Why I do What I DO

An experience at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature caricatures the common educational and personal situations that are impetus for my desire to pursue graduate work in general and which drive me fervently toward serious ethical inquiry around issues of race, gender, and sexuality. I attended two Womanist panels, two Black Theology panels, one Gay and Lesbian panel, and a few others. I was an outsider in some major way in each of these environments. In the Black Theology panel, there was little to no discussion or presented scholarship about women and Black women's theology. Likewise, the Gay and Lesbian panel failed to engage in ANY discussion of race, and incidentally, my partner Julia, my friend Ashon, and I appeared to be the only Black people – the only non-white people – in the room. Most painful, however, was the disappointment I felt after attending the Womanist panels which gave little more than lip service to non-heteronormative realities. Interestingly, the one presenter at the Womanist panel who gave real attention to diverse sexualities and gender identities was a White woman. While I appreciated her presentation, I recognized the missing focus on non-heteronormative sexuality that emerged from Black women's scholarship. Two ethical questions emerged in response to the lack of interdisciplinary focus/scholarship in these panels and have continued to propel my writing/inquiries in my coursework. First, who, in the study of religious ethics, is concerned with non-normative sexuality and gender in non-white and non-male communities? Second, in what ways should I attempt to contribute to the apparent lack of desire in this area and/or enter the conversation in a manner that draws attention to these locations in the study of ethics?

As I have encountered them in my courses over the past three semesters, various historians, theologians, ethicists, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied Christian women's religiosity and have tried to consider the ways in which some women construct theology, institute and practice religious rituals, and formulate ways of being. While the majority of those studies have not been located in and focused on Black women and their experiences, in the latter half of the 20th century religious scholars have attempted to incorporate Black women's religiosity, experiences, and values into larger theo-ethical discourse. A review of these works, however, shows that scholars have often made at least one of two atrocious errors: ignoring or discounting the particularities of Black women's religiosity and analyzing or critiquing those particularities through a hegemonic paradigm that issues forth from White, hetero-masculine normative ideologies. That said, Black sexuality – as a tenet of Black feminist discourse – requires for a useful perusal of the subject, theoretical frameworks that take into account the particularities and diversity in Black women's experiences. I feel assured that Womanism, Queer Theory, and Quare theory – read together - are useful and necessary resources for reviewing, engaging, and critically analyzing Black Women's sexuality in relation to social ethics, as dualistic, hegemonic and normative perspectives common to Western philosophical and theological lenses, are limiting in scope and foundationally erroneous.

Womanism, in my reading, has many accomplishments to be acknowledged, and I want to lift them up, as they continue to help me think through my project. First, Womanism – specifically related to race, class, and gender – has worked hard to insert non-normative contexts into highly normativized discourses. Theological and other disciplinary discourses have been couched in particularly imperialist, colonialist, positivist, enlightenment-based, or simply myopic assumptions and language. Womanism – particularly theology and ethics worked as a corrective for that huge error in scholarship. Second, Womanism has offered Black women a voice where they were voiceless in the academy and in so doing, it has taken Black women from a position of being signified upon to one of agency that allows for truthful, contextualized disclosure. Third, Womanism has worked to make religious studies a study of embodiment – bridging our sacred selves with our embodied selves by refusing to separate race from gender or social experience. This re-humanized our scholarship of the sacred as un-separate from the human. Finally, Womanism has tried to make space to talk about sexuality and healthy sexual living in the church.

I am confident in saying that Womanism's great contribution thus far is just as praxis- oriented as it is poetic. Offering praxis and poesis on the living and the studying of Black women is well within the realm of what Black women scholars already do. In my work, I want to think about that in relation to sexual ethics, particularly queer sexuality and ethics. Rather than diagnose the "them" of which we speak in our ponderings, I want to participate in scholarship that continually invites the "them" to speak for themselves.

Indeed, I am concerned with the ways this type of work is done in the academy. As many scholars have opened the door for more valid – if not reliable – productions of knowledge, I find myself wondering: Should scholarly claims about sexual ethics emerge from a standpoint of universalism or particularity? This question naturally leads to another for me: What can be done about the significations that occur as a result of universals, and likewise, what can be done about the invisibility rendered to persons who are left out of the "particular" conversations? Let me be clear about my assumption regarding academic engagement with both sexual ethics and queer perspectives: it seems that what makes our scholarship authoritative is the ability for it to be understood mostly in terms of reliability. To be sure, my training thus far has centered on the possibility of an audible and authoritative voice in my work, which has undoubtedly produced a normative, often imperialistic, method of scholarly engagement. For my evaluators, this has been an exercise in the rigors of academic translation of the ideas and issues pertinent to my own work.

This is all to say: my work is oriented not toward constructing a normative voice in Black queer sexual ethics, per say. Rather, it is oriented toward constructing relationships between disciplines or theories that helps us to think about ethics – especially as I encounter and engage more persons in my moral community – whether in the academy or on the street. Story-telling is a part of my history as a Black person and as a woman and as a scholar, and I want to investigate the trajectory of story-telling that has occurred through Womanist ethical scholarship through to Black queer declarations. In as much as a legend is what is told or written when a story's truth is too dangerous, I want to be sure not to make the experiences of Black queers legendary in the academy and in the community. Thus, a few lingering questions remain for me: How does the elimination of race and gender from the Christian ethics conversation about sexuality result in an incomplete development of a sexual ethic? What is affirmed about the normative voice in Christian Ethics when it is not held accountable to all the members of the faith community? How do concepts of race, gender, and sexuality emerge from differing images of God? For those whose identity lies in an intersection of particular races, genders, and sexualities, how are decisions about sexual moral action made in light of particular images of God?

So...we'll see how it goes, huh? I'm doing this PhD thing...for real :)