Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng

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СКАЧАТЬ II, 1980–1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 139–59.

      14 See Renee L. Hill, “Who Are We for Each Other?: Sexism, Sexuality and Womanist Theology,” in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology II, 345–51.

      15 See Leng Leroy Lim, “The Gay Erotics of My Stuttering Mother Tongue,” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 172–77.

      16 See Margarita Suárez, “Reflections on Being Latina and Lesbian,” in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking (New York: Continuum, 1997), 347–50.

      17 See Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).

      18 See Horace L. Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2006).

      19 See Roger A. Sneed, Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

      20 See Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace.

      21 Susannah Cornwall, Controversies in Queer Theology (London: SCM Press, 2011), 73.

      22 See, e.g., Michael Sepidoza Campos, “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in Filipino Cultural Spaces,” in Queer Religion: Volume II, LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 167–91; Jojo (Kenneth Hamilton), “Searching for Gender-Variant East African Spiritual Leaders, From Missionary Discourse to Middle Course,” in Queer Religion: Volume I, Homosexuality in Modern Religious History, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 127–45; Juan A. Herrero-Brasas, “Whitman’s Church of Comradeship: Same-Sex Love, Religion, and the Marginality of Friendship,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion I, 169–89; Roland Stringfellow, “Soul Work: Developing a Black LGBT Liberation Theology,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion I, 113–25; Ruth Vanita, “Hinduism and Homosexuality,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion I, 1–23; Lai-shan Yip, “Listening to the Passion of Catholic nu-tongzhi: Developing a Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology in Hong Kong,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion II, 63–80; Kuukua Dzigbordi Yomekpe, “Not Just a Phase: Single Black Women in the Black Church,” in Boisvert and Johnson, Queer Religion II, 109–23.

      23 See Miranda K. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

      24 It should be noted that I am not setting up a binary between rainbow and monochromatic theologies here. Rather, I am suggesting that the themes of rainbow theology can be used to enrich the analysis of traditional liberation theologies.

Part I

       Race, Sexuality, and Spirit

Chapter 1

       Queer of Color Theologies

      For 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 СКАЧАТЬ