Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought

Anthony B. Pinn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814767795
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Black theology tends to be a theology about no-body. Though one might assume that black and womanist theology have already given significant attention to the nature and meaning of black bodies as a theological issue, this inquiry has primarily taken the form of a focus on issues relating to liberation, treating the body in abstract terms rather than focusing on the experiencing of a material, fleshy reality. By focusing on the body as a physical entity and not just a metaphorical one, Pinn offers a new approach to theological thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.

According to Pinn, the body is of profound theological importance. In this first text on black theology to take embodiment as its starting point and its goal, Pinn interrogates the traditional source materials for black theology, such as spirituals and slave narratives, seeking to link them to materials such as photography that highlight the theological importance of the body. Employing a multidisciplinary approach spanning from the sociology of the body and philosophy to anthropology and art history, Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought pushes black theology to the next level.

Part 1

Body Construction

1
Theological Posturing

The modern world focused a new type of attention on the difference of bodies, and created a hierarchy of bodies that gave felt or lived meaning to aesthetics.¹ Enslaved Africans and their descents as victims of this discursive arrangement sought and continue to seek (in that the process is ongoing and always unfinished) to transform this discourse by turning it on its head and by gaining new visibility and new spaces of life for their natural bodies. The materiality of the body, both the individual body and the collective body, became a venue for struggle against the damning effects of language and modalities of knowledge.

While institutions and discourse place certain restrictions on particular groupings of bodies, forcing them to be perceived in relationship to the restrictive arrangements (e.g., stigmas) of the recognized social order,² resistance or struggle involves the very effort to expose and undo this coercion within the social context of everyday patterns and practices. Thus, according to Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson, “everyday life is therefore fundamentally about the production and reproduction of bodies.”³

Effort to reconstitute the body does not produce a unified self and no single “truth” upon which to rely. As the body is really bodies plural, the relationship between the body and the self must also mean multiple selves; therefore multiple ways of viewing the world and the demands for justice placed on the world. Agency is not lost, nor is the desire for transformation diluted. Rather, this recognized need to challenge everything changes black theology—stripping away its certainties and its rather flat depiction of the history of struggle—but it does not destroy the ability to do theology. It is simply the case that embodiment must mean a new kind of theological posture.⁴

I found useful insights for such a theological posture in a newspaper article read some years ago. The February 28, 2003, issue of the Minneapolis Star Tribune contained a story titled “Modern and Muslim” describing the “Scheherazade: Risking the Passage” show in which Muslim women used their artistic creativity to explore the intersections between personal faith, culture, and world developments. Of particular interest, because of its controversial nature, was the photo exhibit by Lalla Essaydi.

The context for one of Essaydi’s photographs is a “‘House of Obedience’ belonging to Essaydi’s family in Morocco.” This refers to the place where women are imprisoned for “extended periods, apparently to compel repentance after they’ve broken an Islamic custom.” This “space,” as Foucault might note, is meant to individualize (as problematic), manipulate, reconceive, and reconstitute the body as docile. Within the context of this confinement or discipline, the practices and movements of the body are defined and surveyed. Bodies enter that space through a discourse of knowledge depicting them as “sinner” or “disobedient,” and they are to exist supple and easily controlled. These houses are local points of power, offering specific examples of force—a type of “spectacle.” Within this space of confinement, the body “is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions.”⁵

While physical pain may not be the primary mode of punishment with respect to the discursive body that concerns Foucault, the physical body is also present within that confinement. The bodies entering or displayed in these “houses of obedience” are also material; they are physical beings that experience pain, suffering, and demoralization in order to control the manner in which they respond to traditional authority. In short, within these spaces of confinement, bodies—discursive and material—are trained to accept the “truth” of the structures and institutions defining and guiding their discipline and punishment. Hence, punishment within the houses of confinement might entail privation of movement as a form of discomfort or suffering. Pain is an unavoidable dimension of confinement.⁶ The point in either case, in this context of punishment as religious process, is not to destroy but rather subdue the body, to determine how the body occupies time and space and what the body does within time and space. Both the symbolic and the expressed dimensions of the body are captured through punishment. As Foucault notes, “it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.”⁷ Confinement in this case is meant to produce discursive bodies marked by the “truth” of the socioreligious arrangement of society, and material bodies equipped and willing to work for the safeguarding of these power relationships.

Punishment must be perceived, through the mechanisms of implementation, as natural, as “right,” and beneficial.⁸ In a certain way, this punishment is meant to produce a “soul”—a modality or residue of power over the body represented through habits/behaviors that is present “around, on, within the body by the functioning of power that is exercised on those punished … born … rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.” The “house of obedience” forges within and on those women punished a mechanism facilitating surveillance and ongoing confinement. Through the soul (being fine tuned as necessary), punishment reaches beyond the particular moment and gains a more lasting and more embedded control over the body.⁹ These disciplined bodies were to teach lessons to those within the social body, and these lessons revolved around issues of placement and practice with respect to religion, gender, and politics.

Essaydi “persuaded Moroccan women friends to pose for her in that beautiful prison. Naked, their bodies are painted.”¹⁰ This presentation would be interesting but less confrontational if it involved an arrangement of colors and designs, but instead the artist clothed the bodies in “lacy calligraphy that includes floral designs and quotations from the Qur’an.”¹¹ This was considered an outrage in that calligraphy “is a sacred Islamic art forbidden to women,” and “by literally robbing themselves in the words of the Qur’an, the women are both submitting to and violating Muslim strictures.”¹² There is a certain type of defiance at work in this picture, a signifying of power relationships, a layering of “texts,” through a presentation of the body as resilient against efforts to inscribe it. The body as symbol of the religious system is exposed as such, but the visibility of the marked body also points out the fragile nature of religious discipline in that it raises the question of necessity: Must this situation be? Against the purposes of the “House of Obedience,” women turn themselves into subjects in that they work on their bodies and shape their conduct as individuals but within the context of others, and in this way they secure a measure of contentment not intended for them.¹³ One might suggest that their presentation as text-within-text, within materiality, exposes the “made” nature of power regulations and suggest an increased range of life opportunities. Or, to borrow Foucault’s wording in Technologies of the Self, people “are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.”¹⁴ Without the intent of a theodical argument, there are ways in which the (re)presentation of these women as embodied and defiant exposes “houses of obedience” as somewhat arbitrary and open to historical manipulation. Molding of the body through discipline is replaced by an aesthetic construction of the body. Fractures in social arrangements and religious knowledge occur as a result. The former, molding through discipline, involves techniques/principles (for Foucault an “art”) of obedience and the latter techniques/principles of disruption. Both are intentional modalities of thinking and behaving. Punishment is meant to mark the body in ways enabling control over it; however, these particular bodies displayed in the image are marked in ways that challenge socioreligious and political obligation and control. They signify subjection by bringing into view and question efforts to normalize certain mechanism of individualization and social existence. Claiming their bodies, they fight tendencies to have their bodies conspire against them. In this respect the body is political.

Both the discursive body and the physical body can participate in this challenge to the framing of power in that they are each the target of discipline. Yet, these bodies do not resist in ways that remove them from power relations and outside the reach of knowledge, beyond the view of society; but their working against or refusal to comply with power through changes to their bodies (e.g., nude and covered with sacred text) does involve recognition of the “self.”¹⁵ By their creative disregard of power, they “become.” Nonetheless, even this subjectivity, this self, must be interrogated in that it resided within and not outside power relations. What is more, this subjectivity is not unknown but stems from choices present within the discourse of knowledge framing the social body. Self-government through this act of resistance is limited. If this reach toward self is meant as a lasting strike against gender-based discrimination or against religious oppression, it fails to root out fully these discourses. This turn toward the self cannot be understood as the attainment of an alternate but unified truth about the self that is lodged in the body.¹⁶ One must neither make too much, nor too little of creative disregard in that bodies are double-faced, they are “both sacred and profane, purity and danger, order and chaos.”¹⁷

The challenge to socioreligious regulation and knowledge found in these embodied women fractures the assumption of necessity behind spaces of docility; it urges the construction of “spaces of freedom” despite efforts to write and subdue these same bodies. It is possible to further suggest that the “secrecy” or obedience intended is exposed and challenged.¹⁸ The “technologies of power” represented by these houses of obedience are signified through manipulation of other technologies—of production, sign systems, and the self—for work against prevailing knowledge-power discourses.¹⁹ Stigmatized (by gender) bodies, to borrow Erving Goffman’s language, are transformed through an altered meaning for their embodiment; they are not presented as failed or sinful. They do not view themselves as “discredited” in that the marks on their “natural,” naked bodies are not signs of abomination but instead are the language of beauty. An altered aesthetic transforms their bodies into something visible for their beauty, their happiness. Social identity is challenged and interrogated to the extent it does not fit this new self-identity.²⁰ If “obedience is a sacrifice of the self,” this image suggests a break with the demands of certain power relations through recognition of these very relations as open to shifts and changes.²¹

The body may be culturally framed and formed, but the body is also material realities and never fully controlled. It is the reality of this physical body that gives this challenge to authority its political weight and importance. Power and knowledge (working together) allow the body to be present physically and known, but it is known in a certain way: Gender is a real issue to address because the bodies within Essaydi’s photograph are material bodies experiencing the dynamics of gender discourse, feeling the discomfort and limitations involved. The problematic of agency and control is in play here to the extent this effort at discipline and presentation of the body is focused on the material body.

Of Disobedient Bodies

I find the content of Essaydi’s artistic statement intriguing, in part because of the theological paradigm implied by the form of expression used.²² I suggest Essaydi affirms creative disregard—what might be described as a photographic challenge to staid notions of the body and its proper construction and meaning—as an important source of transformation: it serves to reconfigure societal margins or boundaries using the despised to reshape the language and grammar of beauty in terms of both body and “soul.” Creative disregard means, in this context, those attitudes and sensibilities that run contrary to the normative workings of societal arrangements/regulations and are therefore considered problematic because they question what discourses of power and restrictions on life practices are meant to enforce. By “unacceptable” presentation, creative disregard as process and posture challenges the construction of the body as metaphor for the social system and the denied importance and place of the body as material.²³ This sense of disregard involves a re-presentation of the complex body in ways that allow for alternate life meaning(s).

Attention to body aesthetics and the look of the body has implications that are far ranging. Because the display of the body either affirms or challenges cultural arrangements and assumptions affecting both the individual and the group, decoration or alteration is never a merely superficial and personal development. If the philosopher Terence Turner is correct, the decorating of these bodies with sacred texts exposes and brings into play both the individual physical body and the social body—both open to interrogation in that “the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated no only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well.” What is more, Turner continues, “the surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment … becomes the language through which it is expressed.”²⁴ The body becomes artistic, an aesthetic framing of meaning in the form of a work of art. Hence, adornment, in this case through the body inscribed with verse, is no small matter. This is a double “reading” in that the photographic image is to be read and the body containing verse must also be read.

Altered body images challenge normalized images of these women’s bodies that seek to reify stigmatized and oppressive life schemes meant to house controlled and docile bodies. The body “redrawn” alters perceived and felt identity, and challenges (although also representing) societal interests.²⁵ Something of fundamental importance is involved in this adornment of the body with the written words of a holy text: the body is given a new ordering that in this instance (perhaps more than in others) connects it to perception of and a discourse on a more stable beauty and wholeness.²⁶ Adornment, hence, gives the body visibility and importance not intended by the mechanisms of punishment.

Furthermore, there are ways in which one might consider the action of this artistic presentation a strike against the assumed authority of a particular discourse of beauty and merit through which women “act” on themselves, (re)present themselves as something other than “sinners” in opposition to traditional power relationships (authority) vis-à-vis religion, and in the process become subjects. Power is stretched thin: The “house of obedience” does not produce docile bodies as intended; obedience does not become solidified as the shape of socioreligious relationships. Defiance in the context of this presentation of women as embodied and as texts over against certain modalities/forms of authority involves an alternate morality and ethic premised upon intentional “practices of freedom,” which recognize the plastic nature of the self and the dynamics of power relationships from within which one labors for life.²⁷ Essaydi’s work entails an act of defiance, a creative disregard, not the final dissolution of all power relationships, but hopefully the development of new, local power relationships that offer alternate “truths” in response to a socioreligious and political issue. There is, then, an always and ongoing process of construction and deconstruction.²⁸

While the implications of gender in this practice of...