Living with the In-Between: Strategic Ambiguity as a Resource for the Synodal Church

The Catholic Church’s recent embrace of synodality has drawn renewed attention to the discursive postures which enable ecclesial conversation and conversion across difference, including an especially helpful recovery of parrhesia as a tool for the synodal church. This paper hopes to further that conversation by offering a positive evaluation of non-parrhesiastic speech in ecclesial contexts, with special attention to strategic ambiguity, selective self-disclosure, and code-switching as tools for marginalized people. Drawing on the feminist reclamation of "gossip" and Jesus's own variety of discursive postures in the Gospel of John, the paper argues for attention to non-normative and sometimes stigmatized approaches to speech, frankness, and secrecy as sites for the power-building which makes parrhesiastic speech possible. It then applies this framework to LGBTQ+ people in non-affirming settings and argues that the strategic ambiguity queer people have used to survive and navigate non-affirming churches can offer helpful lessons to the synodal project.