Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics

by Marcella Althaus-Reid

Ground-breaking, intriguing and scholarly, Indecent Theology broadens the debate on sexuality and theology as never before.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Sexuality, Spirituality

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2000

About the author

Marcella Althaus-Reid was Professor of Contextual Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. When appointed, she was the only woman professor of theology at a Scottish University, and the first woman professor of theology at New College in its 160 year history.

She graduated with a Bachelor in Theology Degree from ISEDET, the Protestant University Institute in Buenos Aires. She completed her Ph.D at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her interests included Liberation Theology, Feminist theology and Queer Theology.

Prof Althaus-Reid died on Friday 20 February 2009, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite version of Althaus-Reid's thesis: "The problem is that it is easier to live without God than without the heterosexual concept of man. They need to be undressed simultaneously. The subversiveness of a religious system lies in the sexual subversions in that disorderly core of abnormal sexual narratives where virgins give birth and male trinities may signify the incoherence of one male definition only, in the tension between patriarchal identity and difference." (p. 18)

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• All theology is sexual theology. Indecent Theology is sexier than most.
• By examining the dialectics of decency and indecency and exploring a
• theology of sexual stories from the margins, this book brings together for the first time Liberation Theology, Queer Theory, post-Marxism and Postcolonial analysis in an explosive mixture. Indecent Theology is an out-of-the-closet style of doing theology and shows how we can reflect on the Virgin Mary and on Christology from sexual stories taken from fetishism, leather lifestyles and transvestism.
• The Argentinian theologian would like then to remove her underwear to write theology with feminist honesty, not forgetting what it is to be a woman when dealing with theological and political categories. I should call such a theologian, indecent, and her reflection, Indecent Theology. Indecent Theology is a theology which problematises and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppression in Latin America, a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence. An Indecent Theology will question the traditional Latin American field of decency and order as it permeates and supports the multiple (ecclesiological, theological, political and amatory) structures of life in my country, Argentina, and in my continent.
• [Ch 1]
• The need for Grand Narratives always takes with it some cuttings and mutilations in itself. Latin American theology comes from that, a mutilation of symbolic knowledge such as theology, politics, economics, science and sexuality
• Lemon vendors who do not use underwear are indecent. The Argentinian theologian without underwear writes Indecent Theology. They both challenge in different ways the creation of a factual sexual order of things, one that became entangled in an alliance of patriarchy between Europeans and natives.
• The destruction of the Grand Narratives of the Americas did not come as the result of a hermeneutics of suspicion, or the realisation of the trace in the text, that element which is a movement leading us towards what the text tries to occult, hide and negate. No, economic exploitation was the deconstructivist clause, the doubting interrogation of naturalised, assumed authoritative narratives. MAYAN narrative consumed u EUROPHEAN grand narrative and yet womens oppression does not change. The Coming of the Other
• Reading deconstruction from the end of the Grand Narratives in Latin America is an interesting exercise on a marginal positioning of ourselves as indecent theologians in the context of Christian theology.
• The incorporation of the Latin American forma mentis into the Spanish one implied a minimum dialogic process at a certain point, a symbolic co-operation. Incorporation transforms what it is eaten, but keeps it. The incorporation we are talking refers to a process of nourishment. The nourishment of the European Other did not happen by capital exploitation only, but by sexual agreements. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS Thus women’s oppression gave a sense of normality to changing times, glossed and mythologised as in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe. ****
• The subversiveness of a religious system lies in its sexual subversions, in that disorderly core of abnormal sexual narratives where virgins give birth and male trinities may signify the incoherence of one male definition only, in the tension between patriarchal identity and difference. This undressing is the starting point for gross indecency in theology. The lemon vendors I mentioned earlier continue an indigenous tradition of not using underwear, defying the male gaze, controlling gazes, and the decency of those gazes. This constitutes in itself the base for a paradigm in our present discussion. They challenge a systematic sexuality.
• A body-paradigm, is therefore pertinent in theological analysis, and does not need to come from the European Other, but from the lemon vendors, who embrace in their lives the economic and sexual connotations of the survivors of the destruction of the Grand Narratives of Latin America. SUMMARY OF CHAPTER.
• Indecent = breaking the sexual imaginary of Western theology
• that sexual act of theology which is simultaneously economical. It regulates numbers, fixes positions and pre-empties intimacy and meaning.
• Why does the Feminist Theology of Liberation select the female gaze as a privileged place of discourse? Why not a theology with women’s hands, legs, breasts or head? Why not a theology ‘with women’s sex?’ Moreover, why a theology from a fragmented female body, in this case, a cornea, a woman’s retina?
• Theology with women’s eyes carried out exegesis, re-readings of the Bible, but never developed a serious feminist theological materialist analysis or hermeneutical circle, except for some flirting with a general description of women’s conditions under different oppressions
• To choose Mary as a departing feminist theological criticism is another example of idealist methods in a theology which is supposedly Marxist influenced. If it is true that the first inscriptions (of hunger, pain and sexual desire) are always written in the body, one wonders how a women’s theology can start with Mary, the icon of a no-body. To start with Mary is to start with an idea, a gas-like substance, a myth of a woman without a vagina which discloses in a hilarious way the fact that half of humanity has been constructed around ideas of ghostly simulacras. *****
• As a woman theologian myself, I need to struggle against the idea of using ‘she’ for the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is not a woman but a simulacra in which the process of making ideologies and what Marx calls ‘mystical connections’ is exemplified
• Mary is in the realm of the fantastic and phantasmagorical.
• It is interesting that in every recently edited collection of essays on Liberation Theology, published by someone of the first-generation liberationists or some of the self-appointed male inheritors (so called ‘second-generation liberationists’), most of the articles written by women are on Mariology.4 Audre Lorde has said that ‘the masters tools would never dismantle the masters house’ (Lorde 1994:54) and we may add to this that one must beware when the masters feel so pleased with Mariological studies.
• Lil bio essentialism
• Let us consider a move from anthropology to Mujeriology, for the sake of a love for differences, not equalities.
• [2 The indecent Virgin]
• The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been described in terms of the dark colour of the skin of the image and the style of her clothes, but curiously, nothing has been said about this tender, swollen reddish vulva from where she emerges.
• To put your head through the hole, to see yourself as the Virgin emerging from a divine vulva, requires a sexual option. For instance, you need to consider where God is in this, because God’s position is a sexual option in itself.
• We can consider, for instance, whether God is a female divinity represented by a vulva, but even beyond that, whether God relates to an autonomous sexuality or a reflected one (such as in the case of women’s sexuality in traditional heterosexuality). Or is God a pleasurable site, a G spot somewhere hidden but built around mythical (sometimes exaggerated) proportions? In that case, we need to consider the mythical proportions of penetration in traditional theology. Traditionally, theology has seen the world as coming from God’s dissemination which has been represented by the Highest Phallus men could conceive of: the Word of God.
• that sex does not need to be penetrative disseminations, as the portrait of the artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe seems to convey. The G(od) spot does not need to be located as a supplement; the G(od) spot belongs to the vulva and her pleasure; to the embrace of the lips and the hardness of the clitoris.
• The point is that the Virginal liberationist does theology without lust.
• Anthropologist Wendy Holloway’s notion of ‘investment’ is a useful one to consider here. According to her, in any society (such as the Latin American) where there are several simultaneous discourses on femininity and masculinity competing for hegemony, a woman can get some reward for her support of a certain discourse on women which promises to be beneficial to her
• By investing in the Virgin, a poor woman avoids being classified as a prostitute, meaning by this a woman who takes a public stand of deviant or subversive power.
• VANILLA MARIOLOGY
• The problem increases when women theologians in Latin America do not realise that their Marian Theologies are also part of making an investment in the Virgin
• he theologian as the Virgin of Guadalupe sooner or later needs to identify herself with a fabulous virginity, and a biographically located inscription of sex/gender in that of God in history. Gender is usually considered in linearity and punctuality.
• I have said elsewhere that the Virgin Mary in Latin America is a rich, white, woman who does not walk and whose authoritative discourses are visual more than scriptural. The vulva of the Virgin of Guadalupe is for showing off, not for written reflections.
• That Spermatic Word is the word of origins, the word and embodiment of God the Father who produces praxis (actions and thoughts) by a process we may call ‘Spermatogenesis’. This Spermatogenesis is the creation of discourses of rationality in the testes (testicles; the place of the divine testimony) of God. From God’s testicles, as his divine witnesses, we find a process of auto-dissemination of the Word from which women in Christianity have been excluded.
• Therefore, God the Father is the scribe of his lonely creational pleasures, for His is the pen/is (Battersby 1989:50), the power and the glory. However, the Virgin Mary has no sharing in her symbolic construction of God’s speech acts. She is no word; she is only appearance.
• It is interesting how an eternal God only had one registered case of procreative sex in history. We may assume that the rest of his lonely pleasurable activities were of a non-procreative nature. Where do the churches then get the idea of sex being divinely approved of only if done for the purpose of procreation?
• God’s sexual act with Mary carries in itself an intentional act of looking: a gaze on her womb is directed outwardly, and it is an act which, through the history of Mariology, has been opened to the conscious perception or absorption of what we have been looking at\
• The killing role of the Virgin Mary makes theological violence sexy
• Historically, the Virgin makes violence sexy but not pleasurable. Mariology lacks the refined etiquette of sadomasochism, and does not even acknowledge consensual theological acts.
• Our gods are Queer, because they are what we want them to be. There are no final definitions or models, just rubber-like, flexible identities ready to perform a divine act according to patterns of power.
o The fact that we know about the gender roles of God (the aggressive God of Israel, or the tender God of the New Testament) does not entitle us to homologise such gender performance with his sexuality.
• If we were to follow that dictum from the Reformation, that we know nothing about God except for what we know of Jesus, then we need to confront a Jesus/God whose theological identity has become a unique mess of being the One who fucked Mary and is yet her son at the same time (interesting if not very edifying material). That Jesus who had a preference for men disciples, beloved disciples and a Lazarus who was so close to him that the Gospel presents Jesus in his infantile denial of his death. So Jesus may be a faggot, or a transvestite, so little we know of him except what other people saw in him; sexual appearances are so deceiving.
• Sexual chaos and the chaos of death are the two suppressed forces of Christianity although paradoxically they constitute the Christian paradigm.
• It is evident that indecenting the Virgin may be the counterpart of the membranous theology to which we are accustomed and which consists in constructing women and other lesser heterosexually thought beings with shut lips (not only their mouths), and closed sexualities—at least in the sense of forbidding the erotic use of the non-reproductive body. That has direct theistic implications. To indecent the Virgin means to indecent God and Jesus, as their identity is relational. Indecent Theology works here as a coming-out process which consists of simply doubting traditions of sexual presuppositions, a process that being public can have transformative political implications.
• PER/VERSION
• For centuries, the Vatican has been building layer upon layer of what we could call proto-alien characteristics in Mary: first, the stone-walled hymen virgin conceiving by copulating with a kind of divine cloud and giving birth in some unimaginable way. Then, it was added to her biography that her mother was also odd in that same way, and Mary was also conceived from a cloud. No wonder Jesus is presented in the Gospels as sexually apathetic at times! One can easily argue that the Virgin Mary is the strangest thing in Christianity and scarcely needs anybody to Queer her, but Queer is not oddity. Queer is precisely the opposite: it is the very essence of a denied reality that we are talking about here when we speak of ‘Queering’ or Indecenting as a process of coming back to the authentic, everyday life experiences described as odd by the ideology—and mythology—makers alike. *** QUEER IS NOT ODDITY!!****
• [3 Talking Obscenities to theology]
• Out-of-the-closet theologians do not leave the personal aside, and that always implies a risk, but neither do the closeted kind.
• According to Sedgwick, male desire is perpetuated through the interrelation of three elements, mainly by homosocial consent, that is by an allegiance amongst men to perpetuate patriarchy, and also by the regulation of homophobia and misogyny. Male desire circulates in this holy trinity always reflecting two sexual structures of oppression— marriage and hetero-sexuality.
• Homosociability, ‘solidarity with the poor’, or ‘made in His image and likeness’ is about constructing God as part of same sex desire; there is realpolitik in Systematic Liberation Theology too.
• This is a fetishisation process in itself; the reification or ‘THINGIFICATION of the discourses of enticement towards, for instance, the symbolics of communal eating. In the Eucharist, according to the dogma of transubstantiation, God is what you eat, that fetish of bread and wine. God is what you digest, perspire and excrete from your body. God is the transit of bread and wine in your stomach and bowels. God is the peculiar smell that perspiration takes after drinking the wine of the Mass and the heavy-sweet breath of bread taken on an empty stomach. The supposed sharing nature of the sacraments (solidarity/ homosociability) is only the ability to take into yourself and incorporate that fetish thinking. At its best, the sacramental ceremonies in the churches work as acts of exemplary colonial orderings, but not of solidarity. The body gestures of silence, of receiving the bread with cupped hands, and passing to another person on your right or left, can become military operations of precision and discipline not too distant from poorhouse workers at the beginning of the century passing bowls of gruel under the vigilance of the bosses. However, every text carries with it a subversive version, and in communion there is an example of intertextuality or intersexuality with God who becomes (transubstantiation or not) our bodies and shares our complex sexualities. And God becomes chaos: the smell of our bodies when making love, our fluids and excretions, the hardening of muscles and the erectness of nipples.
• Soft-Core Theology, a gentle theological construction where sexual oppression is explicit but kept to what are understood as natural, tolerable limits. As in soft-core pornographic films, there are frontiers to be observed. In Soft-Core Theology, God needs to be boundary marked by, say, sodomites, to express the value that reproduction gives to human relationships and defining God’s values too. 93
• This takes us to the real point of a negative fetishisation in Christian theology, which is the fetishisation process carried through a historical God/human being, Jesus, performing ‘all human being’ and ‘all God being’ culturally, simultaneously and definitively. This is not Soft-Core Theology anymore but Hard-Core Porno/Theology. That kind of porno/theology will always be an imperial grandiose gesture made of universals, essentialism and non-challenged religious and political assumptions.
• Pure simulations: terror and obscenity in the Gospel family
o The Gospel family might be considered as the scene of a terrible (terror) simulation. It was Baudrillard who elaborated the idea of a postmodern culture where the borders between reality and appearance are systematically blurred as the effect of technology is applied in the media (Gane 1993:3–5). Simulations or hyper-realities, as Baudrillard also calls them, are cases of cosmetic surgery taking their place as real. But how then do we distinguish between the real and the artificial? We are under the spell of seduction, an erotic style of domination- control that happens to the oppressed. IT IS THE REAL AND THE HYPER-REAL
o he Gospel family is a display whose function is put on stage only to perform a showroom for the male body of the baby Jesus, the gender codes of dressing and body postures of the Virgin and the conceptualisation of a God/Christ who embodies a male divinity’s behaviour.
o The Gospel family is a simulation in two acts, or an artifice which partakes of two orders closely related, sexual and economic. It is not a stable product, and has not produced one definitive simulation model of the family in history, but the primordial family simulacra has that which Baudrillard called ‘the dream-like quality’ (Gane 1993:67) which has been addressing and impacting on everyday life through the influence of Christianity
o The fact that the Gospel family is the location of the primal site of women’s disappearance and abortion in Christianity. If it is a man/messiah who is born, this means, in the divine economy, that a woman/messiah is not born; she has been excluded from being born. It is the Virgin Mary (a theological construct) and not a woman who becomes mother. Woman-mother and child, and Holy Family in general are concepts bound to a sacrificial theology. A woman does not become pregnant and give birth, but an illusory virgin has t

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Althaus-Reid’s work here is a phenomenal critique of Christianity’s predominant heteronormative patriarchal traditions and ways of thinking/life. Really well done from a genuinely concrete materialist frame, using figures like Butler, Derrida, D&G and many others (especially figures within postcolonial and queer theory/theology). A wonderful reminder that there’s so much more to life than the “decency” of hetero Christianity!! This is also a needed critique of the first generation of Liberation theology and its romanticization of the poor and economism. Definitely recommend!

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was an awful book, the worst theology I have ever read (it is less theology and more heresy). Dwight Davis' review (also on Goodreads) is well worth reading. Marcella Althaus-Reid seems more obsessed with scattering sexual innuendo rather than providing substantial thought. She avoids engaging with Scripture or the Christian tradition and dedicates her convoluted tome to defending "indecent" (i.e. non-heteronormative) sexual desires and expressions. A typical sentence reads:

"That Spermatic Word is the word of origins, the word and embodiment of God the Father who produces praxis (actions and thoughts) by a process we may call 'Spermatogenesis'. This Spermatogenesis is the creation of discourses of rationality in the testes (testicles; the place of the divine testimony) of God. From God's testicles, as his divine witnesses, we find a process of auto-dissemination of the Word from which women in Christianity have been excluded. Therefore, God the Father is the scribe of his lonely creational pleasures, for His is the pen/is (Battersby 1989: 50), the power and the glory" (p. 54).

There are much worse lines than these in the book where Althaus-Reid speculates on Christ being a transvestite and God being a faggot. How this was ever published by Routledge is a queer mystery to me. Suddenly the Index Librorum Prohibitorum makes sense...

[John Lussier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Indecent Theology is Marcella's attempt to examine Christian theology through the lenses of queer theory and liberation/feminist theology. Ultimately her reliance on queer theory over rides any Christian theology you might find.

[J.L. Neyhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Context:
Dr. Marcella Altaus-Reid, born in 1952, grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied Liberation Theology during the political conflict in that part of South America in the 1970s as she earned a Bachelor of Theology degree at Instituto Superior Evangelico de Estudios Teologicos (ISEDET) seminary. She also worked in “deprived communities” in Latin America and Britain (4-5). She completed a Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 1994 where she continued focusing on Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, and Queer Theology. Indecent Theology was her first book, published in 2000. At that time she was a Lecturer in Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.

Intended audience:
Altaus-Reid must have intended her audience to be fellow academics or graduate students who are extremely well-educated and well-read, not only in theology in general but in “Sexual Theory (Butler; Sedgwick; Garber), Postcolonial criticism (Fanon, Cabral, Said), Queer studies and theologies (Stuart; Goss; Weeks; Daly), Marxist studies (Laclau and Mouffe; Dussel), Continental Philosophy (Derrida; Deleuze and Guattari; Baudrillard) and Systematic Theology” (7). I have studied literary theory, some philosophy, and lots of theology for many years, and I still struggled to understand everything she was saying!

The main argument:
Altaus-Reid calls this “a book on Sexual Political Theology” and argues that we need to go beyond where the previous Liberation theologies and Feminist theologies had gone, to what she calls “Indecent Theology” (7). She defines Indecent Theology as “a theology which problematises and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppression in Latin America, a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence” (2). She sees traditional norms of “decency and order” as propping up multiple structures of life in her country and continent. She names those structures as “ecclesiological, theological, political and amatory” (2). She says her purpose is not to completely demolish Liberation Theology but to apply the contextual hermeneutical circle of suspicion in-depth, stating that it needs to be a “continuing process of re-contextualisation, a permanent exercise of serious doubting in theology” (5). Therefore she sees her work as a continuation and disruption of Liberation Theology (5). She wants readers to understand that “sexual constructions” are all tied up in political and economic (and theological) agendas so in order to disrupt the hegemonization of theology, we must question what has been considered “sexual normative ideology” (7).

Rating?
I'm not sure what rating to give this on here. I certainly do not agree with her all the time. But this is an important book to read if you are interested in queer theology. So I'm going to rate it more on its importance in the field than on how much I personally liked it. And I'm knocking it down one star because it is so incredibly dense and full of jargon and references that are not usually explained very well, if at all.

[Jocylynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, along with Jim Cone's "A Black Theology of Liberation," is the reason I will probably never agree with the entirety of traditional Christian doctrine.

[Brad Inglis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite only being able to completely understand about 80% of this book, and not fully agreeing with half of that, I would say that this is a must read if you are interested in any sort of liberation/feminist theology. While exploring the intersections of sexuality, indecency and theology, Marcella Althaus-Reid provides a confronting, materialist approach to what is typically a decent, heterosexual area of study. While this book is a challenge, it is a very rewarding read, as the author takes you down the hallway of indecent theology, opening doors, and inviting you to explore. This is a much needed exploration in the 21st century, as the church grapples with its complicity in colonialism, capitalism and the dismissal of the indecent human.

[Ellis Billington · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had to make a list of theologians, living or dead, I’d most like to get a beer (or a cocktail or a coffee) with, Marcella Althaus-Reid would top that list. Her theology is unflinching, provocative, and somehow just as radical today as it was when it was written. (It’s also very dense and academic, but so rewarding if you’re willing to take that on and read it.) This book is such a good reminder to question the agendas implicit in the ways biblical stories are being told to us, and to listen to the stories (the people) that are intentionally left out or looked down upon. It reminds us that liberation is not complete without sexual liberation, that wrapped up in all oppression is sexual oppression. It reminds us to look for revelation in the “indecent”—in ourselves and in God.

[Shabeeh Asim · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was glad to know i wasnt the only one who struggled with the phrasing and the ideas that Althaus-Reid explores. while i do like the way she writes, i feel as if she left many key points and arguments under-baked, as in she did not quite explain them or their relevance enough. nevertheless, i enjoyed this book and do intent on reading more of Althaus-Reid's work. regardless of how i felt about the book, it is a fundamental read for anyone interested in the respective field of liberation theology and/or queer theology.

[Ozy Frantz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. A lot of really interesting ideas and I continue to be interested in sex-positive kinky theology, but this book was written in a very dull and incomprehensible style that made it almost impossible to follow her argument.

[Denise Sudbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third read as I'm working on a dissertation. Every read has been something new.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved reading this, so much meat to chew on, and lots of a-ha moments.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bold, important and provocative book.

[Alli · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always Althaus-Reid is a brilliant liberation theologian and a bizarre queer theologian. I want to love her but she's forever going too far

[Madeleine Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read enough theology to say that this book accomplished something very rare: it makes reading theological writing fun, moving, and extremely compelling all at the same time. She understands the stakes in theological writing. I never want to talk about any kind of Jesus except Bi-Christ ever again.

[Christopher Broadwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going Commando with Theology
Review: Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics, published in 2000, seeks to uncover untouched areas of feminist and queer liberation theologies, while overturning hetero-sexualities and practices at the base of their hetero-narratives. In the introduction, A-R describes the text as a “multidisciplinary approach and drawing on Sexual Theory, Postcolonial criticism, Queer studies and theologies, Marxist Studies, Continental Philosophy and Systematic Theology.” (7). The first of five chapters locates the context of the discussion—the “indecent” lemon vendors of Buenos Aires— to challenge theology and its hetero-Grand Narratives as well as LT. Chapter two “indecents” the ambiguous metaphors in X theology. Theology as a sexual act is erected systematically in chapter three, in a non-Vanilla fashion. Chapter four arouses sexual stories and fetishism, particularly those of marginalized persons, to engage in the hermeneutical circle with theology. The fifth and final chapter analyzes the economy of hetero-theology and patriarchal “Savage” Capitalism.
Analysis: I struggle with calling books academic or inaccessible, yet this text is overwhelmingly both of these things. The reader of this highly provocative and insightful text must be an academic well versed in each of the studies mentioned above in order to successfully follow some of the shockingly indecent proposals that are sometimes unleavened. However, Althaus-Reid does take up quite the task and, for the most part, sheds light on the gaping holes in Savage Theology/ Capitalism. Returning to the introduction, her description of the marginalized voices becomes increasingly helpful in understanding the context of her theology. Engaging in this type of indecenting, what one may call the furthest boundaries of society, is the very work of
theology.

[Joseph Sverker]

This is certainly a critique on instituted Christianity and Western Theology. It is made from a complete queer theory backdrop with a blend of liberation theology, even though that is critiqued heavily as well. There are interesting points in this book and it challenges how one should think about Christianity and oppression in the future. There is more to the poor, than simply being poor. I think the concept of intersectionality fits in well here. I find it somewhat disturbing though how Althaus-Reid so completely embosoms queer theory. Maybe, I'm simply not there yet, but I cannot quite see the legitimacy of some of the queer theory interpretations, specifically with her readings on the Gospels. I don't think I'm prudish, or maybe I'm that too, or I'm so stuck in my heteronormativity, but I wonder if there is such validity in turning heterosexuality to the main culprit of oppression. My impression becomes that queer theory is simply another ideology which you need to either embrace or be cast out as "the Other" or "the heteronormative". I'm certainly leaning more towards Volf's understanding and interpretations on exclusion and embrace. He seem to reach a way forward to inclusion. I don't quite see that here.
When reading this book, and being unable to quite get to grips with it or even understand it, I realized further that I think that it is because the book is so thoroughly Catholic. So many of the questions are (what I felt) uniquely South American and Catholic. I disagree with so much of what she is exemplifying, but for other reasons, that it is difficult to know where I should have my own starting point.
Althaus-Reid certainly takes the bull that is institutional Christendom and Liberation Theology by the horn, but my feeling is that the Catholicism is left untouched?

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phwoar. This is one of those books so loaded with language that you can't really understand what it's saying. Like much of philosophy. But it was also pretty thought-inspiring. I can't think my way into Althaus-Reid's social location--I'm not female, I'm not Argentinian, I'm not bisexual. But I agree with much of what she's saying. And I do think that the Church is bound by a patriarchalism from which it cannot free itself. The welcome that queer folk find in the Church is the same that people of color find--come join us, but please leave your culture at the door; be Hispanic, but act like Germans or Scandinavians; be queer, but act like a shellac-perfect heterosexual. Liberation in Christ means liberation of sexuality too, and a full acknowledgement of our queerness means that even the heterosexuals will be queered, will be able to admit that a colonial sexual ideal is a falsehood, and in doing so, straight people will admit to reality and be liberated too. So while I didn't love the book, I loved the thoughts I had while reading it.

[Andiepants · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rarely do I get hot and bothered reading theology, with the exception of the intellectual turn on that I get from any well written book, but Althaus-Reid had me stimulated from head down. Shit, this woman knows how to write. Some of he theory seemed distanced from the population she claimed to have been writing to - which is an ongoing theme with liberation theologians - but her anecdotes were so headily realistic that you can almost overlook the other problems.

[Meredith Kadet Sanderson]

oh boy oh boy oh boy. I think this will be at my house in a few days.