Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative

Intentional Monogamy as a Radical Act: Queer Theology and Re-thinking Christian Sexual Ethics

Written by a queer feminist scholar from the interdisciplinary field of Curriculum Studies, this presentation draws from a messy and provocative bricolage of feminist, queer, and conventional theologies to shape a framework for theorizing sexual ethics. Feminist theologians note the tacit gender politics in theology. Feminist theology has a pragmatic, emancipatory component, working against structures of sexism and oppression supported by theological traditions and practices. Queer theologians Isherwood and Althaus-Reid situate queer theology ultimately as political. Queer theology, they write, “takes seriously the queer project of deconstructing heterosexual epistemology and presuppositions in theology, but also unveiling the different, the suppressed face of God amidst it” (p. 5). It is, they declare, “an incarnated body theology…”(p. 5). Both, it is important to note, are fields of study that call for relation-centered ethics. A queer feminist theology is one of participation and engagement, concerned with new ethics of relation in the search for the “earthly, messy, and partial divine” (2004, p. 6). The author works within this framework to employ a relational ethics of radical love that queerly disrupts heteronormative, homonormative notions of Christian sexual ethics in a discussion of what she terms intentional monogamy.