Sadomasochistic Nature Religion: Transfeminism, BDSM, and the Meat of Religious Studies

Contemporary religious studies, particularly feminist and queer analyses of religion, have been grappling with a couple different important shifts in the past few years. One is what we might call the “more-than-human” turn. Borrowing from queer theory, environmental studies, and posthumanism, scholars like Virginia Burress, Carlos Ulises Decena, and Todd LeVasseur have articulated the transcorporealities where the perforated boundaries between human bodies, nonhuman animals, plants, spirits, ancestors, and sentient elemental others comingle in a queer becoming. This builds off scholars like Karen Barad and Mel Chen, who articulate queer/trans life at the molecular level, where “nature” is not the cis-heteropatriarchal narrative we’ve been given but instead queer, trans, even kinky. Second, scholars like Aisha Beliso-de Jesús and Laura McTighe, particularly building from Black feminist thought, have torn at the seams of the “scholar/practitioner” divide as well as academic aesthetics of neutrality and objectivity, showing that such scholarly renderings of people into “data” rearticulates white supremacist, cissexist, and patriarchal subjectivities as the scholarly norm. Religion, or even identity broadly, becomes something only subjects, not scholars, can possess, both disavowing the political potential wrought by such people and often excluding certain scholars as simply rehashing their own “identity politics.” That is, the theology/religious studies and scholar/practitioner binaries function to aesthetically depoliticize scholarship without unpacking its own sedimented political investments in a deadly status quo. Both these methodological interventions agree on at least one thing: good scholarship is entangled, enmeshed in power dynamics and systems and various bodies and politics and ecologies that cannot be unraveled from our scholarly positionalities. Scholarship is situated, and embracing our entanglements opens us up to the possibilities of imagining a world otherwise, beyond the narrow scope “the human” has meant for so long. 

This paper provides a transfeminist critique entangled with these two methodological turns by offering what I call a sadomasochistic method of analysis. Taking these two shifts—towards an always-already queer body and away from depoliticized scholar/practitioner divides—this paper draws on BDSM and kink to articulate just how painful such intimacies actually are, how violent and bloody trans women’s entanglements with religion can be, and how I, as a trans woman in the United States, have not become an earth goddess imagining otherwise but a piece of meat who can’t get a passport. Further, though, it explores the contradictions of myself as a transfeminist scholar of religion drawn to studying painful topics that entangle me with subjects who sincerely wish to do me bodily harm. I liken this experience not to “queer ecology” or the “more-than-human,” but the less-than-human. Farmers recognize a proliferation of genders in their animals: cattle, for instance, are not male or female, but steers, heifers, cows, bulls, and stags. Rarely do farmers say “sex,” but instead “sex conditions;” the body is fluid, mutable, one could even argue queer. This isn’t about recognizing ecology’s queerness, though, but that these different sex conditions all lead to different kinds of meat, dairy, or whatever other fleshy byproduct. They can even give cattle hormone treatments to get different sorts of results. At least someone can still get their hormones, I guess, before they’re slaughtered.

Following Black feminists, particularly Hortense Spillers’ notion of pornotropics and Amber Jamilla Musser’s “sensational flesh,” this paper thinks with sadomasochism as embodied theorizing of subjection and subjugation. Sadomasochism specifically, and BDSM broadly, literally performs power relations, juxtaposes differentials between people and structures that fundamentally delimit agency. Through playacting embodied relations of un/freedom, dominants and submissives poke and prod at various painful sensations—physical acts like cutting or striking, discursive strategies like humiliation, or sometimes incorporating traumatic emotional events or borderline abusive scenarios—to illicit certain embodied responses like cumming, pissing, or crying, all performed within the safety of a communicative and caring environment. Relinquishing power can become a deeply fulfilling and freeing, as well as sexy, act. Similarly, but with important distinctions, I, like many others, do not have power over myself: my body, my sex and gender, my hormonal makeup, my access to healthcare, how I pee, my debilitations, my paperwork, my rendering as a citizen-subject is all controlled by a state that remains openly antagonistic to my existence. This is not BDSM, of course, but I would argue that the urge to write about things that actively harm me is sadomasochistic. It’s rearticulating my relation to the state, governmental employments of religion, and the cis-patriarchal regimes that prop up both in the United States. For many of us, the feminist study of religion, especially as lesbians and trans people, is a controlled environment in which we can investigate our wounds, our traumas, our subjugation, and do so in ways that elicit genuine joy and comfort. For many of us, this is the only way we can freely join a conversation about our unfreedoms. Building on but diverging from scholars like Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani, I don’t seek to reposition sadomasochism as inherently subversive, but rather as a modality of engaging with a world that hurts you as many queer people are forced to inhabit.

More than simply rejecting the scholarly aesthetics of objectivity or asking us to embrace our entanglements, this paper proposes a religious sensation of pain and pleasure, of self-effacement, of the hot flush that comes from being hit or studying religious transphobia as a trans woman, that both delimits my freedom but also enables me to understand the limitations of my body in productive political and religious ways. As a trans scholar of religion and sexuality, particularly how it interacts with the murderous projects of statecraft, my research becomes a way of rupturing and suturing myself, of embodying the discursive fires that forge me as a subject. I cannot control my body, but I can control what I study; I often cannot help but study my own subjugation, but it’s my narrative to write. By focusing on the religious sensations of flesh, particularly how our flesh is maimed, we uncover the economies of care and harm that dictates the lives of so many queer people.