queer Theory and the Study of Religion,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion II, 227–51.
2 Laurel C. Schneider, “Queer Theory,” in Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation, ed. A. K. M. Adam (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000), 206.
3 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), 79. See also Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 42–48.
4 Melissa Dunn and Aisha Moodie-Mills, “The State of Gay and Transgender Communities of Color in 2012” (April 13, 2012), Center for American Progress, accessed January 3, 2013, http://bit.ly/IhiwY6.
5 According to Wittgenstein, linguistic concepts need not, in general, have an essence. For example, there are many activities that fit within the concept of a “game,” but there is no “one, essential characteristic” that ties all of such activities together beyond that of “family resemblance.” See Chon Tejedor, Starting with Wittgenstein (London: Continuum, 2011), 111–14.
6 See Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, “Introduction,” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, ed. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–22.
7 Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 168.
8 Ibid., 183.
9 David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, Q&A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).
10 Delroy Constantine-Simms, The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Books, 2000).
11 Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds., Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
12 Qwo-Li Driskill et al., eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
13 See, e.g., Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007).
14 See, e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007).
15 See Michael Hames-García, “Queer Theory Revisited,” in Hames-García and Martínez, Gay Latino Studies, 26–27.
16 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text nos. 84–85 (2005): 2.
17 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55. A new anthology of essays was published in 2012 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Omi and Winant’s work. See Daniel HoSang et al., eds., Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
18 Roger Sanjek, “The Enduring Inequalities of Race,” in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1.
19 Ibid.
20 William Ming Liu and William R. Concepcion, “Redefining Asian American Identity and Masculinity,” in Culturally Responsive Counseling with Asian American Men, ed. William Ming Liu, Derek Kenji Iwamoto, and Mark H. Chae (New York: Routledge, 2010), 129.
21 As my Argentinian friend Hugo Córdova Quero has reminded me, the term “people of color” is used primarily in the United States. That is, former colonial subjects become “people of color” when they arrive in the United States and are classified into pre-existing racial categories.
22 Jeffrey Weeks, “The Social Construction of Sexuality,” in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, ed. Steven Seidman, Nancy Fischer, and Chet Meeks, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 19.
23 For a discussion of the term “Two-Spirit,” see chapter five below.
24 See Cheng, Radical Love, 2–8.
25 For some helpful definitions relating to issues of sexuality and gender identity, see Palmer and Haffner, “A Time to Seek,” 7–11.
26 Gordon S. Wakefield, “Spirituality,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1983), 549.
27 Laina Y. Bay-Cheng, “The Social Construction of Sexuality: Religion, Medicine, Media, Schools, and Families,” in Sex and Sexuality, Volume 1: Sexuality Today—Trends and Controversies, ed. Richard D. McAnulty and M. Michele Burnette (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 204. Indeed, given the fluidity of categories, one queer theorist has posed the question: “Must identity movements self-destruct?” Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?: A Queer Dilemma,” in Queer Cultures, ed. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 279.
28 Furthermore, instead of being mutually exclusive categories, such categories are actually deeply interrelated and ultimately cannot be separated from each other. See chapter seven below; see also Ian Barnard, Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Linwood J. Lewis, “Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity,” in McAnulty and Burnette, Sex and Sexuality, Volume 1, 229–64; Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
29 See Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace, xviii.
30 I recognize that these racial and ethnic categories can serve to marginalize the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people. As Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé has noted, such categories require such people to “have to make the choice to identify with only one group as opposed to being able to define ourselves as we choose, acknowledging our place within the people-of-color communities.” See Elias Farajaje-Jones, “Loving ‘Queer’: We’re All a Big Mix of Possibilities of Desire Just Waiting to Happen,” In the Family 6, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 17. It is my hope that the discussion of rainbow theology in Part II of this book will ultimately transcend these socially-constructed categories and honor the experiences of mixed-heritage and multiracial people.
