In the Life and in the Spirit , livre ebook

IN THE LIFE AND IN THE SPIRIT
IN THE LIFE AND IN THE SPIRIT
Homoerotic Spirituality in African American Literature
MARLON RACHQUEL MOORE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Marlon Rachquel, 1971–
In the life and in the spirit : homoerotic spirituality in African American literature / Marlon Rachquel Moore.
pages cm
Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)—Univeristy of Florida.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5407-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) EISBN 978-1-4384-5409-2 (e-book)
1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Homosexuality in literature. 4. Spirituality in literature. 5. Christianity in literature. I. Title.
PS153.N5M663 2014
810.9'896073--dc23
2014002129
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
My challenge to African Americans is to engage seriously and critically the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality in the same faithful way that we have typically offered a critical engagement of Christianity and race.
—Horace Griffin, “Toward a True Black Liberation Theology”
Sex is often a bodily path leading us to other dimensions of existence. It is a profound expression of wholeness [,] for spirit can be encountered in the erotic and the erotic in the spirit—they flow in and out of each other.
—Elias Farajaje-Jones, “Holy Fuck”
To be fully liberated, we have to move beyond transgression toward creativity, responsibility, sexual ownership, and sexual authority.
—Donna Weir-Soley, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings
Let go of your mother’s God. Embrace the divine in your life as it reveals itself to you.
—Marlon Rachquel Moore, my liberation theology
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One. Toward a Genealogy of Black Queer Spirituality
PART I. GAY CHRISTIANITY
Chapter Two. Gay Christian Narrative: Langston Hughes’s “Blessed Assurance”
Chapter Three. Sacred Sensuality: Just Above My Head
PART II. PHILOSOPHIES OF THE SPIRIT
Chapter Four. Soul Talk and Sermonic Seduction: The Color Purple ; Say Jesus and Come to Me
Chapter Five. Neo-Spirit Narrative: “In the Life”
PART III. NONTHEIST COSMOLOGIES
Chapter Six. Humanist Zealotry: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Chapter Seven. Reciprocity as Spiritual Ethos: The Gilda Stories
Closing Thoughts and Suggestions for Further Reading
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
C ontemporary religious and political discourses still, by and large, assume a mutually exclusive binary in which “people of faith” are set apart from gay/lesbian communities. This paradigm assumes an antagonism that situates queer or non-normative sexual identities in the inferior ideological position. The discourses are diverse and deeply embedded across U.S. cultural institutions. Churches of various denominations, for example, conduct exorcisms to rid believers of the “homosexual demon” and some offer “reparative therapies” intended to alleviate desire or, at minimum, curb undesirable behaviors. Exodus International, from 1976 to 2013, for example, was the most famous and expansive Christian ministry dedicated to helping people find “freedom from homosexuality” through its religious transformation program. The following is an excerpt from the organization’s “Statement on Homosexuality”: 1
Exodus upholds heterosexuality as God’s creative intent for humanity, and subsequently views homosexual expression as outside of God’s will. Exodus cites homosexual tendencies as one of many disorders that beset fallen humanity. Choosing to resolve these tendencies through homosexual behavior, taking on a homosexual identity, and involvement in the homosexual lifestyle is considered destructive, as it distorts God’s intent for the individual and is thus sinful.
Even when Exodus International acknowledges that a gay person can be “truly Christian” if he is a believer in the doctrine, it undermines that assertion with another: “However, if someone pursues homosexual involvement and refuses to acknowledge this as sin, it’s valid to humbly question whether their commitment to Christ is genuine.” Clearly, from their perspective, one cannot be both (homo)sexually active and “committed” to Christianity.
In law and politics, activists and lawmakers of various religious and political ilk invoke the religious underpinnings of their policy decisions as they assert that allowing same-sex marriage devalues and sullies the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. 2 These heterosupremacist beliefs have been codified in state and federal legislation, most notoriously in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and California’s 2009 Proposition 8. 3 One does not have to rely on religious declarations to locate a common (though disputed) discourse on the deplorable nature of homosexuality. Homosexuality-as-destructive rhetoric figures prominently in the U.S. military’s seventeen-year ban on homosexual acts, commonly called the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy (DADT). 4 DADT dictates, in part, that self-identified homo/bisexual servicepeople are allowed to serve as long as they do not engage in homosexual sex acts, or convey their sexual orientation through public statements or acts. Cultural critic Judith Butler has shown that DADT makes clear the mere utterance of the words “I am a homosexual” is a powerful speech act, a self-definition deemed so offensive and contagious that it constitutes homosexual conduct and a sexual propensity, which endangers the very stability of military culture (107–108). That is, to express oneself in any nonhetero manner is a violation of the law and justification for one’s expulsion from membership in the military community. Like anti-gay churches, the federal law institutionalizes and normalizes homophobia and les/bi/gay/queer self-loathing.
All of this says that for a person whose sexual activity is not strictly heterosexual, or whose desires, sexual identity, and/or family structure is not heteronormative, the negative effect of being considered evil or unnatural can be profound and totalizing. Some people internalize this negative image and seek ways to escape the despised identity or stigmatized aspects of their life; others struggle against such polarizations and work to facilitate new paradigms and forge new freedoms. One way in which writers engage in this freedom struggle is through imaginative literature. Writers often negotiate their own oppression and those of others with whom they sympathize by endorsing perspectives that revise the structures and strictures by which the oppression is forged and perpetuated. In this book I set out to target responsive efforts in literature to cast off the culturally entrenched negative classifications described earlier and which aim to refigure the relationships among faith, religion, spirituality, and queer sexuality. With this motif, In the Life and in the Spirit converses with other relatively recent critical engagements with illustrations of the spiritual in fiction by black writers. While I was conducting this research, several important volumes of criticism and a series of essays were published, the presence of which reveals the complexity and diversity of primary sources and, simultaneously, affirms the need for more queer critical readings and for a focus on sexually queer subjects.
An important set of ideas emanate from essays by Melvin Rahming who coined the term spirit-centered as a way to describe stories that foreground human interaction with spiritual forces. In his 2004 essay, “Theorizing Spirit,” Rahming determines that the surge in production of spirit-centered fiction necessitates a reconsideration of how critics think about this kind of work. He expresses concern that traditional critical approaches lack interrogational depth when confronted with the “non-Western concepts of reality” (2) particular to Africana fiction. What we need, he contends, is a new framework, a “critical theory of spirit” that allows us to centralize the role of spirit in the evaluation of a work of art such as this. He further clarifies this methodology in a subsequent essay, titled “Reading Spirit”:
By “spirit-centered methodology” I mean to imply a critical discussion that takes its ideological cue, ironically, from aspects of the work that subordinate ideological, even aesthetic, considerations to spiritual intent. Thus, the critical exploration of spirit-centered works anchors itself, like the work, in a paradigm of spirit—that is, in a cosmology that assumes, again like the work, the organic interrelatedness of all things in the universe. Because of the infinite nature of spirit and the inexhaustible avenues to spiritual experience, such an approach is ultimately not in the service of discrete philosophical and aesthetic constructs, although it may well call to mind these contextualized considerations. For the same reason, the spirit-centered approach cannot be prescribed: at best, it can only be described. Thus, the methodology of spirit-centered criticism is implicit in the actual attempt to explore avenues by which the text conveys its spiritual matrix and yields up the inseparability of its parts as they engage and contribute to the reader’s appreciation of the work’s spiritua