Becoming, change and transition are primary features of the transgender experience. These phenomena have echoes in the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, uses the negation of predicates to thematize the transcendence of the Divine nature. In The Divine Names, Dionysius writes, “We use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God. With these analogies we are raised upward toward the truth of the mind’s vision…we leave behind all our own notions of the Divine.” Dionysius describes how predicative language fails to positively articulate God, as it attempts to use human implements to give an account of that which is wholly beyond human cognition. These human implements only allow us to make analogical claims about God; in language we can say what God is like, not what God is. For transgender people, transition includes an envisioning of what we might be, what we might transgress, which we cannot necessarily describe or envision from our current embodiment — one’s gender is always at least partially unknown, and in a perpetual process of crossing or becoming. Dionysius’ approach to thinking about the Divine nature resonates with more recent philosophical and theological discussions of trans experience, and these discussions can be deployed as a means of grasping some of the more difficult issues in divinity. This paper aims to provide a sketch of the ways in which transgender experience and queer theory supply a set of analogies that articulate an understanding of the relationship between human, language, and God. Moreover, the mystical theology as articulated by neo-Platonists like Dionysius, provide a set of theological and philosophical tools for understanding the spiritual, social, and political implications of the transgender experience. By exploring transgender etymologically and it’s connections with Dionysius’ transcendent notion of the unknowingness of God, we can understand trans-ness not as it is concerned with the binary of male/female, but as an embodied crossing over from a gender which is known into unknowingness, an ambiguity through which a new kind of political, spiritual and social identity emerges.
It is my intention to present a trans Jewish Messianism that both retains the traditional, particularistic messianic figure – whose arrival Jews pray for three times per day – as already present in the “Now-time,” while also perpetually prolonging his own eventuality and emergence. This is accomplished through what I term the messianic threshold. The messianic threshold refers to the situation of transition in temporal “utterance” as participating in messianic “emergence” – where redemption takes place within the continually discontinuous disjunction between “utterance” and “emergence” – and are situated by the uttered Trans temporal tenses. That is, the form of Jewish Messianism proffered herein explores whether the temporal speaking of the messianic threshold’s temporal tenses can encompass a Trans messianic particularity. In so doing, I will trans-form Levinas’s messianic ethic of “universal responsibility” as situated in a broader context, questioning whether a universal messianic permanency can only flourish within its particularistic and traditional vulnerability. In sum, I propose that the language of the traditional Jewish Messiah perpetuates his own call to urgency as the universality of his own trans vulnerability, as acting through each participant in the “Now time.” Through a careful reading of Elliot Wolfson’s hermeneutical poetics, Derridean undertones helps situate language as embodying the surplus of meaning through which the trans temporal tenses of messianic hope emerge. I will then present how the messianic threshold converges these trajectories in the concurrence of the always present “now-time”. In other words the Trans temporal disjunction of the always present messianic body as gesturing towards the Messiahs perpetually prolonged unveiling, personifying its textual modality as that which only unveils as a re/veiling. This concurrence will then be performed as situating the messianic threshold within biblical, Talmudic and Hasidic texts.
In conclusion I suggest a final Rabbinic passage as a paradigm of the thresholds Messianic ethic as perpetual renewal inhabiting the space not for Redemption in finality but rather a hermeneutical disclosure for redemptive renewal in each present now.
Accounts of judicial rulings on instances of cross-dressing provide rare insight into the lived experiences of people who transgressed gender boundaries in Medieval Islam. Three stories stand out as case studies to conceptualize the creation of boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable gender transgression within the late Mamluk era (16th century).
The first is a story of a female assassin disguised as a man who attempts to kill Sultan al-
Ghawri’s and who is executed, then exhibited naked on the city gate. The total exposure of her body makes this punishment unparalleled.
The next story is found in two different accounts of Muhammad b. Salama al-Nabulusi and his ill-omened marriage. Al-Nabulusi’s unnamed bride claims to be a khuntha (an intersex person), but the court rules that the bride is in fact a boy. The court annuls al-Nabulusi’s marriage and punishes him and his bride severely. The two conflicting accounts illustrate the subjective nature of bodies as Ibn Tulun reports that the court’s findings were correct, and the punishments deserved, while Ibn al-Himsi laments the incorrect and unjust ruling.
The final story is the story of ‘Abd al-Rahman and hislove interest, ‘Ali. They petition the court to allow their marriage, claiming that ‘Ali is a khuntha. The court determines that ‘Ali is a female khuntha and allows the marriage. This story, the only one that does not end in punishment, speaks to acceptable ways of crossing gender boundaries and provides a point of contrast with the previous two stories.
Drawing on Eric Stanley’s theory of queer overkill from Near Life, Queer Death, I consider how these stories reveal that deception aimed at crossing gender boundaries was perceived as constituting an existential threat to Mamluk society through the destruction of gendered order. In moving between the public world of punishment and the private world of marriage, a distinction between the overlapping but not identical processes of gendering and sexing becomes clear. This distinction is often thought to be a modern one but examining how it plays out in the medieval context helps clarify the relationship between bodies and constructed identities.
This experimental paper explores queerness as a radical, erotic, playful form of agency that manifests the ecstatic potentials that unfold out of the world’s becoming, out of nature’s self. I argue that when we adopt a “kinarchist” vision of eco-social relations, queer resistance becomes not only opposed to normative social orders of gender and sex, but also becomes a challenge to conception of “Nature” as stable, determined, and passively available for either classification or consumption. Using the figure of the Web of Wyrd, popular in modern revivals of ancient, pre-Christian Germanic magic, I explore how, within a web of intersecting power flows, causal determinisms, and inherited structures, queerness exposes the contingency of “naturalized” ideologies, and opens sites for creative play through a strategy of erotic intimacy and participation with the given – one’s given body, the given social body, and the given body of ideology – rather than mere opposition, rejection, or erasure.
In this model, queerness cannot be seen as a culturally constructed stance of opposition to a normative “Nature”; rather, queerness teases hidden excesses out from under normative control, making possible a “transcendence” of the given without denial. Queer magic makes possible the emergence of new, surprising, and liberatory twists, even out from a determined set of inherited, powerfully normative collection of socio-material plotlines. Queer magic, “being wyrd,” is a powerful way to inhabit one’s destiny by accepting responsibility for one’s inheritances (past) and social-entanglements (present), while also giving oneself over to the production of value and meaning in the world through a radical participation across normative boundaries with one’s wider web of relations.
In this presentation I will examine a work of visual art by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge titled Cruciform (2005). Genesis and his late wife Lady Jaye are known for conducting an experiment called Pandrogeny in which both underwent body modification surgeries in order to physically resemble one another. This experiment was further intended to create a third, androgynous being, coming into existence through a metaphysical merging of their identities and referred to as “Breyer P-Orridge.” While this creation was often expressed through collaborative, transgender performance, “Pandrogynic ideals,” as philosophized by Genesis and Lady Jaye, made their ways into works of art. The image of Cruciform is but one example. It presents a cut-up photograph of Genesis himself in the position of a crucifixion. He is in the nude, baring both his penis and surgically enhanced breasts, appearing as a “purposeful hermaphrodite.” There are other invocations of religious iconography: flora and fauna and a gold-leaf background. The importance lies in its multifaceted focus on the body as transformative: material, spiritual, and even sacrificial. This reading of Cruciform focuses on its material dimensions of a canvas (body) within a canvas. I then argue that this image informs us about the spiritual dimensions surrounding the Pandrogeny experiment as well as ironically illustrating debates that arose from Christian art-historical moments as they continue to transform theological thought (i.e. Iconoclasm and Renaissance depictions of Christ’s “sexuality”). It is my hope that in turning attention to this artist and his body of work contributions can be made to discussions regarding the transgression of gender binaries, and in particular, one that operates a unique space of also transgressing the boundaries of religion and art.
This paper aims to challenge normative depictions of the suffering and crucified body of Christ as male. Thus, this project begins with an analysis of the “female” martyrs in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas and in the Martyrs in Gaul, focusing particularly on how the sex and gender of Perpetua, Felicitas, and Blandina complicate the sex and gender of the body of Christ. The bodies of these martyrs do not fall neatly on the sex and gender continuum in antiquity nor in our contemporary gender categories. Therefore, how is one to regard them? Eva Hayward’s “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves,” provides a useful theoretical framework with which to consider this. For Hayward argues that whether a body is trans or not, it undergoes transformations through itself, marking and scarring the body in various ways. Whether or not the bodies of Perpetua, Felicitas, Blandina, and Christ fit ancient or contemporary categories of sex and gender, one must find a way to be comfortable with the notion that a single body, even the body of Jesus, can be multiple sexes and reflect different genders at once or not at all. The second half of this paper turns to our contemporary world wherein art has been a medium through which individuals have sought to queer and feminize the crucified and suffering body of Christ. Artists, more readily than theologians, have often been able to envision a greater breadth of bodily possibilities outside of today’s sex and gender binaries. The focus here is specifically on the artistic depictions of Christ’s body and divine bodies as displayed in “The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies,” an exhibition held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY in the fall of 2016 through the spring of 2017. “The Christa Project,” allows one to consider the bodies of the “female” martyrs and of Christ as whole regardless of the transitions and sufferings these bodies endured. Together these ancient and contemporary notions of the body of Christ offer greater possibilities for all bodies and for Christ’s body in particular.
“no borders on nations and no borders on womanhood” — @shonfaye on Twitter
Bodies that transgress borders, whether of nation-states or of genders, are framed as contaminants in US law, policy, and discourse. In order to enforce the boundaries, the state employs surveillance to expel the contaminants: ICE surveillance of migrant-heavy areas to find and arrest undocumented migrants; bathrooms bills that attempt to legislate trans people out of public life; “see something and say something” campaigns encouraging ordinary citizens to participate in this surveillance. Trans and migrant bodies are objectified under a visual logic that renders them wholly knowable and known to the gaze of the state and those it deputizes: transgressive, undesirable, unbelonging.
Even though this logic of surveillance and expulsion is rooted in the dominant Christian tradition of the US, an alternative exists within this very tradition: the logic of the host. In the sacrament of the Eucharist, we intake the foreign body expressly in order that it will infest us from the inside and take over – exactly what migrants and queers are feared to be threatening. Rather than celebrating an American Jesus who seeks to expel the migrant, quarantine the queer, and secure his borders both bodily and national, Eucharist is the theoliturgical enactment of a sociopolitical promise made by the queer/migrant parasite christ. Eucharist both demands and enacts the destruction of borders and the becoming-parasitized of bodies. Becoming-migrant and becoming-trans are practices of being parasitized, of hosting the other so radically that the bordered, other-objectifying, American-born, gender-assigned Self crumbles, and in its place arises a queer/migrant community of political and theological liberation.
In 2009 the Pakistani Supreme Court officially recognized a “third gender”, using the centuries-old Urdu term khwaja sira as the preferred term for all trans peoples in the country. The use of this term in legal documentation was hard-fought by Pakistani activists, who sometimes categorize the more popular word hijra as a derogatory slur. This paper examines the ways in which the term khwaja sira attempts to evoke the “Muslim-ness” of Mughal era courts, enshrining a connection between khwaja sira and the religio-nationalist underpinnings of Pakistan as an Islamic republic. Khwaja sira as a Mughal term referred to what the British called “eunuchs” employed by the court to guard all-female spaces, a position of high status ordained by the emperor. This connection makes certain elevated terms (khwaja sira) seem more divinely-ordained and others (hijra) mundane, as well as align this divinity with the right to exist. Khwaja sira activists have also fought to keep the term intentionally ambiguous, specifically refraining from answering questions about biology and biological transformation as part of gender identity. The strategies used by activists keep the general Pakistani public from making judgements about “man-made” versus “God-made” khwaja sira, a distinction that may allow cisgendered people to demand that all those who identify as khwaja sira be proven intersex at birth or else be seen as “inauthentically” trans. This intentional ambiguity is also related to the ambiguity of terms like queer and trans in English, both of which are featured prominently in English-language khwaja sira pamphlets and activist resources. In Bourdieu’s understanding of linguistic marketplace, Urdu words and their chosen equivalents in English are at play within an international marketplace of language, where the stakes are legal rights, the acquisition of international funding for advocacy and community organizing, and, subsequently, the continuation of trans communities within Pakistan.
