Prayer, according to Rowan Williams, is a form of speech directed at the irreducible. Speaking to the irreducible gives being over to irreducibility-- and spending time in prayer is spending time removed from the hegemonic language which reduces us. In other words, time spent praying is time spent in a dialectic of being-other-than-oneself-only. And in a sense, not just 'other' but more. We are more when we pray.
Marcella Althaus-Reid has confirmed that holiness, and attention to it, allows for a certain promiscuity. This promiscuity is a certain suspension of normative ethics; that particular which is higher than the universal (Kierkegaard) can be found in the reciprocity of satisfying one another's incredible need to believe (Kristeva)... This excessive love is perhaps only "valued" and practiced by indecent queers with immediate desires and commitments to doing what it takes to experience them. This promiscuity-- and the solidarity it creates as a gift economy-- is considered in Althaus-Reid's work to be a form of unproductive love. Analogous to Williams's idea of time spent in prayer, to contribute an un-productivity in a society of commodification is to harm others less by, on the one hand, resisting the profit-drive of being-in-relationship(s) and, on the other, by giving to the other what is commensurate to how they make you feel. Like a kinky guilt-before-the-other, queers know we are indebted to the ones who pleases us the instant they please us.
Being promiscuous lovers and praying to an irreducible God can be talked about more, and especially as theology itself. This paper will reflect on this merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness by speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper hopes to contribute to the furthering of a queer and sapphic theology committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.
This paper will be co-written and co-presented by two PhD students, collaborating together.
Being promiscuous lovers and praying to an irreducible God can be talked about more, and especially as theology itself. The work of Rowan Williams on theological integrity, the anti-capitalist theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, and the vast, eclectic, transdisciplinary archive of psychosocial and critical religious theorists can bring together compelling evidence of this hopeful turn in theological anthropology. This paper will reflect on the merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness by speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper hopes to contribute to the furthering of a queer and sapphic theology unapologetic and radically committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects of desire and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.