Church debates and the politics of identity
by Mary McClintock Fulkerson

Debates on the full participation by gay and lesbian persons in the life of the church matter very much to feminist theologians. The feminist vision of God's realm has at its center resistance to relations of domination, whether they be in the form of heterosexism or misogyny. A wealth of lesbian feminist theologies have explored this vision in concrete ways, lifting up the rich biblical and theological imagery for a progressive stance on sexuality and offering powerful interpretations of the meaning of Christian love through their writings about women loving women. But the discourse of biblical and sexual justice may not be the only place to put our energies. Nor is the endless back and forth on what Scripture says on the subject. What is striking about the terms of the ecclesiastical debate is not the differences between the opposing positions -- as acrimonious as they sometimes become -- but the assumptions shared by both those who would have an inclusive church and those who would not.

Questioning sexed identity
Ostensibly, it is the disagreements that stand out in ecclesiastical debates. They cluster most vociferously around different uses and understandings of Scripture, but also in discussions of what causes homosexual identity. This latter concern plays a major role in determining whether full inclusion into the "status" of other baptized members is possible. The bottom line is whether one's sexual identity as non-heterosexual is affirmed by God or not.
What both sides share in this debate is an understanding of sexual identity which comes from modernist therapeutic and scientific discourses. Both those who refuse gay and lesbian persons and those who insist upon their inclusion in the life of the church share the idea that persons have corresponding sexual identity and sexual preference and that this identity, for good or ill, is an absolutely fundamental reality. It is just this idea of sexed identity, however, that feminist theorists outside of the church and its theological conversations are calling into question. At the same time that gays and lesbians are pressing for full consideration in mainline church denominations, feminists are questioning the stable identities that are assumed by a "politics of inclusion/exclusion."
Feminist theory has long raised the question of the construction of gender and separated it out from the categories "sex" and "woman." Sex is the category for anatomical differentiation of bodies. Thus there are female bodies which are women and male bodies which are men. Gender is a category which has helped identify the way in which the definitions of "masculinity" and "femininity," the features which define men and women beyond their bodies, are social constructions. Gender explorations inquire into the use of these definitions to stereotype and limit the possibilities of male and female "subjects" or persons. As Simone DeBeauvoir claimed, "One is not born a woman."
When gender is opposed to the category of sex, it construes the sexed body as a "given." Although feminist theory and theology typically rely upon the sexed-body "woman" as the starting point for theoretical reflection upon liberation, "post-structuralist" feminists argue that such gendered categories are organized by current power arrangements. The assumption that sex refers to "natural" realities for which we do not need analyses may work fine on the level of everyday interaction. Analytically, however, the binary division of bodies into anatomical men and women has the potential of all naturalized categories. It can support oppressive (gender) relationships. As long as subjects are viewed as sexed (male and female) prior to the considerations of power relationships, some notion of gender is operative. What even DeBeauvoir failed to recognize was that "sex" as well as gender is something one becomes -- or is done to one.

'No doer prior to the deed'
Judith Butler takes on the daunting task of attacking the "woman" subject of feminist theology (and, by implication, of all theology) from a poststructuralist position. Nietzsche was right, she says: There is "no doer prior to the deed." Informed by Foucault's archeology of the sexualized subject, she shows that a notion of the interior self plus a Freudian discourse of identity results in sexed subjects. Defining oneself as having some essential, internal, identity for which the primary feature is one's gendered, sexual desire is a peculiar development of modern discourses, argues Foucault, one which occurs with the medicalization of scientific discourse.
Foucault's work shows that the pair sex/sexuality has a history. It is not a fixed, unchanging natural feature of human being. Since the 19th century, says another historian of sexuality, the West has treated sex -- our gendered desire -- as "the 'truth' of our being [which] defines us socially and morally; its release or proper functioning can be a factor in health, energy, activity; its frustration is a cause of ill health, social unorthodoxy, even madness." One might compare this view with the medieval corporate "subject" who lacks a separate individual identity and is defined by his/her relationship to the community and place in the divine ordering of things. By contrast, the modern subject is an autonomous self, an entity unto him/herself. As such, s/he is defined fundamentally by her identity. The peculiarly modern move is not only individualist, but identifies sexuality as the central explanatory principle in human subjects -- sexuality is the desire that emerges from being male or being female. This way of identifying human subjecthood or personhood produces the notion that one's sex/gender coincides with one's essential self. As Jeffrey Weeks puts it, sex becomes "the supreme secret (the 'mystery of sex') and the general substratum of our existence."

Body, gender and desire
This anatomy of the modern sexed subject exposes a relationship of reciprocity between body, gender and desire. Desire expresses gender; gender expresses desire; and one might even say that sex and gender are collapsed -- sex is gendered. Butler says that the "metaphysical unity of the three is assumed to be truly known and expressed in a differentiating desire for an oppositional gender -- that is, in a form of oppositional heterosexuality." The clarity of gender identity is discerned by one's difference from the other, opposing, gender. "Woman" has no meaning except as that which is not man. The modernity of this concern with the binary oppositional "sex" of the subject's proper object contrasts with ancient societies in which the class of the partner, not the gender, was the significant issue.
Foucault's account of Herculine Barbin helps Butler confound the modern sexualized subject in a graphic way. Foucault's description of this 19th-century hermaphrodite is a gripping display of the case that sex is not the inner truth of a subject, her/his "intractable depth and inner substance," but a construction of bodies, various pleasures and affectivities and body parts; s/he is legally defined as female at points early in his/her life, and legally a male later on. His/her journals provide access to Herculine's pleasures, which defy easy categorization. Butler points out that the temptation to explain his/her desire for girls by appeal to the "male" parts of her anatomy (and vice versa), is confuted by his/her body, which refuses to be unified. The very temptation to unify this person as a sexual subject is a display of the normalizing heterosexual regime of knowledge/power that "we" bring to his/her body. If we are to take Herculine seriously without "explaining" him/her with the discourse of pathology or subhumanity, we must question the notion that desire is "caused" by an essentially unified gendered body. It is just this configuration -- the metaphysical threesome of sex, gender, desire -- that keeps the man-woman binary in place.

Power
Recognition of the force of this threesome introduces a third feature of Butler's analysis: power. The unintelligibility of the figure of Herculine is not the result of his/her essential unintelligibility. It is the effect of a particular regime of truth about subjects -- not a natural fact. A regime of truth is the set of rules that define the "sayable in any particular social order." It determines what kinds of statements and inquiries will be taken seriously. The regulating regime at stake here is compulsory heterosexuality, and it defines the truth about subjects. As a dominant ordering of reality, compulsory heterosexuality regulates pleasure and bodies; it cuts up reality into two human identities and defines their legitimate and illegitimate experiences. This regulating of identities means that certain kinds of identity simply cannot exist -- "Those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not 'follow' from either sex or gender." The normalized relating of the threesome, sex, gender and desire, is predicated upon heterosexual difference. Object choice is defined in relation to the sexed body; desire is channeled and defined by the sexes it connects; and those sexes are two -- male and female. Any thinking about desire and human relations is locked into this grid; any subject which does not conform is disciplined.

Feminism without women?
Butler's destabilizing of fixed sexed identity does not have to eliminate feminist practices or support anti-feminist politics, but it can make more evident the problems with identity politics. Butler's is a challenge to the dominations that are effected by a set of rules operative about sexual identity, its relation to desire and the assumption that there are two kinds of subjects. The problem with "the identity woman" is its propensity to reinforce the notion that what is true about a subject is her/his gender and, thereby, contribute to the hegemonic effects of a set of definitions that legislate compulsory heterosexuality.
Feminist politics is about resisting dominations based upon gender. Secular and theological feminisms habitually include resisting dominations of race, class and sexual preference as well. Feminists have discovered from the voices of womanists, Mujeristas, Asian and African women, that we assume women are in some sense "the same" only at our peril. Butler challenges us to ask even more difficult questions about the construction of identity and the work it might do.
If we would resist the dominant sexual arrangements of heterosexism and sexism, we must take seriously the instability of all identities. Butler's call is to resist the implicit notion of "real woman" that continues to define the heterosexual regime. As long as the internal "truth" of our identities is given by the regime of binary sex, then the problems identified with the constructed nature of gender have not been totally resolved. She asks us to forgo the belief that being a "woman" is a natural identity, that it is the inner truth about subjects, because that discourse deploys other hegemonic discourses that lock the lesbian and the homosexual as forever wrong, distorted, and deviant in their desire and practice. If we take Butler seriously, we see that the lesbian is no more a "real woman" than is the heterosexual "woman." Their dependence upon these identities often reinforces the heterosexual regime and its assumption that the deepest thing that can be said about our identities is our "sex." The category that merits elimination, in short, is the notion of "real." Our "real" identities are only problematically identified with any fixed feature, not the least of which is our maleness/femaleness.
Destabilizing of the notion of a "real woman" is a move which should not be confused with getting rid of projects which resist specific forms of domination. It is important, however, to recognize the limits of resistance, which do not rule out change but point us toward a different politics than one which relies upon transcendental acts. The clue for gender resistance comes from the unstable social relations of heterosexuality: Women/men are not "natural" and fixed entities. They exist not by ontological truth but by virtue of "repetition" and difference. If we would subvert such identities, we must destabilize the acts that produce them. Through a patient process of denaturalization we can expose the fallible, constructed nature of the thing. Since the target is the notion that heterosexuality is the "original," the response must be a "copy" that calls the feigned original into question. The new category Butler offers for such subversive acts is gender parody.

Gender as performance
Parody, or mimicry with a twist, aims at displacing the reproduction of the difference -- man/woman -- and is thus directed at the heterosexually-defined boundaries on bodies. This subversion is clearly not accomplished by the idea that the subject's true nature as female or as lesbian is expressed in her emancipatory acts, a version of the notion that one's inner true self is expressed in one's behavior. Neither is this a turn to what is "real" or really true about women, namely, the body. Parody is a subversion of the surface body or the gendered body as it presents itself as male or female. The body, like the subject's sense of self, is always socially coded. Butler's alternative form of resistance proffers an image that moves us out of the identity categories which continue to legitimate and naturalize femininity. If parody is the alternative to invoking the real, it is also a new definition of gender. Subversive acts of parody which contest compulsory heterosexuality categorize gender as performance.
When gender is defined as performance, it can no longer be viewed as the "inner truth" of one's being. As parody, gender refuses the real. Gender is a corporeal style; it is acts, gestures, and enactments which invoke and construct meanings available in the culture, rather than representing or expressing the truth of one's inner sexual self. The mix of styles in punk culture is suggestive of gender performance; drag and cross-dressing; butch and femme styles among lesbians are the more productive examples of parodic gender performance. When I perform a kind of woman, I am invoking a host of cultural signs which reproduce my gender identity. As long as my bodily display is recognizably "female," its difference is with dominant constructions of "male," and my performance makes no gender trouble. It simply repeats the dominant codes. Resistance to oppressive power regimes cannot happen with repetition of the binary codes for gender, but it cannot occur outside of the available codes. That is why resistance requires parody of this order. Drag, cross-dressing and butch/femme lesbians are exemplary of subversive parody because they set up contradictions between the presumed anatomy, the gender prescribed by social code and the gender being performed. The dissonances between the anatomical body, the culturally defined gender, and the bodily display signify decentering challenges to the "real identity" of the performer. They signify parodically with the compulsory cultural system of binary sex.

Addressing liberal/conservative agreement, not disagreements
In light of Butler's critique, it is not the disagreements but the discourse shared by liberal and conservative theological positions on homosexuality (namely, that persons are sexed objects) that needs to be addressed. Even though the progressive inclusionary positions eschew the conservatives' discourse about natural orders for sexuality and sexual desire and refuse to treat biblical texts as divine prescriptions, they share the modern discourse of sexuality as a phenomenon "deeply rooted in a personality structure," as a Presbyterian document puts it. And they share the convergence of binary (male and female) genders with that of sexuality. Both pro and con invoke a sexual preference: Sexuality is something that persons have as an orientation. Sexuality is "our way of being in the world as embodied selves, male and female." Where they differ, of course, is whether it is acceptable to be the kind of person whose preference is for the same gender/sex.
What is troubling about this shared territory is the assumption of both positions that sexual identity is fundamental to a person's being, and that there are two kinds of sexual persons: heterosexual and homosexual. Although that does not lead to the same views of the relation between one's sex and one's desire, since the progressives are free to wonder if sexual orientation is fixed, the frame still assumes that anatomical sex and gender coincide in two types of subject, allowing for desire itself to be defined by difference. The definition of desire on this heterosexual grid means that even the progressive position damns with faint praise the very subjects it wishes to liberate. As always the phenomenon that must be explained is not sexuality in all its complexities, but the veering off of a subject's desire from its proper binary opposite to its mirror image: The search is for the causes of homosexuality, never the causes of heterosexuality.
As a consequence, the only target attacked by progressive positions is homophobia. The goal is equality -- achievement of justice by the inclusion of gays and lesbians. I admit that this is no small target; the difference between progressives and conservatives is a crucial one, and the strategies necessary to dislodging heterosexual dominance are necessarily multiple. However, this discourse of equality does reproduce the heterosexual frame of sexed subjects. Progressive church positions have yet to become a challenge to heterosexuality as the "real." (The Presbyterian version specifically distances its inclusionary vision from cross-dressers and drag.)

Seeking an alternative to the theology of inclusion
The discourse of inclusion of lesbian and gay persons -- of the goodness of non-heterosexual subjects as creatures -- does some important work: It names as good what has been branded inherently sinful in church traditions. This discourse, however, does not expose the constructed and unstable nature of all sexual configurations. If identity is the effect of a regime of power, then homophobia is not the only problem. Reproduction of heterosexuality has produced the illusion that subjects are constituted by a real, sexed essence which is naturally or unnaturally expressed by practice. Given the strength of that construction, and the productive as well as juridical nature of power, the only way to contest compulsory heterosexuality is performance of gender that calls the security of that regime into question.
In order to work toward a theological position better suited to challenging contemporary forms of domination than a theology of inclusion, another look needs to be given to feminist reliance upon the fixed subject, woman, as it is habitually invoked. To be sure, there are contexts where appeal to "women's experience" and its validity may be a justifiable strategy to expose the silencing and oppression of women. However, it is not contradictory to feminist practice to conceive of an alternative form of engagement against sexism and heterosexism. That alternative engagement might take seriously the proposal that sexed identity is not an essential given of Christian discourse. This does not prevent us from taking seriously constructions of binary gender in particular situations. My point is that feminist recognition of difference and its use to oppress is not preserved only by practices which accept the notion that differences are fixed essences of subjects. In fact, the obsession with sexual difference as the definitive mark of subjects may be precisely an accommodation to modern cultural discourses. More importantly, it very well may be a modernism that a theological proposal should most strenuously refuse.
One can certainly take issue with my conclusion that Christians are called to challenge the heterosexual as the real. Both the absence and the illegitimacy of a challenge to the heterosexual organizing of our identities and our "normal" sexual identities and objects of desire are defensible on theological and biblical bases. Implicitly, church documents warrant refusals to take up this challenge on the basis of their appeal to biblical traditions that seem to proscribe homosexual behavior. More directly, they appeal to passages from Genesis about the creation of human being as male-female, or the directive to procreate. Theologies of creation make arguments about the God-intended order that rule out of order my challenge to heterosexuality as the "real." However, as defined by Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, David Halperin and Judith Butler, to name a few, the "modern" character of the operative terms in the self-understandings produced by this heterosexual regime should give us pause with regard to the settled character of this issue. Any assumption that our notions of real sexual identity are somehow identical with the categories and world-views of ancient or biblical communities -- if that is our theological authorization -- is simply naive.
A more adequate theological grammar of subjects would wonder about what the Christian gospel has to do with the nature of subjects. How closely tied to the essential vision of a Christian liberationist theology, or any other Christian vision, is a particular cultural code for defining a person? If it is clear that notions of inner sexual identity and the accompanying matrix that routes and normalizes desire from gendered identity are historically constructed, it behooves Christians to ask if these are identical with that which is constitutive of the Gospel. It is not that theology has nothing to say about subjects; a theological doctrine of creatures would define them as imago dei, as finite, good in their creatureliness and finitude, vulnerable to temptation and idolatry, distorted by sin and reliant upon God for redemption. Given the judgment that constructions of subject-identities are themselves subject to the ordering of a theological grammar, we might conclude, however, that definitions of sexuality as well as our behaviors are characterized by fallibility, impermanence and finitude and are not essential to the community's ongoing identity.

Iconoclastic criticism andradical love
This is clearly not to say our identities are not God-given, shaped by a grammar of faithfulness, of dependence upon God, of ecclesially-formed practices of forgiveness, self-love, call to confession, and agape for the stranger. It is to rank prescriptions against idolatry higher than the specific cultural codes -- physiology of desire in the ancient world; psychological, medical, psychiatric, in the modern -- that we are tempted to absolutize in our ethical codes. I appeal, then, to a theological grammar that resists the absolutized notions of sexed identity that support heterosexism.
The Christian community's discourse of fallibility, its beliefs that what is created is finite, partial, subject to error and a candidate for idolatry, come under another ordering in a theological grammar. Iconoclastic criticism in the Christian community is ordered toward a radical love. More specifically, this radical love is displayed in a community whose relations of respect, forgiveness, confession, accountability and agape toward the stranger are made available without conditions. The kerygma of the Christian community displaced the conditions that required one to become a Jew for faithful worship; its good news was that membership in the family of God was open to anyone, that salvation was by grace through faith.
If we follow this theological logic, we see that new conditions have been placed on membership in the community which gathers around Jesus, and they endanger the kerygma. A modern definition of personhood which relies upon sexual identity places conditions upon access to the status of child of God. Radical love is invoked in the community to support a reality where there is neither slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus, a reality defined by a grammar of justification by faith alone. A contemporary version of this grammar can expand its logic, a logic which refuses to put conditions on access to the Gospel, and do that by refusing to require binary gendered identity just as it refuses to require circumcision. This Christian grammar of iconoclasm for the purposes of life is, in short, intrinsically expandable -- even to gendered identity itself. It extends our notion of justification by grace through faith in a new way. It confesses that our conceptions of identity are susceptible not only to the located and limited perspectives of the cultures that produce them, but that we are not saved by making of them requirements for full communion.
If the modern notion of sexualized identity is clearly indefensible as a historically consistent aspect of original and normalized Christian self-understandings -- and I think it is indefensible -- it is no less problematic when viewed as part of the essence of a transformative Christian theological vision. As long as normalizing discourses create heterosexuality as the "real" way that human beings may relate and are undergirded by the notion that the important thing about subjects is their identity as (real) men or (real) women, extension of theologies that focus on including women are not helpfully made to include homosexuals. It may be that inclusionary readings of Scripture are not subverting of oppression and it is time to read Galatians 3:28 with a new literalness, admitting that we are all performing our sex/gender.

Mary McClintock Fulkerson is Associate Professor of Theology at Duke University, <mfulk@mail.duke.edu>. A longer version of this essay appeared in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gary Comstock and Susan Henking, Continuum, 1997. Fine arts photographer Brooks B. Walsh, also our cover artist, works in New York City.