The Queer Violence of Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Mysticism

A free-born black woman, Rebecca Cox Jackson lived in Philadelphia in the early1800s with her husband, Samuel, in the house of her brother Joseph, an AME minister. Jackson was a regular churchgoer.  Though illiterate, she knew her Bible.  She was familiar with spirit-filled conversion and repentance experiences at church meetings and revivals.  However, she wanted something different, and she broke free from those Methodist religious ties.  She found kindred spirits among the upstate New York Shakers, who blended strict discipline with spiritualist fervor and gender equality.  Jackson enthusiastically embraced the Shaker theology of God the Mother and their practice of celibacy.   Eventually, Jackson embarked on her own Shaker-style ministry, calling Christians—especially other black women—to follow the Shaker way.  Jackson loved and had erotic mystical visions of the divine Mother.  She may have desired women.  

There is significant historical debate about whether Jackson was a lesbian, to use a term that would have been unknown to her.  Jackson left a book of writings, a spiritual autobiography of sorts.  Jackson’s Gifts of Power vibrates with a woman-focused erotic mysticism that is also filled with violent imagery.  The meaning of her mysticism is undecipherable when read through a heteronormative or even a putatively objective historical lens. 

In the early 1830s Jackson had a conversion experience.  She began intensive bouts of prayer, ritual fasting, and denying herself sleep.  She engaged in bodily mortifications, which worried her family.  When she asserted that God “destroyed the lust of my flesh and made me utterly hate it” (88) they became truly alarmed.  She asked to leave her husband so she could dedicate herself to “a virgin life.”   Then she started receiving visions.  An early vision was graphically violent. Jackson dreamed of being flayed and vivisected by an intruder to her home, so that “skin and blood covered me like a veil from my head to my lap. All my body was covered with blood” (94-95). She experienced it as a vision from God.

Decoding the extreme violence of Jackson’s visions is nearly impossible without a suitable hermeneutical lens.  Scholars of mysticism are well-attuned to how mystical texts intersperse descriptions of intense bodily mortification and the ecstasy of divine love. Queer scholarship exposes how mystics transgress conventional gender and heteronormative categories. Postmodern psychodynamic scholarship insists that even distant medieval texts have something powerful to say today about how abjection and jouissance might intersect in the soul’s union with God.  However, unlocking Jackson’s erotic and violent dreams and visions requires a special interpretive perspective.  The late 20th-century lesbian French feminist writer, Monique Wittig sheds light on Jackson’s experience. 

Jackson’s dream of being flayed and disemboweled situates her outside of heteronormative conventions of bride-of-Christ mysticism. Jackson’s encounter is abject, violent, and grotesque.  Wittig uses the grotesque intentionally to write the erotic lesbian body in her novels.  In The Lesbian Body, she describes lovemaking with violent imagery in ways that echo Jackson’s imagery: “I discover that your skin can be lifted layer by layer, I pull, it lifts off… I reveal the beauty of the shining bone traversed by blood-vessels” (Wittig 1975, 17).  Wittig names the attempt to write about sexuality outside the male gaze and phallocentricism as a “desire to do violence.”  The lesbian writer “can only enter by force into a language which is foreign to it” (10)  To create a lesbian imaginary, one must dislodge and disgorge the concept of woman, which is linked heteronormatively to man.

Jackson, read queerly, becomes what Wittig calls “not a woman” in her violent mystical eroticism (Wittig 1992, 20).  Her visions are devoid of attraction to a virile male body, as found in many Christian mystical texts.  Jackson’s Shaker repudiation of conjugal acts—which she found revolting—did not impede her attraction to the black female body.  She fantasized about their red lips, black hair, and dark silken limbs.  Gifts of Power is peppered with references to Jackson’s longtime companion Rebecca Perot, another black woman who had gone with her to live with the Shakers in Watervliet, New York.  Perot stayed with Jackson when she returned to Philadelphia to establish a Shaker household there.  She and Perot traveled, lived, worked together on and off for almost 25 years—even sharing a bed.  Visions of Perot’s body fill several Jackson’s dreams. In one, Jackson sees Perot bathing in a river, wearing “only… her undergarment. She was pure and clean, even as the water in which she was abathing. She came facing me out of the water…. She looked like an Angel” (Jackson, 225).

Lesbian and queer historians caution against trying to peer between the bedsheets of times long ago to find evidence of genital sexual activity.  Instead, one should look for a spectrum of women-identified bonding, where sexual desire might emerge organically, easily, and perhaps often.  Black queer scholarship insists on rigorous sensitivity to how the intersections of blackness, class, gender nonconformity and other factors obscure from scholarly view the “histories of black women who loved women and/or transgressed gender norms” (Jones).  From this perspective, imagining sexual desire between the two Rebeccas is not an intrusive imposition but a scholarly commitment not to assume an absence of woman-to-woman erotic relationships.  Such queer imaginings are also an effect of listening for intertextual echoes.  The echoes supplied by a writer like Wittig can assist in understanding spiritual meaning embedded in Jackson imagery of grotesque bodies, violent actions, and lesbian eroticism.

References:

Jackson, Rebecca Cox. 1981. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez. University of Massachusetts Press.

Jones. Jennifer Dominique. 2019. “Finding Home: Black Queer Historical Scholarship in the United States,” History Compass 17.

Wittig, Monique. 1975. Lesbian Body. William Morrow.

_____. 1992. The Straight Mind: And Other Essays. Beacon.