“On my bed at night I sought him whom my heart loves"” reflections on trust, horror, G*d, and the queer body in vowed religious life

Abstract

What can the multifaceted bouquet of queer love reveal about G*d? In this paper I wish to answer this question by reflecting on the queer body of the male vowed religious. I will argue that, since gendering is a key feature in our attempts to create epistemic order, the performance of gender instability in turn destabilizes our attempts to create epistemic order. In short: gender trouble leads to epistemic trouble. Far from being only a passive sign for these troubles, the male religious body, which is stylized by renouncing penetration, is also a field for the active experience of the horror and the need for trust implied in our fragile epistemic situation. Both trust and horror can be interpreted as an experience of the Dark Night, as the experiential side of Negative Theology. I will argue that the grace that we as queer men and women in general contribute to the Church is that we are pointing to and living out the fundamental reality of epistemic uncertainty and the troubling necessity of trust.