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The(y)ology: Mythopoetics for Queer/Trans Liberation
Every body contains multitudes, but no body is immune to the ideology of one true self, one sexuality, one gender, one vision of the world, one true God. For many who identify (or who have been named by others) as transgender, queer, and nonbinary, the refusal to fit within the illusion of one set of sex and gender expectations has been met with violence and suppression. While the myth of oneness is a powerful story that shapes the contours of our societies and our selves, it is not the only myth. Performances, fictions, rituals, and theologies can transform current realities. The(y) Mythopoetics for Queer/Trans Liberation is a manifesto for artists, teachers, theologians, clergy, and activists looking for ways to resist rigid paradigms of gender, sexuality, self, and the sacred. In these pages, we are called to tell new stories about who we are and how we relate to each other within our ecosystems. The myths discussed wrestle with and transform the complex mytho-histories that have birthed and, often, harmed us. No story comes from nothing, and, more radically, perhaps no story is fully irredeemable. In The(y)ology , feminist philosophies join with trans poetics, literary theory with liberation theologies, drag performance with kabbalah, ecologies with pornographies, and ancient theater with queer autobiographies. However ambitious its scope might be, The(y)ology is fundamentally about encouraging us all to think playfully and to play thoughtfully with the mythologies that define our lives. Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus is a poet, playwright, drag artist, and independent scholar living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They are the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative, performing as drag ogress Çicada L’Amour, producing one acts, full-length shows, and cabarets since 2014. In and out of drag, Max has performed at the Guthrie Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, 20% Theatre, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, Rimon (The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council), the Rochester Arts Center, and have also directed a full length show ( Twilight of a Goddess ) with Siren Island in Point San Pablo, California. After majoring in classics and theatre at Beloit College, they received their MA in Theology and the Arts from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Max is former fellow and facilitator with Arts Religion Culture (ARC), and a member of the Green Sabbath Project. They are currently pursuing their MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, with a focus on queerness and the medieval imagination.
258 pages, Paperback
Published May 30, 2023
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December 27, 2025
Seldom do books with so much rigor end up so fun to read! The author appears to be more interested in literary theory than I, but I will be appreciating the centering of Eros and multiplicity in the conception of divinity for quite some time.
28 Gutiérrez […] I align myself with this tradition of a “modest” theology. The theologian interprets and explains practice – practiced solidarity with the poor […]. Theology interprets the moments when other worlds permeate a current one. […] First comes “[…] action, and commitment to the service of others,” then “theology follows; it is the second step.”
29 [Reid] “Latin American Political Theology has been ignorant of the non-heterosexual body and non-heterosexual loving patterns of relationships […]”
I look to Gutiérrez for the mission of theology: to be in community, to make, to embody, to be with, to act, and then reflect. But it is in Althaus-Reid’s that I approach […] my project. […] “This is a God who depends on our experience of pleasure and despair in intimacy to manifest Godself, but who has been displaced, theologically speaking, by a God of grand heterosexual illusions, phantasmic assumptions of the order of love and sexuality.”
30 Queer theology “rescues different forms of imagining love which exist among us and which may lead us to different and better understandings of God and life,” […] we should commit to a project not only of critiquing myth but of mythmaking […]
36 If indeed humans are theomorphic, made "in [God's] image," then what we say or think about humans influences our perceptions of the divine. […] Feminist theologians might assert that no human is the same as God, but if women cannot talk about themselves as theomorphic and point to God with their experience, then the mystery and complexity of God is diminished. […] legitimizing patriarchy.
43 Presenting a singular myth as the original elevates it as the answer to all subsequent questions. It also suggests that, if the first myth is an answer to the human question, then the answer is also more important than the question. For someone like Barth, human questions may change but they always point back to the revelation.
47 […] a denunciation of the existing order. […] The repudiation of a dehumanizing situation is an unavoidable aspect of utopia.
48 The myth is a symbol of our societal concern. It provokes our hope, which "opens us, in an attitude of spiritual childhood, to the gift of the future promised by God. This hope "makes us radically free to commit ourselves to social praxis, motivated by a liberating utopia and with the means which the scientific analysis of reality provides for us."" […] Gutiérrez's eschatology demands and inspires liberation.
50 We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.
53 Lorde addresses the other woman: "Since you have so completely unrecognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you." The effect of Daly's writing on Lorde is the opposite of Richardson's mutual recognition of one another's subjecthood.
54 Lorde's letter reveals Daly's universalization of her identity and failure to recognize the complexity of other people’s reality. This nonrecognition compromises one's ability to see the other as a subject. It results in objectification.
90 As queer readers of myth, we must expose the holes in heterosexual coherence. […] Not only must we be prolific in our mythopoetic dialogues, we must refuse any attempt at a singular, dominant queer mythology.
114 […] I suggested a reading of several gnostic mythopoetic texts that exposes the disorder of presumed singularity over multiplicity, "the one" over "the many." The demiurge presumes his selfhood and agency over and against the complex multiplicity of the pleroma, which, while unified, is described as and sustained through shifting relationships between divine entities. These entities also tend to be multi-sexed, act out multiple gender roles, and engage in a multiplicity of erotics. […] Through his presumption, the demiurge also genders the world as something feminine or female to be acted upon, extending from Eve to all matter and indeed to all matter and all humanity. The demiurge then relegates desire to a singular function: the perpetuation of his dualistic empire. While just as much an object for the demiurge to act upon, Adam is also positioned in the scheme to model his actions on the demi-urge's. The dream that the archons put in Adam's mind is one of false authority over and against his surroundings, beginning with dominion over Eve. Adam, and any Adamic descendent, enforces the dualistic cosmology of Yaldabaoth by becoming a demiurge in his own right, denying the syzygy of himself and Eve, which could be, and should be, modeled off the aconic organization of the pleroma, a community of entities rather than a self-delineated over and against everyone else.
115 […] I refuse a cosmology where a demiurgic model is the only viable one.
117 […] distinctions that are rooted theologically in the Greco-Roman- Abrahamic distinction between creator and created, or God and world. Insofar as pantheism rejects this fundamental distinction, it threatens all the other privileges that map onto it: male versus female, light versus darkness, good versus evil, and humans over every other organism.
Pantheism threatens the demiurgic model. [...] "the oppositional logic of classical metaphysics does not [...] give us two; it [...] gives us one, and a falling-short of that one."" In a dualistic cosmology, only one half of the dyad is empowered, true, and good.
118 Theologians interested in queer liberation cannot accept the demiurgic cosmos as the cosmos, which may in fact mean we cannot accept a cosmos, in its singularity, constituted by something acosmic.
119 Similarly, liberation theologians who envision worlds of multiplicitous sexuality, subjecthood, vibrancy and imagination must address the commitment to monotheism, particularly those monotheisms which assert a God who sets history on its course, entering the fray as the ultimate subject against the chaotic object of his creation[…]
As a queer, nonbinary theopoet, I wonder with her about my communities’ commitments to holy narratives and cosmic models that still appeal to the demiurge, even if a more liberal one. I worry that in our liberational pursuits, we simply tack more and more of our characteristics onto the demiurgic skeleton, accepting the same old tenets as long as he uses our idioms. But a demiurge who votes for my candidate, frequents the same gay bar, or lets me love who I want to love, is still a demiurge. The universe is still hers. We are still their subjects.
123 Bauman deploys again Halberstam’s queer theory to offer “an ethics of ambiguity and unknowing rather than progress,” […] Bauman takes a stand, similarly to Rubenstein, of the many over the one, of rejecting the reduction of causality, of reason, of family. <>
[…] Bauman’s project is thus concerned with interspecies listening or more broadly heeding those voices of further proximity from the patriarchal center.
124 “In other words, if our worlds have been structured into narratives of progress that through efficient causality and instrumental reason, turn all of life into fodder for certain human's progress, then haven't our desires, hopes, and dreams been distorted toward creating this reality?” <>
[…] The Relationship of human-against-world, spurred by the temporal movement of progress, forces us to act until we or the earth are obsolete.
125 This is a queer, ecological, and pantheistic vision, where agency is no longer the sole disposal of an alien demiurge and those who model themselves after him.
[…] the dominant strands of Western cosmology require an ontic distinction between the "spiritual" demiurge and his "material" creation, where "matter is the undifferentiated, persistently feminized, often racialized stuff that a rational, male principle brings to order." The distinction is key to both Plato's cosmogony and to that of Genesis 1. […] Order is strictly separate from chaos. Order, intelligent, agential, and alien, forces its design onto matter.
[…] Rubenstein uses her chapter to explore materialist counterontologies. By materialism, both new and quite old, she refers to philosophies "that locate creative agency — whether it be called life, spirit, animacy, or emergence — within matter itself.”
134 Empedocles […] salvation is not about escaping from the world but embracing it, loving it, cultivating divinity until we stop being selves, until we are integrated into complex unity that is community. All things making love made into love.
[…] Separation and purity are the signs of Strife! Diversity in communion moves us toward divinity. The demiurge traps himself in fear and paranoia from his creation, both revealing his weakness and perpetuating it. A love tied only to sexual reproduction and marriage between one man and one woman is a love concerned with the perpetuation of a self or a type – a name, family, legacy – not recognition of the multiple loving agents that constitute every body and event. This is love radically democratized.
136 Heraclitus’s cosmos is not made by a creator […] Instead, the most beautiful kosmos is a pile of things poured out at random. […] The most important distinction between his and Empedocles' thought, however, is that stuff that separates is not ontically distinct from stuff that brings together.
139 This is the model I call erotic worlding […] We are […] the results of matter […] pleasuring matter.
143 Fee cites Freud’s Oedipal complex as an ideology “that produces heterosexuality as a symbol of ‘normal’ and ‘mature’ adult sexual and gender identity.” She explains: “The Oedipal complex structures the direction of identification and desire, in that identification is what one would like to be, and desire is what one would like to have but one cannot identify and desire the same object.
144 Homosexual desires are seen as heterosexual desires stemming from the wrong identifications. The Oedipus complex is the story that Freud creates about growing up and taming these initial multiple desires.”
[…] Fee continues: “It is worth questioning whether Freud's "normal" negotiation of the Oedipus complex is ever achieved. My own psychotherapeutic work with people is testimony to how fluid desire is and how it flows in many directions breaking up all kinds of imposed moral codes [...]. In Freudian terms, we can — at any point in life — still be at the mercy of the pre-Oedipal state of " polymorphous perversities" — a time when neither we, nor the objects of our desire, were defined through sexual difference, a time before our gendered fate was sealed by strongly embedded cultural messages. If Freud's theory that all children are polymorphously perverse is to be believed, it is difficult to understand how these multitudinous, undifferentiated desires get so narrowly channeled into adult procreative heterosexuality.”
Freud's myth […] Chaos must be wrestled into heterosexual order. This conflict, however, is not only of the past but is a constant struggle tied to every emerging body. Childhood is disordered and dangerous.
145-6 Maturity is not guaranteed. The heterosexual matrix is required to regulate our bodies […] Erotics include who we desire to be and with whom we desire to be. […]
After discussing theorists Foucault, Butler, Wittig, and Rich, all of whom challenge the dominant Freudian scheme, Fee explains that "the destabilisation of sexual and gender identities brought about by these shifts in theorising, opened up new ways of thinking about identities and practices outwith binary sex and gender ideology" The given naturalness of the heterosexual matrix, once revealed as discursive, provides new space for imagining other. Imagining other creates new space for becoming other.
150 (Freud) Furthermore, he [Heraclitus ] argues for identity as founded on the differences between communities of matter. Singularity is conditioned by plurality, identity by the recognition of multiple entities. […] I see in Eryximachus's physician someone who cultivates a moderate and moderating love, like Freud's psychoanalyst who guides the patient from divergent and multiple identifications or desires into the heterosexual, cisgender normative. Both doctors acknowledge the many within a given body but deem that manyness a threat to order and to a coherent self.
151 […] it can be disastrous when we ignore, subordinate, or destroy the many in service of the one. I propose that certain bodies, based on their vantage points in the cosmos, have experiences of and insights into how the many and the one coexist. I am talking, right now, of nonbinary, genderqueer, or genderfucked people […] <>
152 A symbol of multiplicity once again threatens the demiurgic order. And it does so by obscuring the line between the many and the one. Of course, not everyone who uses they/them/theirs does so with the explicit intention of it pointing to a multiplicity.
153 Opting for one's body to be referred to in a way that is both plural and singular is an assault on the ontic distinction between one and many.
156 Gender, here, reads as a list of culturally contradictory things coming together. It is about things that are desired, no longer about denial of desire. […] homing in on a multiplicity of objects in relationship to one another in ways that are delighting, confusing, frustrating, and especially surprising: “My gender surprises me – it dressed down for a long time […] Now it has all kinds of demands.”
157 To be in relationship with yourself […] is to be in relationship with all yourselves and with what all yourselves desire.
162 But humans are mixtures plagued with the social regulation of the eternal or singular self, the demiurgic model […] asking us to worship our separation from our world and our God from us. […] To acknowledge our multiple parts moves us toward being more in love. […] We do not have to act out every personality we contain or act on every impulse. […]. Empedocles […] hopes the beloved will be a better lover to the world when he knows his interdependence with it, not his eternal separation/ from it.
164 Subject-subject consciousness is central to Hay's understanding of gay spirituality. For him, part of the gay experience involves being a child who is denied the ability to act out one's attraction toward other children. […] In comparison to the heterosexual matrix wherein boys and girls were taught to think of the other "as SEX-OBJECTS to be manipulated, Hay writes, "He whom I would love would be another ME. We wouldn't manipulate each other — we would share […]
166 Still, the utopian is a desire, and that subject-subject desire existing in queerness is what makes us a threat to the heterosexual matrix and is key to our liberation.
178 What is most dangerous for the demiurge and his children is that in a panerotic, pansexual, pananimate universe, the cosmos has sex dreams.
193 In drag, artificiality is the point, and in acting, it is typically discouraged. With drag, we might think of […] camp, which is “a lie which tells the truth.” Drag tells the “truth” by presenting “falsehoods,” by performing exaggerations […]
200 Relationship - erotic, cosmic, mystical, generative — is impossible without difference. But it is a contingent difference.
Pantheism argues for contingent differences rather than […] static distinctions. Differences become a matter of perspective […] determined by constitutive relationships. The emergence of selves, Rubenstein defines as pancarnation, or "divinity's inability not to express itself in and as the endless, stubbornly un-totalized run of all things."
201 What does it mean then, when we presume to have a self who is impenetrable and unchangeable, whose perspective is singular and objective? For one, we get tyranny and violence. But more specifically, we get a conception of the self which cuts us off from new sight […,] new becoming, from change […]
However, without the emergence of selves, the pleasure of formation, attraction, and erotic animacy cannot exist. […] The answer to the presumed self is not self-destruction but the performance of self.
222 But drag gives us the opportunity to nurture that which grows in us, against the planned selves we think we are. […]
Gesture-centered drag breaks through a conception of a body adorned in objects, that gender is an object worn upon a neutral subject. […]" Drag is the dance of Dionysus, who pulls the rug from under the tyrant, who uses illusion to break illusion, who shatters prison walls, who feeds the masses on his magnificent body, feminine, masculine, androgynous, monstrous, animal, and divine.
239 Performance of gender and sexuality makes our genders and sexualities […] interpretable. […] The drag performance, dancing the dance of oppositions, makes gender, and the power relationships behind it, a matter of contestation.
240 To perform in drag is to incarnate myth. […] And like the perpetuation of the demiurgic rule through a human hierarchy made in his image, in the world of theology, too often have non-white, non-Christian, non-cis-men been forced to replicate disembodied, genderless speech in order to be taken seriously in the discipline of God-talk. But in denying the body, in keeping the sexual, gendered, ethnic, and raced self invisible, the theologian denies us revelation. […] For queer and trans theologies, indeed for all theologies concerned with revelation, we cannot allow sexuality and gender or the naturalization of the self to be obscured.
241 Drag […] opens up new paths for the body to be gendered and for the body to gesture toward the holy. […] To buy into a single demiurgic illusion is fundamentally different from slipping in and out of many illusions.
[…] For queer and trans theologians, for feminist and liberation theologians, […] what worlds of possibility are we unable to know if we never undertake the Dionysian illusion? Would I never have seen of my own erotics and my genders if I had never worn a garment designed for something other than my arbitrarily designated body[…]? […] To be in drag is to make the self become other, and to see in that other a poetics of our deepest selves, redistributed. Drag is myth acted and enfleshed.
242 If God created specific personae so God could know, reach, love, and make more of God's selves, then our job is not only to study but to bring to light the various personae that are uniquely qualified to perceive those selves.
28 Gutiérrez […] I align myself with this tradition of a “modest” theology. The theologian interprets and explains practice – practiced solidarity with the poor […]. Theology interprets the moments when other worlds permeate a current one. […] First comes “[…] action, and commitment to the service of others,” then “theology follows; it is the second step.”
29 [Reid] “Latin American Political Theology has been ignorant of the non-heterosexual body and non-heterosexual loving patterns of relationships […]”
I look to Gutiérrez for the mission of theology: to be in community, to make, to embody, to be with, to act, and then reflect. But it is in Althaus-Reid’s that I approach […] my project. […] “This is a God who depends on our experience of pleasure and despair in intimacy to manifest Godself, but who has been displaced, theologically speaking, by a God of grand heterosexual illusions, phantasmic assumptions of the order of love and sexuality.”
30 Queer theology “rescues different forms of imagining love which exist among us and which may lead us to different and better understandings of God and life,” […] we should commit to a project not only of critiquing myth but of mythmaking […]
36 If indeed humans are theomorphic, made "in [God's] image," then what we say or think about humans influences our perceptions of the divine. […] Feminist theologians might assert that no human is the same as God, but if women cannot talk about themselves as theomorphic and point to God with their experience, then the mystery and complexity of God is diminished. […] legitimizing patriarchy.
43 Presenting a singular myth as the original elevates it as the answer to all subsequent questions. It also suggests that, if the first myth is an answer to the human question, then the answer is also more important than the question. For someone like Barth, human questions may change but they always point back to the revelation.
47 […] a denunciation of the existing order. […] The repudiation of a dehumanizing situation is an unavoidable aspect of utopia.
48 The myth is a symbol of our societal concern. It provokes our hope, which "opens us, in an attitude of spiritual childhood, to the gift of the future promised by God. This hope "makes us radically free to commit ourselves to social praxis, motivated by a liberating utopia and with the means which the scientific analysis of reality provides for us."" […] Gutiérrez's eschatology demands and inspires liberation.
50 We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.
53 Lorde addresses the other woman: "Since you have so completely unrecognized me, perhaps I have been in error concerning you and no longer recognize you." The effect of Daly's writing on Lorde is the opposite of Richardson's mutual recognition of one another's subjecthood.
54 Lorde's letter reveals Daly's universalization of her identity and failure to recognize the complexity of other people’s reality. This nonrecognition compromises one's ability to see the other as a subject. It results in objectification.
90 As queer readers of myth, we must expose the holes in heterosexual coherence. […] Not only must we be prolific in our mythopoetic dialogues, we must refuse any attempt at a singular, dominant queer mythology.
114 […] I suggested a reading of several gnostic mythopoetic texts that exposes the disorder of presumed singularity over multiplicity, "the one" over "the many." The demiurge presumes his selfhood and agency over and against the complex multiplicity of the pleroma, which, while unified, is described as and sustained through shifting relationships between divine entities. These entities also tend to be multi-sexed, act out multiple gender roles, and engage in a multiplicity of erotics. […] Through his presumption, the demiurge also genders the world as something feminine or female to be acted upon, extending from Eve to all matter and indeed to all matter and all humanity. The demiurge then relegates desire to a singular function: the perpetuation of his dualistic empire. While just as much an object for the demiurge to act upon, Adam is also positioned in the scheme to model his actions on the demi-urge's. The dream that the archons put in Adam's mind is one of false authority over and against his surroundings, beginning with dominion over Eve. Adam, and any Adamic descendent, enforces the dualistic cosmology of Yaldabaoth by becoming a demiurge in his own right, denying the syzygy of himself and Eve, which could be, and should be, modeled off the aconic organization of the pleroma, a community of entities rather than a self-delineated over and against everyone else.
115 […] I refuse a cosmology where a demiurgic model is the only viable one.
117 […] distinctions that are rooted theologically in the Greco-Roman- Abrahamic distinction between creator and created, or God and world. Insofar as pantheism rejects this fundamental distinction, it threatens all the other privileges that map onto it: male versus female, light versus darkness, good versus evil, and humans over every other organism.
Pantheism threatens the demiurgic model. [...] "the oppositional logic of classical metaphysics does not [...] give us two; it [...] gives us one, and a falling-short of that one."" In a dualistic cosmology, only one half of the dyad is empowered, true, and good.
118 Theologians interested in queer liberation cannot accept the demiurgic cosmos as the cosmos, which may in fact mean we cannot accept a cosmos, in its singularity, constituted by something acosmic.
119 Similarly, liberation theologians who envision worlds of multiplicitous sexuality, subjecthood, vibrancy and imagination must address the commitment to monotheism, particularly those monotheisms which assert a God who sets history on its course, entering the fray as the ultimate subject against the chaotic object of his creation[…]
As a queer, nonbinary theopoet, I wonder with her about my communities’ commitments to holy narratives and cosmic models that still appeal to the demiurge, even if a more liberal one. I worry that in our liberational pursuits, we simply tack more and more of our characteristics onto the demiurgic skeleton, accepting the same old tenets as long as he uses our idioms. But a demiurge who votes for my candidate, frequents the same gay bar, or lets me love who I want to love, is still a demiurge. The universe is still hers. We are still their subjects.
123 Bauman deploys again Halberstam’s queer theory to offer “an ethics of ambiguity and unknowing rather than progress,” […] Bauman takes a stand, similarly to Rubenstein, of the many over the one, of rejecting the reduction of causality, of reason, of family. <>
[…] Bauman’s project is thus concerned with interspecies listening or more broadly heeding those voices of further proximity from the patriarchal center.
124 “In other words, if our worlds have been structured into narratives of progress that through efficient causality and instrumental reason, turn all of life into fodder for certain human's progress, then haven't our desires, hopes, and dreams been distorted toward creating this reality?” <>
[…] The Relationship of human-against-world, spurred by the temporal movement of progress, forces us to act until we or the earth are obsolete.
125 This is a queer, ecological, and pantheistic vision, where agency is no longer the sole disposal of an alien demiurge and those who model themselves after him.
[…] the dominant strands of Western cosmology require an ontic distinction between the "spiritual" demiurge and his "material" creation, where "matter is the undifferentiated, persistently feminized, often racialized stuff that a rational, male principle brings to order." The distinction is key to both Plato's cosmogony and to that of Genesis 1. […] Order is strictly separate from chaos. Order, intelligent, agential, and alien, forces its design onto matter.
[…] Rubenstein uses her chapter to explore materialist counterontologies. By materialism, both new and quite old, she refers to philosophies "that locate creative agency — whether it be called life, spirit, animacy, or emergence — within matter itself.”
134 Empedocles […] salvation is not about escaping from the world but embracing it, loving it, cultivating divinity until we stop being selves, until we are integrated into complex unity that is community. All things making love made into love.
[…] Separation and purity are the signs of Strife! Diversity in communion moves us toward divinity. The demiurge traps himself in fear and paranoia from his creation, both revealing his weakness and perpetuating it. A love tied only to sexual reproduction and marriage between one man and one woman is a love concerned with the perpetuation of a self or a type – a name, family, legacy – not recognition of the multiple loving agents that constitute every body and event. This is love radically democratized.
136 Heraclitus’s cosmos is not made by a creator […] Instead, the most beautiful kosmos is a pile of things poured out at random. […] The most important distinction between his and Empedocles' thought, however, is that stuff that separates is not ontically distinct from stuff that brings together.
139 This is the model I call erotic worlding […] We are […] the results of matter […] pleasuring matter.
143 Fee cites Freud’s Oedipal complex as an ideology “that produces heterosexuality as a symbol of ‘normal’ and ‘mature’ adult sexual and gender identity.” She explains: “The Oedipal complex structures the direction of identification and desire, in that identification is what one would like to be, and desire is what one would like to have but one cannot identify and desire the same object.
144 Homosexual desires are seen as heterosexual desires stemming from the wrong identifications. The Oedipus complex is the story that Freud creates about growing up and taming these initial multiple desires.”
[…] Fee continues: “It is worth questioning whether Freud's "normal" negotiation of the Oedipus complex is ever achieved. My own psychotherapeutic work with people is testimony to how fluid desire is and how it flows in many directions breaking up all kinds of imposed moral codes [...]. In Freudian terms, we can — at any point in life — still be at the mercy of the pre-Oedipal state of " polymorphous perversities" — a time when neither we, nor the objects of our desire, were defined through sexual difference, a time before our gendered fate was sealed by strongly embedded cultural messages. If Freud's theory that all children are polymorphously perverse is to be believed, it is difficult to understand how these multitudinous, undifferentiated desires get so narrowly channeled into adult procreative heterosexuality.”
Freud's myth […] Chaos must be wrestled into heterosexual order. This conflict, however, is not only of the past but is a constant struggle tied to every emerging body. Childhood is disordered and dangerous.
145-6 Maturity is not guaranteed. The heterosexual matrix is required to regulate our bodies […] Erotics include who we desire to be and with whom we desire to be. […]
After discussing theorists Foucault, Butler, Wittig, and Rich, all of whom challenge the dominant Freudian scheme, Fee explains that "the destabilisation of sexual and gender identities brought about by these shifts in theorising, opened up new ways of thinking about identities and practices outwith binary sex and gender ideology" The given naturalness of the heterosexual matrix, once revealed as discursive, provides new space for imagining other. Imagining other creates new space for becoming other.
150 (Freud) Furthermore, he [Heraclitus ] argues for identity as founded on the differences between communities of matter. Singularity is conditioned by plurality, identity by the recognition of multiple entities. […] I see in Eryximachus's physician someone who cultivates a moderate and moderating love, like Freud's psychoanalyst who guides the patient from divergent and multiple identifications or desires into the heterosexual, cisgender normative. Both doctors acknowledge the many within a given body but deem that manyness a threat to order and to a coherent self.
151 […] it can be disastrous when we ignore, subordinate, or destroy the many in service of the one. I propose that certain bodies, based on their vantage points in the cosmos, have experiences of and insights into how the many and the one coexist. I am talking, right now, of nonbinary, genderqueer, or genderfucked people […] <>
152 A symbol of multiplicity once again threatens the demiurgic order. And it does so by obscuring the line between the many and the one. Of course, not everyone who uses they/them/theirs does so with the explicit intention of it pointing to a multiplicity.
153 Opting for one's body to be referred to in a way that is both plural and singular is an assault on the ontic distinction between one and many.
156 Gender, here, reads as a list of culturally contradictory things coming together. It is about things that are desired, no longer about denial of desire. […] homing in on a multiplicity of objects in relationship to one another in ways that are delighting, confusing, frustrating, and especially surprising: “My gender surprises me – it dressed down for a long time […] Now it has all kinds of demands.”
157 To be in relationship with yourself […] is to be in relationship with all yourselves and with what all yourselves desire.
162 But humans are mixtures plagued with the social regulation of the eternal or singular self, the demiurgic model […] asking us to worship our separation from our world and our God from us. […] To acknowledge our multiple parts moves us toward being more in love. […] We do not have to act out every personality we contain or act on every impulse. […]. Empedocles […] hopes the beloved will be a better lover to the world when he knows his interdependence with it, not his eternal separation/ from it.
164 Subject-subject consciousness is central to Hay's understanding of gay spirituality. For him, part of the gay experience involves being a child who is denied the ability to act out one's attraction toward other children. […] In comparison to the heterosexual matrix wherein boys and girls were taught to think of the other "as SEX-OBJECTS to be manipulated, Hay writes, "He whom I would love would be another ME. We wouldn't manipulate each other — we would share […]
166 Still, the utopian is a desire, and that subject-subject desire existing in queerness is what makes us a threat to the heterosexual matrix and is key to our liberation.
178 What is most dangerous for the demiurge and his children is that in a panerotic, pansexual, pananimate universe, the cosmos has sex dreams.
193 In drag, artificiality is the point, and in acting, it is typically discouraged. With drag, we might think of […] camp, which is “a lie which tells the truth.” Drag tells the “truth” by presenting “falsehoods,” by performing exaggerations […]
200 Relationship - erotic, cosmic, mystical, generative — is impossible without difference. But it is a contingent difference.
Pantheism argues for contingent differences rather than […] static distinctions. Differences become a matter of perspective […] determined by constitutive relationships. The emergence of selves, Rubenstein defines as pancarnation, or "divinity's inability not to express itself in and as the endless, stubbornly un-totalized run of all things."
201 What does it mean then, when we presume to have a self who is impenetrable and unchangeable, whose perspective is singular and objective? For one, we get tyranny and violence. But more specifically, we get a conception of the self which cuts us off from new sight […,] new becoming, from change […]
However, without the emergence of selves, the pleasure of formation, attraction, and erotic animacy cannot exist. […] The answer to the presumed self is not self-destruction but the performance of self.
222 But drag gives us the opportunity to nurture that which grows in us, against the planned selves we think we are. […]
Gesture-centered drag breaks through a conception of a body adorned in objects, that gender is an object worn upon a neutral subject. […]" Drag is the dance of Dionysus, who pulls the rug from under the tyrant, who uses illusion to break illusion, who shatters prison walls, who feeds the masses on his magnificent body, feminine, masculine, androgynous, monstrous, animal, and divine.
239 Performance of gender and sexuality makes our genders and sexualities […] interpretable. […] The drag performance, dancing the dance of oppositions, makes gender, and the power relationships behind it, a matter of contestation.
240 To perform in drag is to incarnate myth. […] And like the perpetuation of the demiurgic rule through a human hierarchy made in his image, in the world of theology, too often have non-white, non-Christian, non-cis-men been forced to replicate disembodied, genderless speech in order to be taken seriously in the discipline of God-talk. But in denying the body, in keeping the sexual, gendered, ethnic, and raced self invisible, the theologian denies us revelation. […] For queer and trans theologies, indeed for all theologies concerned with revelation, we cannot allow sexuality and gender or the naturalization of the self to be obscured.
241 Drag […] opens up new paths for the body to be gendered and for the body to gesture toward the holy. […] To buy into a single demiurgic illusion is fundamentally different from slipping in and out of many illusions.
[…] For queer and trans theologians, for feminist and liberation theologians, […] what worlds of possibility are we unable to know if we never undertake the Dionysian illusion? Would I never have seen of my own erotics and my genders if I had never worn a garment designed for something other than my arbitrarily designated body[…]? […] To be in drag is to make the self become other, and to see in that other a poetics of our deepest selves, redistributed. Drag is myth acted and enfleshed.
242 If God created specific personae so God could know, reach, love, and make more of God's selves, then our job is not only to study but to bring to light the various personae that are uniquely qualified to perceive those selves.
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August 6, 2025hey mama's et al.
de gil klinkt: "yippie 4 life!"
ideeën warmden al (xd) m'n kaakjes op! oh en hoe: het roept orgastisch scheppen op x
de winnende hond zal Ongeremde Kreatie heten :3
ga en vind je ego genekt door [E/e]ros, mwah!
post culminatio: ik smeek je mn bap te redden
de gil klinkt: "yippie 4 life!"
ideeën warmden al (xd) m'n kaakjes op! oh en hoe: het roept orgastisch scheppen op x
de winnende hond zal Ongeremde Kreatie heten :3
ga en vind je ego genekt door [E/e]ros, mwah!
post culminatio: ik smeek je mn bap te redden
May 7, 2024
"Questions of identity are related to questions of time and of how we experience the moment the world is in. Indeed, explora-tion of identity is tied to exploration through time, and both are complicated"
Max Brumberg- Kraus is one heck of a writer! Focused on the tensions between theology, mythology and reality, they look at the world through reality glasses and not everything is pretty.
They are a recent graduate of the same seminary that I graduated from in 1989. During my time there, many theological scholars were beginning debates with lasting outcomes ( think the recent schism with the United Methodist Church).
This is not a book for the faint hearted. Brumberg-Kraus' scholarship is top notch and contemporary for non fiction. Highly Recommended non fiction. 5/5
Max Brumberg- Kraus is one heck of a writer! Focused on the tensions between theology, mythology and reality, they look at the world through reality glasses and not everything is pretty.
They are a recent graduate of the same seminary that I graduated from in 1989. During my time there, many theological scholars were beginning debates with lasting outcomes ( think the recent schism with the United Methodist Church).
This is not a book for the faint hearted. Brumberg-Kraus' scholarship is top notch and contemporary for non fiction. Highly Recommended non fiction. 5/5
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