From Indecent Theology to Asexual Theology: Another Move in Queer Theological Method

This paper brings asexuality studies to bear on Marcella Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology to consider: How can Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology aid us in theologizing asexuality? And how might asexuality studies speak back to and enrich Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology? I address these questions in three parts. 

First, I introduce asexuality and its attendant theorization in feminist and queer studies to familiarize the audience and contextualize their emergence vis-à-vis Althaus-Reid’s life and work. So nascent was asexual activism during her lifetime that it is understandable why she did not include it in her treatments of queer experience and theology (at least to my knowledge). This places the question of asexuality and indecent theology in our hands. 

Second, I consider why, at first glance, Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology may appear unhelpful or even antithetical to the development of asexual theologies. For one, the sensuality and eroticism of indecent theology could be read to reinscribe the conflation of queerness with hypersexuality, a reality that marginalized asexual people (also known as “aces”). “What I learned from trying to engage in queer spaces while ace was that, next to trauma and discrimination, many queer people center sex in their queerness and conceive of sex acts as the catalysts for queerness itself,” recounts ace activist and writer Sherronda Brown. “And if that’s where queerness is located, and could only be located according to some, then where did that leave me?” (2022: 30). As an ace who is also Black, a racial marker already hypersexualized under US anti-Black supremacy, Brown and others like them come up against especially intense pressures to embody hypersexuality in and beyond queer spaces. As a result, they often accrue higher social costs for their nonconformity.

 Asexuality studies developed the term ‘compulsory sexuality’ to name the presumption of and normative imperative to sexual attraction, desire, and activity that Brown and others encounter in and beyond the queer community. Scholars of compulsory sexuality adapt the term from Adrienne Rich’s (1980) classic essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence’, and they build on her argument to posit that sexual oppression and erasure result not only from social imperatives to inhabit heterosexual orientations and behaviours – a critique championed by the LGBTQ+ community – but also from the more radical moral requirement that all humans be sexual in the first place. Asexuality brings to the LGBTQ+ community this latter concern, and in doing so, it exposes and indicts the compulsory sexuality operative within a great many queer spaces and discourses. Although it would be anachronistic to hold Althaus-Reid accountable to ace critiques of compulsory sexuality, those of us who carry forth the writings and work of indecent theology must consider how to deal with the hypersexuality and latent compulsory sexuality of Althaus-Reid’s work so as to not perpetuate the oppression of asexual persons. 

Third, and ironically, I argue that indecent theology can help us name and mitigate compulsory sexuality even as Althaus-Reid may at times perpetuate it in her writings. Althaus-Reid’s work unveils and critiques the pervasive cisheteropatrichy latent in mainstream Western “Theology” (including many liberation theologies), and second, returns to the material conditions of the poor, including the sexual dimensions of their lives, as an alternative starting point for indecent theological reflection. Whereas Althaus-Reid thematized Theology’s pervasive cisheteropatrichary as a problem and proposed a more capacious and subversive sexual theology in response, asexual theology would agree with her interrogation of cisheteropatrichy but also advances a more radical critique—one that indicts Theology as well as Althaus-Reid’s own indecent theology: Althaus-Reid shows that all theology is sexual but does not perceive the problematic sexual normativity unveiled by her analysis. It is no wonder, then, that the indecent theology she proposes focuses on lived realities that move theology beyond cisheteropatriarchy but not sexual normativity. That is, it moves theology beyond compulsory heterosexuality but not compulsory sexuality. Without denying the importance of drawing from a wide array of sexual realities for theological reflection, asexual theology would insist that a truly indecent theology must critique sexual normativity and, in response, incorporate asexual lives as a locus theologicus alongside others.