Liberation Theology and Sexuality

Marcella Althaus-Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351153942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Liberation Theology and Sexuality is a book about 'doing Liberation Theology in Latin America' in the twenty-first century. The style of doing theology remains the same, but this book reflects the work of a new generation of liberation theologians developing a theology that offers a wider and more complex critique of reality, with new perspectives on issues of sexuality, race, gender, culture, globalization and new forms of popular religiosity. Liberation Theology and Sexuality shows how Christianity in Latin America needs to take into account issues concerning sexuality and poverty, together with traditional religiosity and culture when reflecting on the construction of Christian faith and identity in the continent. For the first time, Liberation Theology and Sexuality presents a unique combination of Latin American theologians from more than one generation, reflecting on depth on these issues.

Chapter 1
'Let Them Talk ...!' Doing Liberation Theology from Latin American Closets

Marcella Althaus-Reid

Lambe lambe
Um beijo seu
Revelaçao

Boca a boca
Um beijo seu
A salvaçao

na boca do povo
un beijo seu
revoluçao

Deixa que digam!
E so um beijo
De homen com homem
Mulher com mulher
Um beijo qualquer.¹

Nancy Cardoso Pereira

(1998: 116)

In Santiago de Chile in 1992, a group of people marched in the streets of the capital city, to demonstrate against the violation of human rights and the atrocities of the Pinochet regime, which left the country with thousands of murdered and disappeared. Inspired by the Informe de Verdad y Reconciliation² (the Chilean Document on Truth and Reconciliation), a group of transvestites, homosexuals, bisexuals and lesbians decided to take the streets of Santiago by storm, to show their solidarity with current human rights organizations. They also wanted to demonstrate the links between a homophobic society and a repressive military one. The march was organized by Chilean citizens and socio-sexual activists, denouncing a terrorist state, while at the same time proclaiming the need for a democracy based on participation and respect for human life in its political, religious, racial and sexual diversity. However, according to press reports from the time, the demonstration received little sympathy from human rights activists in general. Señora Sola Sierra, founder of the Agrupacion de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (Association of Relatives from Detained-Disappeared People in Chile) was aghast at the 'bunch of faggots' in the streets (Núñez Gonzalez 2004: 23).³ She considered that a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transvestite group of people demonstrating for human rights belittled and ridiculed the political struggle of the mothers of the disappeared. Thus part of a published letter written by the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel recalling the occasion reads as follows:

... the bunch of faggots (ramillete de locas) in the procession had full make up on their faces and used all their finery as if the occasion was a carnival. All the poof art folk were there, parading in La Alameda, and shouting 'Justice! Justice! We want justice!' ... Next day, all the newspapers gave plenty space to the homosexual [sic] march, which, with their scandalous behaviour, only helped to obscure the denunciation against [state crimes committed with] impunity.

(Núñez Gonzalez 2004: 26)

It is somehow paradoxical and revealing to find that the name that Lemebel gave to the 'bunch of faggots' in Spanish is a ramillete de locas. 'Ramillete' means a small bunch of flowers; 'locas' means 'mad women' but also is an adjective given to sexually deviant people, including women and gays transgressing gender and sexual codes. For instance, in Argentina during the dictatorial regime which also cost us at least 30,000 disappeared, locas was the name of ridicule given to the Mother of the Disappeared by the press of the regime. The paradox involved in the use of the term locas both for queers as for the mothers of Plaza de Mayo thus becomes clear. As the gay, lesbian, bi and transvestite movements in Chile started to organize their political aims, their opponents did not realize that they all faced a surprisingly common struggle. To start with, the regime of the times considered all as deviant. They were abnormal, not only politically, but on grounds of gender and sexuality as well as religiously. They stood up to challenge the regimes of normality imposed by a criminal state informed by some Christian codes of submissiveness. For a fascist mentality in Latin America imposing tight control on people's lives and thoughts during the Cold War, the difference between a mother as a political activist, thus challenging a gender role, and a transvestite asking for human rights was negligible.

It is sad to realize that there was little solidarity between political activists and socio-sexual activists at the time. Perhaps the only solidarity experienced was achieved in the midst of common suffering and persecution because, after all, heterosexuals and queers died together in the jails of the dictatorial regimes of Chile, Uruguay or Argentina.

However, there was also little solidarity on the part of the militant churches, informed by Liberation Theology, with the people who lived in fear and suffered persecutions and violence due to their sexual and gender options. The brutal military regimes of the 1970s were profoundly heterosexual regimes. That was manifested in their organization and expectations of what elsewhere I have called 'decency': a 'Christian way of life' manifested by the length of women's skirts, approved haircuts for men, and strict gender codes applied across everyday life. Moreover, many human rights activists, sometimes distinguished religious leaders, were subjected to state campaigns that accused them of 'homosexuality'. This was an attempt to undermine their work in the defence of human rights by linking it to disapproved behaviour and illegal activities. But the question we need to ask must be more specific concerning Liberation Theology. We need to consider how it was possible that a highly sophisticated, critical theology, its characteristic feature being the courage that leads religious and lay people to martyrdom, was never able to consider issues of sexual ideology in theology? I personally do not believe that liberationists were blind to issues of sexual ideology in theology. We need to consider the extent of the skills on which Liberation Theology was based: Ricoeurian and Marxist influences on biblical hermeneutics and an ecclesiology inspired by Freirean thought.

In reality, the answer to our question must be complex. First of all, we need to acknowledge that Liberation Theology does not arise from a homogeneous church or doctrinal body. Varying from country to country, the militant churches were made up of a mixture of Roman Catholic dioceses, historical Protestant churches, and also some Pentecostals and Evangelical churches such as the Baptists, particularly in Nicaragua.⁴ The Pentecostal Church of God of Buenos Aires, a church informed by issues of social justice, was part of the original group of churches that founded the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) in 1982. Therefore, the various militant churches came from organizations with very different sexual and gender codes, as well as different traditions of political participation. For instance, some militant churches, such as the Church of God, did not ordain women, while a church with a long tradition of women's ministerial equality and social action, such as the Salvation Army, abstained from involvement in any form of political theological praxis.

In general, all theological reflection on sexuality and gender, during the early years of Liberation Theology, were done in private. Liberationists were too sophisticated to ignore these issues and, as I shall claim later, there may have been an underground sexual theology in the making. Even the argument that gender and sexuality were ignored because Liberation Theology was done by mostly male, celibate priests, who as a group are notorious for their sexual conflicts, does not make sense. It has been suggested that in Liberation Theology people's issues sooner or later became the focus of theological reflection. One can be tempted to think that the conflicts over celibacy and homosexual desire amongst the priests should have been addressed with the same theological honesty that was required of political reflection.

But what about the people in base communities, for instance? Even if the first generation of (male, celibate priest) theologians did not take those issues on board, people in the communities may have done so. That may be true in an idealized understanding of how theologies perform, and specifically Liberation Theology. Common people do not have ecclesiastical power. They are not the ones required to rethink the organization of their dioceses or parishes, or approve the theological programmes to be taught in Latin American universities or seminaries. They do not publish books or have space in the media. To unveil political or sexual ideologies in church and theology requires some power, or alliances of power, to be in place. The natural alliance of power should have been with the existent movements defending gays and poor transvestites forced into prostitution and persecuted by the state, but that did not happen. Freire should perhaps have said that for change to come about these issues had to become part of the formation of new priests and ministers, and the ministry needed to be opened up to people of different genders and sexualities.

Sexuality and Liberationists: Some Arguments

To reflect on the main issues arising from the historical silence of Liberation Theology on sexuality, we must address a few foundational issues. Briefly, we need to consider the following points, which should have been part of the Latin American hermeneutical circle:

1. Issues concerning a post-colonial reflection on indigenous sexual and economic cultures. There was a lack of reflection on the process of church formation and the sexual evangelization of the Latin American people, and how this related to the economic disorganization of the existing efficient agricultural structures.
2. The early influence of the work of Enrique Dussel, a distinguished Marxist theologian and philosopher of liberation, who homologized capitalist desire with gay desire. The hermeneutical work of J. Severino Croatto on original sin was connected with Dussel's homophobia.
3. Finally, the development of a type of feminist Liberation Theology which was complementary and did not question the ideological formation of sexuality. The development of Mariology (and Mariology of Liberation) may be related to this.

Evangelization and Sexuality in the Americas

One of the causes of the public theological indifference to issues of sexuality in Liberation Theology was a serious lack of post-colonial analysis. Liberationists did not research or reflect in any depth on the sexual indoctrination which accompanied the so-called evangelization of Latin America. There is a wealth of archival material and studies in this area, especially on issues of sexuality and the (hetero)sexual indoctrination relating to the Jesuits in Latin America.⁵ These studies include issues of the sexual imposition of the new power structure of the Americas made by Conquistadores and priests, for example in the work done by the Paraguayan theologian Graciela Chamorro. There has also been specific work done on issues of the legislation of marriage and education according to the sexual laws of colonial Latin America. Moreover, there are testimonies of indigenous people who fiercely struggled against diverse issues such as Christian prohibitions on marrying certain members of a family, or monogamy, or marriage itself.

It has been part of the paradox of Liberation Theology in Latin America that it could not recognize the need to extend the analysis of the formation of ideological apparatuses beyond the field of political economy into wider cultural impositions in church and theology. However, love and affectivity as emotional exchanges occur under frames of ideological construction. The hegemonic absolutization of Western heterosexual manifestations of love in Latin American society (such as the legal status of Western marriage) is highly institutionalized. This goes beyond personal and individual expressions of love, for it includes also, apart from the traditional theological discourses, the formation, organization and expectations of Christian institutions, where love is the point of all convergence of the churches' praxis. Christianity in Latin America has been a sexual enterprise: it de-legitimized public structures and interfered in the domestic spaces of affectionate exchanges. Missionaries used linguistic strategies to enforce their own sexual theologies onto the natives, for instance the concepts of a fallen nature in women after Eve's sin, the idea of women as sexual temptresses, and the representation of a virtuous heterosexual masculinity as Christian.

Graciela Chamorro, in her original book Teología Guaraní (2002), has specifically reflected on the construction of womanhood and manhood amongst the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, particularly the work of translation by Ruiz de Montoya, the creator of the Guaraní-Spanish lexicon, which was systematized in dictionaries, grammar books and catechisms (Chamorro 2002: 31). According to Chamorro, there is a strong (hetero)sexual European matrix in the reconceptualization of the original Guaraní words for 'man' and 'woman'. Montoya resignified the original indigenous concepts by introducing a qualification of woman as bad, and man as good.⁶ The Guaraní Nation was forced to reconsider their own language with new theological connotations, thus introducing a whole sexist cosmovision into the everyday vocabulary of the Americas. Chamorro points out how a Guaraní expression meaning 'a dishonest man' was translated into Spanish as 'an adulterous man'. The phrase meaning 'to desire a woman' was linguistically deformed to mean 'a woman inciting a man to have a carnal relationship with him'. The pervasiveness and extension of the processes of sexual colonization in Latin America need to be considered as playing a key part in the theological enterprise of the Roman Catholic Church. The post-colonial insecurity of Liberation Theology meant that the liberationists were in denial of their own hermeneutical circle. What happened to the continual assertion that Liberation Theology was to be mediated by social sciences such as anthropology?

Although the theological project can never take us into an ideal return to a pre-colonial Latin America, Liberation Theology needs to reflect on the sexual past of the Church in the continent. The history of the Church in Latin America needs to assume its own sexual responsibility for having produced a symbolic discourse that married divinity to heterosexual structures and systems of power. Moreover, the sexual understanding of the native nations also has important contributions to make to the understanding of exchanges not only of love and divine cosmovisions, but also of labour. Traditional economic institutions such as the Ayni, to mention one, depend on a different idea of affectionate exchanges (Althaus-Reid 2003). Even if Liberation Theology wanted to reflect only on economic issues, it would have been worth paying attention to the understanding of sexuality in the traditions of the Original Nations, today sadly represented by the poorest of the poor in the continent.

Gays and Capitalists: In Search of a Primal Structure of Sin

Early in the 1970s, Enrique Dussel produced a sophisticated political condemnation of non-heterosexuality which gave rise to non-heterosexual desires becoming a part of a theological reflection on structures of sin. Marxist theologians who wanted to condemn sexuality outside structures of heterosexuality reflected not by grounding issues of sexuality, but by producing a theological Marxist discourse. They needed to prove how homosexual affections reproduced political, economic and cultural imperialism. Dussel produced the first liberationist dismissal of non-heterosexual desires, not by condemning homosexuality as part of a petit bourgeois evangelical argument (he is too sophisticated for that), but by devising a political space for sexual criticism. Dussel reflected on sexuality as part of what he called a project of 'erotic liberation'. He presented his ideas in his influential books Para una Etica cle Liberation Latinoamericana (1973) and Filosofía de la Liberation (1977).⁷

Paradoxically, Dussel's argument is interesting and it could have been a pioneering base for a non-heterosexual theology of liberation. In brief, his argument, based on Levinas, is as follows. The origin of any liberative praxis starts always by our confrontation with Otherness. It is in the encounter with the Other that we encounter God and have the opportunity to act morally. This liberative praxis is produced by our openness to an alternative order, characterized by a relation opposite to that expected in a capitalist system. This encounter with the Other is in reality, according to Dussel, a 'dis-order', which establishes the fact that a liberative practice needs to be also an illegal praxis. So Dussel asks, 'Is legality the same as morality?' (Dussel 1973: 76). He answers that while legality means the mere fulfilment of the law, an unjust law that preserves a capitalist order as a caretaker watches over prisoners in a jail, morality means rather the fulfilment of love. He even considers how, in rejecting the idolatrous call of the capitalist system (which he calls 'Totality'), a Christian engaged in a liberative praxis needs to go beyond any order and become part of a chaos or chaotic space which will 'break (oppressive) walls' (Dussel 1973: 73).

Dussel's argument is clear. The capitalist system is characterized by a rejection of alternatives and Otherness. The face of the Other, of the poor and vulnerable in society, is excluded and denied. The Other is reified, reduced to a thing. There is no possibility to accept difference, and that constitutes the idolatrous base of capitalism. A capitalist system (especially, we should add, in the present mode of global expansion) is a project of Sameness, of totalitarian egoism. For Dussel, 'the Other become th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 'Let Them Talk . . .!' Doing Liberation Theology from Latin American Closets
• 2 Once Again Liberating Theology? Towards a Latin American Liberation Theological Self-Criticism
• 3 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Making Over of Liberation Theology, A Queer Discursive Approach
• 4 Oh, Que Sera, Que Sera . . . A Limping A/Theological Thought in Brazil
• 5 Commodity Aesthetics and the Erotics of Relationship: Challenges of Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation to Market Aesthetics
• 6 The Prostitutes Also Go into the Kingdom of God: A Queer Reading of Mary of Magdala
• 7 Liberation Theology, Modernity and Sexual Difference
• 8 Liberating Mary, Liberating the Poor
• 9 Seriously Harmful For Your Health? Religion, Feminism and Sexuality in Latin America
• 10 Worship and the Excluded
• 11 Love in Times of Dictatorships: Memoirs from a Gay Minister from Buenos Aires
• Index