Abstract
The human dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people are threatend on the African continent. The sexual orientation, gender identity, expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) of LGBTIQ persons are seen as un-African. Religious communities are one of the biggest perpetrators that violate the human dignity of LGBTIQ people. For the past fifteen years the Uniting Reformed Church in South African (URCSA) made policy decions and compiled research documents that envistigates the SOGIESC of LGBTIQ people. The URCSA failed multiple times to affirm the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. In this article I’m asking, whether the recognition of LGBTIQ bodies in the URCSA is an indecent proposal. This paper is theologically underpinned by late Latin-American bisexual theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Bi/Christology. Starting with my own queer autobiography, I position myself from below and outside in doing theology. Secondly, I engage shortly with the history of the URCSA and the confessional clauses of the Belhar Confession. Lastly, the paper examines whether Belhar makes an indecent proposal for the recognition of LGBTIQ bodies in the URCSA.
Highlights
The paper examines whether Belhar makes an indecent proposal for the recognition of LGBTIQ bodies in the Uniting Reformed Church in South African (URCSA)
Zambian theologian Kapya Kaoma explains that the violence of heteropatriarchy takes form in “protective homophobia – that is politically and religiously organized opposition to ... the [SOGIESC of LGBTIQ bodies] ... as an attempt to protect Africa’s traditional heritage.”2 Kaoma, elaborates that “[t]he result is restrictive national legislations enacted under the banner of protecting African culture, religions, and children.”3 Protective ideologies impose brutal forms of violence sanctioned by national and ecclesial interests
For Van Klinken, queer bodies need to tell their stories and learn from African feminist theologians who “have used her-stories to develop her-theologies, I suggest that queer autobiographic storytelling can be a basis for developing queer theologies.”9 For this reason, I start with my own story, a queer autobiography from below and outside
Summary
The lines between heterosexuality as self and the SOGIESC of LGBTIQ persons as other are continuously violently kept apart by heteropatriarchal systems of power. Heteropatriarchy is a system that makes a binary and hierarchical differentiation between the self and other, privileges cisgender bodies and heterosexuality. Steyn and Van Zyl poignantly point out the violation and violence that LGBTIQ people are vulnerable to forms new categories: through meanings attached to non-hegemonic bodies and their desires that othering is perpetuated, and upon whom different forms of exclusion, oppression and violence are perpetuated. LGBTIQ bodies are often misrecognized because heteropatriarchal templates are set in “patterns of hierarchical, binary constructive organised thought.” According to this ideology, bodies are essentially sexualized as heterosexual and gendered as male or female and determines. The recognition of my body and other LGBTIQ people in the URCSA, commences with the claim that “doing theology on sexuality requires that we grant an epistemological privilege to the lived reality of LGBTIQ Christians.” I recount my own embodied story from a queer autobiographical epistemological perspective
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