Performing the Eschaton: Queer Performativity and Sacramental Action

This paper argues that queer gender performativity can be understood as functioning, ecclesiologically and eschatologically, in a way analogous to sacraments within Catholic theology. The paper begins with a survey of the Church as Sacrament in Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church before placing Dulles in dialogue with Kimberly Belcher and Judith Butler. Through this dialogue, I contend that both gender and sacramentality share a connection of efficacious performativity – both produce the reality they signify. In this light, both queer and sacramental performativity are seen to foreshadow and actualize the eschatological ends of both the human body and the Church. This theological framework results in an expanded view of the 'Catholic sacramental imagination' that embraces queerness as 'sacramentally' revelatory of the age to come.

For Avery Dulles, following Karl Rahner, the Church is understood as the ‘primordial sacrament,’ because it continues, in history, the presence of the Incarnation.[i] Considered as sacrament, the Church is “a sign of grace realizing itself.”[ii] As such, the Church as Sacrament has a necessarily dynamic character; it is not so much a static institution as it is motion or event.

Here an important connection emerges between sacrament and ritual action. As Kimberly Belcher points out, there are two ways in which sacraments can be said to be effective: they are “culturally effective in organizing human life and theologically effective in integrating human persons into the life of God.”[iii] Because human beings encounter God through human culture, culture – though not in and of itself ‘divine power’ – takes on a central role in one’s journey into God’s own life. While one’s cultural and human life is certainly organized in part by symbols, it is also organized in other ways: “human habits and discipline, ‘meaningless’ ritual behaviors, and unexamined sensory experience, for example.”[iv] As such, the ritual elements and discursive language of human life play an important role in the sacramental economy and one’s embodied life of faith. The ritual actions inherent in sacramental life “allow practitioners to transform their identities” to resemble more and more the Triune God.[v] Thus the salvific effects of sacraments rely not only on the symbolic meaning of the sacrament, but on the deep connection between ritual action and symbol, by which sacrament takes on a character of dynamism and motion that moves individuals and ecclesial communities nearer to the Divine Mystery.

This connection between ritual action and symbol within the sacramental economy strikes a chord of resonance with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Butler understands “gendered identity” to require the acknowledgement of an Other.[vi] To be “woman” or “man” is to be recognized as such by another; because human life is organized culturally, recognition as “woman” or “man” is dependent upon one’s performance of culturally intelligible markers of gender. From dress to social interaction, the particular actions that comprise culturally intelligible markers of gender may, in and of themselves, appear “meaningless;” yet their performance within a social discourse renders them intelligible via a complex web of social meaning and thus “produces” a culturally intelligible, gendered identity.

Gendered identities are thus “produced” by an array of “meaningless” actions and bodily markers. Similarly, in the sacramental economy, “meaningless” ritual behaviors, discursive language, and sensory experiences map onto complex symbols to produce sacramental effects that draw individuals and communities nearer to the Divine Mystery. As such, both gender and sacramentality share a connection of efficacious performativity: both produce the realities that they signify.

When queer performativity is considered alongside sacramentality, an additional connection emerges: both anticipate and actualize eschatological realities by subverting earthly ones. Kimberly Belcher, following Jean-Luc Marion, contends that in Eucharistic action – the ‘source and summit’ of sacramental action – “the eschatological oneness of the world-in-God advents.”[vii] Eucharistic action serves to draw the Church on earth nearer to the Church of the eschaton by transforming the elements of earthly life into the elements of eschatological life. Similarly, social markers of “male and female” identities reflect earthly preoccupation with marriage and reproduction. Yet as interpretations of Galatians 3:28 suggest, the eschatological body will in some way transcend earthly sexual experience. In a manner analogous to Eucharistic transformation, grace-filled queer performativity is seen to subvert earthly “male and female” constructions by efficaciously anticipating the eschatological body, thus revealing in queer performativity a 'sacramentality' of the age to come.

[i] Avery Dulles S.J., Models of the Church, Expanded Edition  (New York: Image, 2002), 62.

[ii] Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, 61.

[iii] Kimberly Hope Belcher, Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 4.

[iv] Kimberly Belcher, Efficacious Engagement, 3.

[v] Kimberly Belcher, Efficacious Engagement, 52.

[vi] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 30.

[vii] Kimberly Hope Belcher, Eucharist and Receptive Ecumenism: From Thanksgiving to Communion (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 203