Virtue as Gender Performance: A Response to Natural Law and Sex Positivity

White 1

John Christian White
Professor Tonstad
Queer Theology
23 December 2016
Virtue as Gender Performance: A Response to Natural Law and Sex-Positivity
Introduction
It is no secret that many variants of Christian sexual ethics have been antagonistic toward queer individuals. The prevailing model within the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, grounds itself within both an essentialist approach toward sex and gender as well as a formula for sexual morality that claims knowledge of a stabilized, natural use of human sexuality. The emergence of modern gender theory—most specifically that coming from queer and postmodern feminist theorists—have troubled many of these categories, though. They articulate that gender is constructed, rather than ontological. Furthermore, the potential uses of sexuality are multiple; claims here to a natural law ought to be examined with heightened suspicion.
Yet, in some instances, this suspicion has translated into an abandonment of any normative framework for sexual ethics. Precisely because of the rather long histories of dominant normative ethics producing marginalization of queers, this intellectual move is understandable. However, it is a move that is deeply troubling, nonetheless. Despite the goal of most, if not all, of these theorists being justice for queers (as well as potentially other marginalized groups), I worry that a rejection of normative ethics creates a movement without ability to articulate and politically mobilize toward a concrete sense of justice. Furthermore, some of the most concerning models of non-normative queer performance may, in fact, rely upon essentializing renderings of sex and gender in order to effectively "queer" sexual practices—reifying the same troubles they seek to undo.
Therefore, in this project I hope to propose an alternative model for sexual ethics and sex politics. I will address the most significant obstacles for queers in dominant Christian moral philosophy as well as critically analyze the work of modern gender theorists. Furthermore, building upon this work, I hope to provide an account for Christian sexual ethics that retains a concrete sense of justice, located within the legacy of Jesus' ministerial vision, that also aspires toward non-reliance upon gender essentialism. The produced result of this endeavor is a call toward gender performance of discipleship—making virtue a mode of ideal gender performance.
The Heteronormativity of Natural Law
In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine on human sexuality. He described marriage as a holy bond between a man and woman that reflects a divine gender complementarity of the natural order. Furthermore, contained within this understanding of gender complementarity is an insistence upon the union between man and woman as holding goodness because of its potential for procreation. "The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this [is] a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and woman."
This position finds its roots in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Contra Augustinian doctrines of sexuality, Aquinas believed that sex was not evil, in itself. Rather, (hetero)sexual desire is demonstrably evident as a natural inclination. As such, sexual desire was implanted into human beings by God; sexual activity, furthermore, is the opportunity for the sexual organs to fulfill their God-ordained natural purpose. However, Aquinas also writes that the natural use for the emission of semen by a penis is procreation. Hence, the intentional emission of semen outside of procreative potential is unnatural and a sexual perversion.
This framework, quite obviously, produces troubles for homosexuals. For one, it assumes that an observable common practice of heterosexuality equates to a moral imperative for procreative, heterosexual practice. Clearly, Aquinas is imagining a definition of sex that is exclusive to penises-inserted-into-vaginas until male orgasm is achieved, making this also a troubling definition for feminist ethicists as well. (Although, ironically, his insistence upon male ejaculation as the site for determining natural vs. unnatural sexual acts brings into question if lesbian sexual activity is permissive under his view. I digress.) Furthermore, it assumes that there is a natural state of sexuality altogether.
This claim seems hasty at best. For even if we are to place a high value on biology, non-procreative sexual activity could certainly still have some "natural" basis. Arguments for the epigenetic or otherwise natural causes of homosexuality in human beings are abundant. However, it may be that naturalism, itself, is a flawed methodology for producing moral claims. In The Philosophy of Sex and Love, Alan Soble points out that human beings participate in many activities that are not necessarily natural. For example, it is certainly an interference with the course of nature to rely upon a lab-produced antibiotic to ail someone suffering from a bacterial infection. Yet, very few ethicists in the style of Aquinas are willing to take a similar stance to modern medicine as they take to homosexuality.
Furthermore, as Soble contends, one might just as easily argue that the natural use of sexuality is other than procreation: Does the placement of the clitoris in the female body reflect a divine will for sex to be pleasurable? Does the intense pleasure often received via friction with the prostate imply that anal penetration is the optimum natural use of male sexuality? Additionally, one wonders if a man who masturbates misuses his penis—or his hand? Does cunnilingus misuse the tongue? Is it perverse for a nose to be inserted into a vagina—or to support glasses? Soble's point is that the distinctions between natural vs. perverse seem rather arbitrary.
Moreover, it is apparent that naturalism as an imperative toward procreative sex has been rejected by practicing Catholics. A Guttmacher Institute study on the use of artificial birth control amongst women of childbearing age found that 68 percent of self-identified Catholic women had used artificial birth control to avoid pregnancy. In Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage, Teresa Delgado argues that the choice of Catholic women to choose artificial birth control methods amounts to a rejection of official Catholic teaching on procreative sex. She continues that, according to Catholic doctrine, in order for a teaching to hold validity within the Catholic faith, that law must be accepted by the community. Therefore, by virtue of their having clearly evolved in their definitions of moral sexuality, heterosexual Catholics have effectively opened the door to a reevaluation of what marriage or moral sexuality can be.
Parody as Politics
There are other aspects of official Catholic doctrine on human sexuality that have been problematized by modern critique as well. One particularly notable critique comes from gender theorists. One of the most famous of these theorists, Judith Butler, is widely credited as developing the intellectual structure through which queer and third-wave feminist theorists frequently articulate conceptualizations of gender identity. In Gender Trouble, she builds upon the work of earlier feminists; yet she also invites the reader to reimagine the definitions of gender toward a non-static understanding of identity.
She writes that gender is not a biologically-determined, ontological reality (i.e. a woman is a human being with a womb), rather it is a set of performances that are repeated until they come to be understood as a mode of existence, itself. An action is therefore gendered insofar as it reinforces cultural understandings of the discursively constructed identity categories socially associated with that action. For example, the choice to wear lipstick may be gendered insofar as it reinforces broad Western cultural associations of lipstick with womanhood and/or femininity. The action(s) are then read by other individuals with their preconceived notions of what constitutes as manhood, womanhood, etc. in mind. Thus, to see that action performed simultaneously allows for the viewer to interpret the performer of a given action as categorized within a certain gendered social location as well as a reification of the preexisting understandings of that gendered social location, itself—perhaps a similar phenomenon to something like confirmation bias in this way.
This cycle of performanceinterpretationsocial placementconfirmation of preexisting notions continued performance is made possible through a mechanism Butler calls the "heterosexual matrix." This is a series of hierarchical binaries that have become socially understood as producing the constitutive grounds of manhood and womanhood. On one side of the binary are categories that operate together to produce a cohesive understanding of the gendered individual. For example, to simultaneously have an anatomy that is usually described as male, self-identify as a man, perform actions that are considered masculine, and, perhaps most importantly amongst those actions, hold sexual desire for an objectified Other is to effectively render oneself as embodying manhood in hegemonic terms. Furthermore, this embodiment is defined by its relationship with and against hegemonic womanhood—that defined as holding a female anatomy, self-identifying as woman, performing actions that are considered feminine, and holding desire to be the object of sexual desire by a perpetrator of manhood.
Butler sees here, though, an opportunity for queer and feminist political practice. The hegemonic nature of the heterosexual matrix makes manhood and womanhood seem like inevitable and "natural" categories. Yet, as Butler has argued that gender is nothing more than a carefully performed series of discursive reifications, this is certainly not the case. Therefore, she contends that it is possible to disrupt the myth of hegemonic gender and the hierarchical relationship between manhood over womanhood as inevitable. Chiefly, this possibility comes through a queering of the heterosexual matrix.
For example, for an individual who is bodied within an anatomy that is typically understood as male to blur the neatly contained binaried position of hegemonic manhood by self-identifying as a woman reveals the inadequacy of understandings of gender to rest upon biological or otherwise essentializing grounds. Therefore, Butler envisions a political practice by which individuals seek to queer the heterosexual matrix en masse through a multiplicity of non-heteronormative gender performances. She contends that if enough individuals were to discursively intervene against the dominant narratives of gender in this way, so many understandings for legitimate gender identities would emerge that the hegemonic gender binary system would become increasingly useless as a tool for power over women and queers. In a sense, it would fundamentally alter gender as we know it.
This call has produced a wealth of literature on potential strategies for queer performance. One example is Duggan and McHugh's "Fem(me)inest Manifesto." At the core of their argument is what they call the "femme." For these two, a femme is that site at which a sexual subject becomes a sexual object, yet through explicit choice of this objectified status maintains subjectivity. What they mean when they say this is that femme practice is a strategic deployment of discursive action that renders an individual to be read as feminine, womanly, sexual object, etc. For example, a femme might be a woman who knowingly deploys the image of femininity to entice a straight man to buy her drinks at a bar. The man in this scenario might believe he is following the cues of hegemonic gender structures (i.e. paying for a woman's drinks equating to a justification for a sense of ownership of her), but in reality, so Duggan and McHugh contend, the tables have turned. Rather, the femme has used the image of sexual object to manipulate him toward her wanted outcome—thus, taking an active role in the scenario and reclaiming subjectivity.
Domination and Discourse
This model, of course, fits quite nicely within a Butlerian political framework. The individuals sufficiently queer the components of "proper" feminine desire described in the heterosexual matrix in such a way that they are clearly not merely passive recipients of masculine action. Yet, an ethical concern arises. One wonders if the form of a political movement like this relies upon a masculinist ethic. What I mean here is, if (at least one of) the problems of gender as it has been constructed is the intimate relationship between masculinity with domination, exploitation, and objectification in both obviously heinous and more "sophisticated" degrees, doesn't any movement seeking to reconfigure who performs these actions simply amount to a change for whom the problems are apparent?
I do not mean to suggest that femme performance, itself, somehow alters the long and well-documented history of misogyny and then inflicts it, in reverse, upon men. That would be a grave overstatement of their position. Nonetheless, I am still concerned with a political movement that is defined by its ability to manipulate another, regardless of who that other is, or to what identity category that other belongs. While I recognize this may be a particular survival strategy, I cannot help but be reminded of Audre Lorde's famous warning: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
In this case, the master's tools are eroticizations of forms of domination. Perhaps no individual articulates this reality better than legal theorist, Catharine MacKinnon. She argues that masculinity is discursively constructed, definitively, through cultivation of a sexual palate finding pleasure in domination, violence, and objectification over an other—usually, women. She looks to the pornography industry as evidence for this claim. Given that it is an industry overwhelmingly marketed toward men, it seems appropriate to choose it a site for gleaming a vision of idealized masculine desire. After all, if pornography is the space where sexual fantasy holds the potential to manifest, it is necessarily ground zero for an understanding of that sexual fantasy.
What MacKinnon finds here is alarming. If pornography broadly speaks to masculine desire, masculinity desires: "women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, and women killed." These are, in fact, the most common themes of pornography. Yet, these political dynamics are hardly contained to heterosexual relations. Insofar as homosexual spaces have frequently taken on reification of gendered hierarchy through labels such as butch/femme or top/bottom, for instance, there is strong commonality in the relationship between masculinized and feminized persons across sexual orientations, regardless of their sex or gender. It is not biology that determines sexual-political status so much as it is relationship to masculinity under a sexual system of eroticized dominance and submission; MacKinnon writes that it is plausible that sexuality, under a patriarchal logic, is so marked by its gendered implications that it always carries dominance and submission with it.
What MacKinnon describes is the production of what many within feminist circles commonly refer to as "rape culture." This is the normalization of eroticized domination within the masculine psyche to the degree that the idealized performance of masculinity becomes sexual domination; the culminating, climactic performance of masculinity is rape. This insistence upon performance as constituting the grounds of gendered intelligibility, furthermore, is what makes MacKinnon resonate with Butler's description of hegemonic manhood under the heterosexual matrix. Yet, so many sex-positive and queer theorists move from Butler's framework toward queering the matrix through mere reconfigurations of the agents performing these dynamics of dominance and submission.
If performed eroticized domination produces sexual violence under heterosexual conditions, why should one imagine it would produce a different result under other conditions? This is to ask, 1) if hegemonic manhood and masculinity are a discursive result of performativity, 2) masculinity is most specifically defined by its performativity of sexualized domination over an other, and, therefore, 3) it is those repeated practices, rather than an essential, static nature of manhood or male-ness which gives rise to the normalization of sexual violence, how can those same practices of eroticized domination ever yield a result other than continued discursive normalization of sexual violence and a correlating reality of sexual violence carried out largely as a result of this normalization?
Queerness, itself, clearly does not remedy the problem of rape culture. Roughly one-eighth of lesbians and half of bisexual women experience rape in their lifetime; nearly half of bisexual men and 40% of gay men experience sexual assault—not including rape. Yet, queer theoretical frameworks that advocate for reconfigurations of participants' gender (identity) within models of sexualized dominance and hierarchy behave as if sexual assault is a result more of biological and/or ontological social location (i.e. a static conceptualization of straight manhood, maleness, or masculinity) rather than, like gender itself, a production of performance and discourse. Furthermore, they rest upon an unspoken essentializing assumption that gender exists a priori to performance.
On numerous occasions, I have held discussions with peers concerning the sexualized hierarchy present in BDSM practices, for example. Following MacKinnon, I have contended that, while certainly non-normative, these practices ultimately reify the undergirding, motivating logics of masculinist domination. My peers have frequently argued this not to be the case; the power stratification (whether it be real or simulated) present is in no way gendered—women can just as easily "dominate" men under these scenarios as men can "dominate" women. As such, BDSM holds queer potential to disrupt the narrative of male domination over females as a biological inevitability or natural state. To this extent, their position may be true.
However, the position does not grapple seriously enough with performance as constitutive of gender. If one is to take Butler's notion of performativity seriously: under the patriarchal conditions where domination has been discursively rendered as analogous to masculinity, what is an individual, regardless of their own anatomy or gender identification, really doing by acting out real or simulated domination other than performing masculinity? The dominatrix, for instance, may queer the heterosexual matrix's account of sexual desire. Yet, under a non-essentialist understanding of gender, she also performs masculinity; insofar as the gender binary requires an opposite, and masculinity requires an Other to dominate, she objectifies, dehumanizes, and commits real or simulated violence against a feminized Other. In this way, the undergirding hierarchical logic of masculinity as over and against femininity marches onward. The heterosexual matrix may be rendered useless for conceptions of static or inevitable male-female relations, yet the sexualized sociopolitical stratifications existent within the heterosexual matrix are rendered as all the more inevitable for masculine-feminine relations. If anything, this poses more rather than fewer troubles for queers.
I feel compelled to take a moment here to justify my reasoning for choosing to analyze BDSM, specifically, in this project. I am well aware that BDSM practitioners face marginalization within society, broadly. I do not intend to suggest that BDSM produces the logic undergirding rape culture any more than any other given sexual practice premised upon the eroticization of hierarchical relations (i.e. heteronormative, vanilla, missionary-position sex culminating in male ejaculation). To the contrary, one should hold no more or less disdain for the practice or practitioners of BDSM than they should for that of any sexual ethic operating under a norm of domination. Rather, my point is that, insofar as it has become popular amongst self-stylized "sex positivists" and queer theorists to claim that gendered reconfigurations of eroticized domination can produce a liberating politics, BDSM is one of many sexual practices emblematic of the problems I have outlined in this argument.
Yet, there is another trouble to queer practices of eroticized domination. This is that, in claiming domination can yield queer and/or feminist liberation, the sex-positivist effectively sanctifies domination. Yet, as I have attempted to argue in this project, domination is not only a rather ineffective tool for queer resistance to gender hegemony; it is also definitively opposed to concepts of justice. If one's goal is to subvert essentialist understandings of gender as natural—as it is for queers seeking reform of official Catholic doctrine on sexual ethics—in the service of gendered or sexual justice (as is certainly the case for the vast majority, if not all, feminist and queer theorists and activists), one's praxis certainly ought to orient itself toward the production of that justice. Therefore, what is necessary for this project is a queer-feminist sexual ethics, explicitly grounded in non-domination as its norm, method, and goal.
Virtue as Gender
Teresa Delgado posits that one plausible model for revision of Christian sexual ethics is found in the work of Margaret Farley. Specifically, Delgado (and Farley) suggest that a reformulation of the meaning of sexual procreation holds potential to settle the troubles Natural Law has presented to queers. Instead of biological reproduction, what if procreation conveyed a rejection of self-centered narcissism in sexuality overwhelmingly concerned with potential benefits of a sexual act for oneself, to instead produce varying forms of spiritual "fruitfulness?" Such a formulation would certainly yield a more hospitable sexual ethics for queers, infertile heterosexuals, or heterosexuals who choose to not have children, amongst others. Furthermore, this formulation would also allow for a concrete sexual/gender praxis oriented toward justice.
In "Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," Farley sets out a list of ethical norms for what she calls "just sex." On grounds of respect for the autonomy and relationality of persons as ends in themselves, she claims the first norm is to 1) Do no unjust harm. On grounds of respect for autonomy, she offers 2) Free consent of partners. Out of respect of relationality, she adds 3) Mutuality, 4) Equality, 5) Commitment, and 6) Fruitfulness. Lastly, in order to properly respect persons as sexual beings within a broader society, she puts forth a norm for 7) Social Justice. In order for any sexual act to fall within the bounds of ethical responsibility and duty, it must meet all of these criteria.
Many of these norms are useful for a queer-feminist sexual praxis by virtue of their refusal to capitulate to domination as a political method. For example, a norm of mutuality renders practices of masculine desire/domination over an objectified other under the heterosexual matrix ethically impossible. Similarly, norms to do no unjust harm, free consent of partners, and equality explicitly condemn practices of sexual assault, rape, sexual harassment, coercion, or manipulation. Meanwhile, a norm for social justice allows one to consider the discursive ramifications of any sexual action. It is not merely enough that one find some personal liberation or satisfaction in an activity; that activity must also contribute to the broader thrust for justice within society, at large. Insofar as this relates to discourse, this must mean a specific rejection of discursive significations of domination, as well as actual practices of domination, themselves.
This is all to say that "just sex" has significant potential for a liberating queer and feminist sexual praxis. Yet, one wonders what might be the outcome were Farley's model adopted by the church and/or it became practiced as the dominant logic of sexuality in society, at large. One theological answer may lie in an eschatological vision of Jesus' basileia. Referring to the conditions and time of God's reign, basileia may have particular uses as a telos toward which queer and feminist praxis may move. To understand the basileia, Elisabeth-Schussler Fiorenza looks toward the healings, inclusive discipleship, and parabolic words of Jesus described in the gospel accounts. This methodology places Jesus as moral exemplar in cultivating an understanding of liberational/eschatologically-oriented praxis.
One example Schussler-Fiorenza provides is Jesus' interaction with prostitutes. She writes that in a patriarchal society, prostitution is the worst "pollution" a woman can endure. It is well-documented within Jewish and Christian religious texts that prostitution carries a theological connotation as analogous to Israel's unfaithfulness to God. Yet, Jesus, to the outrage of many, proclaims that harlots will enter into the basilea ahead of faithful and righteous Israelites. This is not to say that Jesus condones prostitution and the sexual politics of eroticized coercion, manipulation, or flat-out slavery that so frequently animate it. Rather, it allows for a reading of Jesus as in solidarity with those rendered vulnerable under these conditions.
For Schussler-Fiorenza, the redemptive power of Jesus' ministry and eschatologically-thrusting political example is an ongoing process of invitation for participation. Furthermore, the invitation to enter into the basilea is contingent upon engagement within its perspective and power. As such, it seems entirely fair to call Jesus' basilea vision performative. Insofar as this political performance affects gender and sexuality, Farley's vision of Just Sex seems like, at the very least, a solid foundation for developing an understanding of sexual practices that act as a form of Christian discipleship.
Yet, as I have aforementioned, Farley's normative standards for sexual practice invalidate the possibility for masculine performance as it is known. Could it be that the eschaton is that moment when masculinity ceases to exist? Schussler-Fiorenza writes, "The woman-identified man, Jesus, called forth a discipleship of equals that still needs to be discovered and realized by women and men today." By claiming that Jesus is woman-identifying, it does not seem that Schussler-Fiorenza means to imply that Jesus would have identified himself, or have been understood by his contemporaries as, a woman in the conventional sense. Rather, she means that Jesus' actions placed him in solidarity with women (and other marginalized groups). Of course, as this relates to gender performance, this may, in fact, amount to a vision of Jesus as performative of femininity. If so, Jesus is both a queer and feminist model of virtue as gender in exemplarity.
I find this reading highly appealing for a few reasons. For one, it is a Christological account that resists essentializing notions of gender or sexuality as necessary for women and/or queers to identify with Jesus. Instead, it remembers sexuality and gender as intricately intertwined performances; Jesus is not an exception to this rule. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, precisely because it remembers Jesus' sexual and gendered performance as precisely performance, it allows for the development of a mimicking praxis that maintains a concrete sense of justice as its telos.
Conclusions
At the heart of this project has been a desire to resolve the tensions between the Natural Law tradition of sexual ethics with the libertine sexual ethic often contained in the writings of many modern queer and Third-Wave feminist theorists. In utilizing some of the most basic tenets of modern gender theory, my interaction here with both of these traditions is far from exhaustive. However, I nonetheless propose an alternative movement forward for Christian sexual ethics—a framework that 1) simultaneously remains operational for Christian discipleship, 2) takes seriously performance, rather than biological or supposedly ontological state, as the grounds of analysis for gendered and sexualized praxis, and 3) devotes itself to justice as its end.
The result is a call for universalized rejection of domination as gender/sexual performance. Carried to its fullest extent, its eschatological vision is the cessation of masculinity, in all forms. Yet, given that the gender binary is constructed in such a manner that each pole is intelligible as such only through opposition to its Other, this implicitly holds another outcome. Gender, itself, becomes obsolete. What remains is virtue in Christ and its fruit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.


Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Delgado, Teresa. "Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage." In Queer Christianities, 91-102. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2014.
Duggan, Lisa, and Kathleen McHugh. "A Fem(me)inist Manifesto." Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 153-59.
Farley, Margaret. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.
MacKinnon, Catherine A. "Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure Under Patriarchy." Ethics 99, no. 2 (1989): 314-46.
Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007.
New Revised Standard Version Bible. Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1989.
Schüssler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. 10th Anniversary ed. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994.
"Sexual Assault in the LGBT Community." National Center for Lesbian Rights. 2014. http://www.nclrights.org/sexual-assault-in-the-lgbt-community/.
Soble, Alan. The Philosophy of Sex and Love. 2nd ed. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008.
Tonstad, Linn Marie. "The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and its Others." Theology & Sexuality 21, no. 1 (February 2015): 1-19.





In this use of "sex," I mean social recognitions of difference in anatomical features of sexual organs that are frequently used to distinguish persons as male or female.
Delgado, Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage. 95.
Ibid. 96.
What Aquinas would make of asexuality is unclear. It seems asexuality could potentially problematize his notion of sexual desire as universal and "natural."
Soble, The Philosophy of Sex and Love. 72.
Ibid.
Soble, The Philosophy of Sex and Love. 74.
Ibid. 75-76.
Delgado, Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage. 91.
Ibid. 92.
Ibid.
Butler, Gender Trouble. 8-10.
Butler, Gender Trouble. 47-106.
Butler extends her argument to articulate that anatomical sex as a mechanism for speciation of persons is, similarly to gender, also a social construction.
Butler. Gender Trouble. 194-203.
Duggan and McHugh. A Fem(me)inest Manifesto.
In their article, Duggan and McHugh describe femme performance as a decidedly lesbian politics. Although, one does wonder how the dynamics of something like femme performance might play out in other contexts. For example, if a gay man were to perform something like femme embodiment, would that necessitate he behave in such a way as to be considered feminine? Or rather, as male homosexuality is contingent upon men being attracted to men and, oftentimes, to the masculinity associated with manhood, would it be more prudent to strategically perform masculinity to render oneself more desirable to another? If so, is a reconfiguration of the associations of masculinity with subjectivity in the heterosexual matrix still present?
Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House."
MacKinnon, Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: Pleasure Under Patriarchy. 318.
Her analysis goes far beyond pornography, though. She also largely grounds herself in empirical evidence concerning the rates of sexual harassment experienced by women as well as the testimony of women's lived experiences.
Ibid. 327.
MacKinnon, Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: Pleasure Under Patriarchy. 324.
Ibid. 330-331.
"Sexual Assault in the LGBT Community." National Center for Lesbian Rights.
These numbers do not include reports of sexual assault, broadly defined, in the cases of the women studied; they do not include reports of rape in the cases of men studied. Therefore, the actual numbers for sexual assault, broadly defined as inclusive of rape, would undoubtedly be higher than those provided by these statistics in any of these cases.
BDSM refers to bondage and discipline, discipline and submission, sadism and masochism.
Of course, how much or little contempt one exhibits toward heteronormativity and, more specifically, masculinity is entirely up to the individual.
Delgado, Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage. 99.
Delgado, Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage. 99.
Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. 215-231.
There is some concern that Farley operates under a mono-normative lens to develop this norm. While it is outside the scope of this project to further delve into this question, I will admit that Farley offers a convincing rebuttal to these concerns on page 225. She bases this on the grounds that sexual practices lacking commitment may often violate norms of free consent and mutuality, utilize persons merely as a means to an end, and/or disconnect individuals from broader relations with others in a social world.
On page 223, Farley notes that it may be rarely achievable to attain perfect, absolute equality in romantic or sexual relationships—especially under conditions of patriarchy. This is not her concern; rather, she is worried by broad discrepancies of power that yield conditions where "real freedom" for consent or mutuality is seriously doubtful. Examples she provides for these scenarios include: sexual harassment, psychological and physical abuse, and at least some forms of prostitution.
As Western society becomes increasingly less religious, one must admit that official acceptance of this approach by the church would certainly not necessarily yield its practice in society, at large.
Schussler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her. 121.
Schussler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her. 127.
One should be very leery of allowing understandings of Jesus' radical message to devolve into anti-Semitic posturing. In The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and its Others, Linn Tonstad offers a clear and useful warning against the tendency amongst some queer Christian theologians to rest their arguments upon implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic attitudes. I hope to take this warning seriously in this project.
Schussler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her. 130.
On page 121 of In Memory of Her, Schussler-Fiorenza describes the eschaton as a moment when "death, suffering, and injustice finally will be overcome and patriarchal marriage will be no more." As this describes what is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of masculine domination, it doesn't seem too far reaching to suggest that Schussler-Fiorenza would likely extend this logic to relationships of sexualized hierarchy outside of explicit marriage as well.
At this thought, one cannot help but remember John the Revelator's vision of the eschaton in Revelations 21: 4. "…Death will be no more; mourning and crying will be no more; for the first things have passed away." (New Revised Standard Version).
Schussler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her. 154.
Speaking at greater length on this topic, in The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and its Others, Linn Tonstad has pointed out the trouble of queer, literalist approaches to Jesus' sexual orientation, for instance.
Galatians 5. New Revised Standard Version