Indecent Teaching: On the Pedagogical Possibilities and Challenges of Marcella Althaus-Reid

Like Alfred North Whitehead remark that western philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,” much of contemporary queer theology may be thought of as a series of footnotes to Marcella Althaus-Reid. And Althaus-Reid does pepper the footnotes of those who have engaged with her, whether explicitly engaged in “queer theology” or not. There are a series of ironies entailed in Althaus-Reid’s ubiquity: the seeming ease granted by excerption of texts not easily summarizable or distillable, the smoothing out of language meant to confound and bedazzle, the making-nice with others that should otherwise be disturbed, and the often decisively unsexy appropriations of her work due to academic conventions and personal limitations (including my own here). The list goes on.

But in this paper, I am interested in reflecting on Althaus-Reid as a (perhaps the) nascent “canonical” figure of queer theology, as her texts as required to be taught to beginners. What happens to the notion of a “canon” (or even minimally, a standard reading list) when Althaus-Reid is a cornerstone of it? And what happens to Althaus-Reid’s work when it is made canonical, however destabilized that notion might be? How does one teach her, and to beginners? 

This paper will consider some of the following insights and challenges from the teaching of Althaus-Reid’s work, as well as others from my current experiments in teaching.

First, Althaus-Reid’s departures, particularly from what beginning readers assume queer theology will mean, provoke productive confusions. The density and irreverence of Althaus-Reid’s writing astonish students, working in its form some of the de-naturalizations that queer theology requires. This is not without its own challenges: the frustrations of students with and tendencies to giving up on difficult texts, the unsettlement of orthodoxies both in content and form, the patience with oneself both as student and teacher, the coming-up-against of that which is precisely most difficult to say aloud.

Althaus-Reid also necessitates experiments in queer failure. I have come to begin my queer theology courses by remarking that we will necessarily fail in our efforts. “God, meanwhile, has also been kept hidden in God’s own closet. Nobody thought about doing theology in gay bars, although gay bars are full of theologians,” Althaus-Reid writes in Queer God. But I am not going to take my undergraduates to a gay bar: there aren’t any open during our class time, the closest one is forty miles away from campus, and the last person you want to go to a gay bar with is your professor or your students. (And there are likely guidelines in the faculty manual prohibiting such a thing.) And yet I think it’s still worth trying to figure out how to teach theology with the gay bar in mind, to never be quite comfortable with the comforts of the classroom, to imagine ourselves “dancing theology in fetish boots.”

Althaus-Reid’s strategy of theological seduction renders visible not only the sexual, political, and economic entanglements of dominant forms of theology, but also of theological classrooms. To read about doing theology with no underwear is one thing. To read it aloud in a classroom is another. And yet another to ask (rhetorically) about the underwear or lack thereof we sitting around this table are wearing. In this way, Althaus-Reid’s theological perversions call for better teaching—more apt, more playful, more serious, more multidisciplinary, more multimodal, and perhaps above all, freer. Teaching Althaus-Reid perverts the classroom itself, demanding queer theological pedagogies that are rarely taught, difficultly learned, politically and institutionally risky (if not legislated against), and sometimes only fleetingly accomplished.