There is much to conjure with here: a very rich strand for disruptive ecclesiologies.⚓ 12/12

Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of the hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalised and mobilised through their parodic recontextualization.” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge, 1990.) 11/

parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalised or even essentialist gender identities. 10/

I’m thinking here of Judith Butler’s account of how drag exposes the parody underpinning, and the precariousness of, essentialist categories of gender: “[P]erpetual displacement [in drag] constitutes a fluidity of identity that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; 9/

In particular, I’m interested in reading as the body in drag: for its very character and nature are perennially counter-cultural, and its orientation is towards eternal freedom – a freedom that consists in both being and becoming – and it is also (positively) performative. 8/

that is, readings arising from bodies beyond the purportedly gender-neutral (white, male, heterosexual???) body, and beyond the uniformly able body. 7/

I am now reflecting on what a similarly imaginative reading of the Pauline texts from different kinds of bodies – with different capacities and configurations – might look like: 6/

This is from her essay “The Body Is (Not Quite) One” in the excellent collection Pregnancy and Birth: Critical Theological Conceptions (@scmpress.bsky.social, 2024). 5/

Translated back into the context of the social body, this suggests not just the need for gracious or humble servant leadership but, beyond this, for leadership that recognises and accepts its own vulnerability and dependence, and its implication in all the embodied questions it seeks to resolve.” 4/

The various parts of the body – as we know when we read from the pregnant body – talk back, from what the head can know and say, and sometimes ignore the head altogether; and once again, this is not pathological but an ordinary condition of embodiment. 3/

and thus reliant on the other parts, vulnerable, affected by the changes and conflicts that the body goes through. The head – the ‘powers that be’, including those carrying intellectual authority – does not have the privilege of a position outside the body. 2/

Ann Loades wrote a concise review on the fortieth anniversary of ‘Texts of Terror’. I have uploaded it at this link for you. It will allow you to get a feel for her work!

Most Feminist Readers in Biblical Interpretation will include an extract from her work, but ‘Texts of Terror’ and ‘God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality’ are the two books she’s best known for. Her writing style is easy to follow, but the content challenging (check the blurbs for content notes).

Mind you, with enough organisation you could put together a very good programme of carols for a counter protest, many of them familiar, in their original non-English language. Infant Holy in the original Polish. Stille Nacht. The Angel Gabriel in Basque. Etc.

Christmas should come all at once and with a bang; the old Advent =/= Christmas drum could always do with repeated banging 🤣

… May she know that equal light, and may her work continue to illumine ours. May we, following her example, continue to wrestle with the Scriptures until we find light and life in this struggle.“

“… she has entered that place where there is no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light: no noise nor silence, but one equal music. …

*Brian Wren