University of Chicago theologian Dwight Hopkins once said in an interview that groups at the margins of society possess a medicinal quality for mainstream society.
What does he mean by this? As a Div school student I think immediately of the theology of resistance known in the academy as queer theology, the strand of theological thinking that challenges the ideological and institutional structures that exclude those on the margins of society—particularly those who subvert Western sexual norms.
I believe that one of the norms queer theology should challenge more forcefully is the stereotype of the “beautiful” and healthy body. When we praise only bodies that resemble centerfolds or sports stars, we devalue bodies considered broken, ugly, and diseased. Queer theology can pioneer the way to a healthy perception of these broken, ugly, and diseased bodies; it can help us see them as beautiful, and perhaps even “medicinal,” offering healing for a society rapidly heading toward social, spiritual, and ecological devastation.
More on this in a moment, but first an anecdote.
“She Looks Like She’s Dying”
During my two years as a high school teacher, I witnessed several relationships begin, blossom, and wither. As the young and “cool” teacher, I was often asked for advice. What I noticed was that many students (gay, straight, and bisexual) desired the pretty and popular cheerleader girl or the strong, handsome, athletic boy.
Few, however, desired a girl I’ll call “Natasha,” who, because of a recently acquired illness, was thin, small, and didn’t wear makeup. There was also a boy,“Mark,” who suffered from a chronic illness, was small in stature and had yet to develop a deep voice—a fact he was mocked for by his peers, who called him “fag boy.”
My high school students, as they themselves admitted, were influenced by the media ideal of beauty: women with voluptuous, yet thin bodies, light or fair-skinned, long brown or blond hair, and a face free of scars and acne, with a small nose, full lips, and clear eyes. As one student put it, “that girl looks healthy… she is so hot!” As for the ideal media male, he is tall, muscular, usually white, blue eyes, short hair, clean-shaven, and free of blemishes—healthy-looking.
With these ideals in mind, is it any wonder that my high school students made the choices they did? Perhaps “Natasha” and “Mark” reminded the “healthy-looking” students too much of human fragility at a time when they perceived themselves to be invincible. Or, on a more mundane level, the sick and ugly ones just were not beautiful enough, according to the dominant social ethos, to be around.
Once, when I suggested to one student that he talk to Natasha, he told me, “Mr. B, are you nuts? She looks like she’s dying!”
If Theology is Not for Liberation, It’s Not Theology
Queer theology challenges theology itself to rethink its role in church, the academy, and society. As theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid has written: “…if theology is not for liberation [...] and if it is not rooted in our experience and does not become transformative, it is not theology.”
To support transformation, however, requires that we walk the line between, on the one hand, over-glorifying only “beautiful” bodies, and, on the other hand, dismissing the body, desire, and the erotic as unimportant. After all, as Reid reminds us, all authentic theology is radically sexual and erotic—it originates from bodies and is meant for bodies, particularly the broken, oppressed, and ugly bodies that society rejects.
Again, why do my former high school students (a microcosm representing the macrocosm of society) deem unhealthy-looking bodies repulsive? One response is that they are simply too entrenched in the media’s beauty standards. But why are these standards so pervasive? I believe that if we look deeper we find an ideological force that powers these standards, and a way of looking at it: the modern atomistic-mechanistic metaphor.
The market ideologies that we live by seek financial progress at any cost—whether this means eliminating those who are a burden to progress, or destroying the natural world until all resources are extracted. They are driven by a concept of the world and everything in it as fragmented (like atoms) and without value, meaning, or purpose (and so ultimately nihilistic). According to this atomistic-mechanistic metaphor, all things, including humans, are mechanical agents that have no relation with the divine, each other, or the natural world.
The atomistic-mechanistic metaphor underlies a consumer society that measures success through the “objective” lens of profit, and fosters a competitive, individualist, ego-driven human being.
Increasingly in this mechanistic world view, unwanted children, individuals with physical and/or mental anomalies, and the elderly (all “ugly” bodies) represent hardships that must be relegated to society’s periphery. Since, according to the mechanistic worldview, all humans are simple cogs in the machine with no inherent value or purpose, it is morally permissible to euthanize and/or isolate individuals who—by virtue of their physical or mental condition—are deemed unable to contribute to the social economy with the same efficiency as a “regular,” beautiful, and healthy adult.
Human Fragility, Brokenness, and Ugliness: Beauty for our Perilous Times
Tags: aids, crucifixion, jesus, jim mitulski, mark d. jordan, queer theology, theology, world aids day
Cesar, as spiritually laudable as the message of your article is, I feel that the failure to acknowledge sexual sociobiology is a serious flaw in your message. You speak of theology as coming from and serving human bodies. It is therefore compulsory to consider the origin of those bodies in the physical universe, and their resulting nature. If teenagers are attracted to apparently healthy bodies, it is because our species has evolved toward such attractions; it is a mechanism for maintaining the healthy physicality of our species. It is not a perfect mechanism; it is rooted in a past when we had yet to attain our current intellectual prowess. We may now see the imperfections of inborn sexual preferences, but we would be reckless to assume that the politics of the moment provides a better basis for our evolutionary choices. Make no mistake, it our our sexual preferences that guide the evolution of our bodies, that determine the nature of our descendants. Our mortal, temporal systems of thought are feeble agents compared to the epic forces of the billion-year biological tide.
Most important: reproductive unions between men and women that are not based on ardent love are the root of much, much evil. Such love does not manifest on the basis of moral or political choice, however much we might demand that it should or pretend that it has.
Amen, amen, and amen!
Some scriptures that come to mind:
1 Cor. 15:42 "So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable."
Isaiah 52:14-15 "Just as there were many who were appalled at him [the Servant of the LORD] -- his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness -- so will he sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand."
(On God's choice to use the weak/foolish things to shame the strong/wise of this world, see also 1 Cor. 1)
A couple questions:
1. What does "erotic" mean (e.g. "multi-erotic relationships" and "erotic desire for friendship, trust, and love")? This usage of the word is foreign to me.
2. How do you know that "Jesus was first healthy and beautiful" before he was tortured and crucified? In Isaiah 53:2b, God inspires this description of the Messiah: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." Media portrayals aside, it is both likely and fitting that Jesus would fail to conform to any human/cultural standard of beauty at any point in his earthly life. Your general point is still absolutely valid, however, since Jesus had an "ugly body" not only in his death but also in his life. Also, this means he voluntarily took on ugliness (since before his earthly ministry he was living in perfect beauty with the Father), rather than having ugliness forced upon him by his executioners. Furthermore, it is interesting that in the prophetic visions of Revelation, Jesus, even after his resurrection, is still portrayed as a slaughtered lamb. God apparently thinks that the beauty of his salvific love is always most evident in an image which we would call ugly.
May the "beautiful" realize the poverty and vanity of their beauty, and may God transform our ugliness into a profound expression of his true Beauty.
Clarification: my amens were directed at César's article, not the previous comment.
PyotrZ, I don't think César is arguing that everyone should go have sex with, or marry, someone to whom they are not naturally attracted. I *think* he's talking more about mutual, non-sexual affection between people in a way that clearly demonstrates acceptance of their bodies regardless of worldly standards of health and beauty.
Thank you to Ceʹsar. I agree that it is not theology if it is not liberation theology. I also thank reuster for his comments and references to Scripture.
This dialogue brings to mind a story about Mother Theresa, who was asked how she could work with the sick, poverty-stricken and dying people on the streets of Calcutta. She replied that she saw the face of Christ in each. Scripture is replete with references that are summarized by the teaching that "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" (Cf. Matthew 20:16) and "whatsoever you do unto the least of these . . . you do unto me" (Cf. Matthew 25:40.)
As a person with an invisible disability, I am often startled by the treatment of those with visible disabilities in the United States. A recent example occurred at a drug store when an elderly (and beatific) woman of 80+ years, laid her cane over her shopping basket and tried to balance lifting heavy items to the check out counter. The line grew longer as the clerk stared blankly at her struggles. I cannot lift more than 5 pounds without pain, but between us, the lifting of the items was so easy. I walked with her to her car and helped her lift the items into the trunk. She smiled, explaining that she needed a knee replacement. She had been, at first, reluctant to accept my help, but after I explained that I, too, had a disability and what it included regarding lifting, we both rejoiced. The items we touched together were as light as a feather.
Ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Having one degree in cultural anthropology, I also agree, in part, with the first comment. But, we are able to overcome the evolutionary instincts which could be argued to have been essential to the survival of the species (good health for reproductive capability and protection of the family unit) by a greater evolutionary trait: compassion. It is worthy of note that the burial sites of both the early Cro-Magnon homo sapiens and the now extinct Neandertals (who were most likely absorbed in the homo sapiens gene pool) displayed remains of elderly and disabled members of the clan. I had always felt that both groups showed human consciousness as a result of this single fact.
Chimpanzees make and use rudimentary tools and, despite computer studies on larger group models than before, still are estimated to have 95% DNA commonality with humans. In behavioral comparison, a recent study found that chimpanzees and humans do not have a comparable level of compassion or altrusism with humans. (http://www.acton.org/commentary/commentary_294.php) Chimpanzees will run in fear from the sight of another dead chimpanzee and commercially-over-socialized humans look the other way when they see sickness, physical impairment or what the commercial culture would find to be ugliness because it is outside the narrow cultural definition of beauty–-for fear of our own mortality and vulnerability.
Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116:
. . .
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Some theological scholars are now speculating the Sodom and Gomorrah may have been condemned for how it treated its ill, infirm and poor.
"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi
You are a student of many things. The new Nova series on becoming human says the latest research shows humans did not absorb the Neandertals because we have virtually no Neandertal DNA in our genome. They were in Europe for 500000 years, but they made their last stand just 25000 years ago at the Rock of Gibraltar. Personally I think they disappeared because we ate them.
Thank you, Jim, for the current scientific information on the survival of Neandertal DNA. Studies come and go as we search with ever more sensitive tools into our origins. Your thought that we ate them gave me a huge laugh this morning! From one student of human life to another, thank you. I have to go out and risk being eaten now.
WWW, it seems advances in evolution have been so much in the news recently, and so many great documentaries coming out. I think it is a function of science finally seeing the importance of engaging in the creation/evolution debate. By the way, you probably wouldn't think this was so funny if you has seen some of that recent research.
It was your comment that I found funny. In my lawyer persona, my clients and I are always on the verge of being lunch for the more powerful.
I do not think the grim scientific discovery will be funny. We are such vicious creatures. :(
Blessings to you.
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