This panel addresses questions of freedom and unfreedom in BDSM, kink, sex work, and other minoritized sexual practices. The first paper offers a transfeminist critique of entanglement and intimacies to show how violent and bloody trans women’s entanglements with religion and the state can be. This paper highlights the religious sensations of rendering and being rendered into meat. The second paper examines Jean Paulhan’s Histoire d’O, arguing Christian mystical ascent is central to O and to other texts of erotic self-abasement written by women that make art that fragments the freedom/unfreedom dichotomy. The final paper reflects on the merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness, speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper contributes to a queer and sapphic theology unapologetically committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects of desire and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.
This paper explores sadomasochism as a methodological entry point for studying trans/queer life and religion under its present oppressive policing by the United States government. Namely, it seeks to reposition the “more-than-human” turn away from “queer ecology” and the inherent queerness of the body towards, instead, the religious sensations of rendering and being rendered into meat. Centering BDSM and kink as methods exposes the pleasure in the pain of studying that which hurts, especially as a trans woman studying my own subjugation. If BDSM explores the perforated boundaries between pain and pleasure, a safe avenue for embracing pain and trauma felt as uncontrollable sexual ecstasy, I similarly position religious studies as a sensational reenactment of my own control by the state, my rendering as meat, and the economies of un/freedom that both harm me and make up the genuine pleasure I feel from studying religion.
This paper interrogates self-subjugation and the putative dichotomy of freedom/unfreedom in works by Dominique Aury, Emily Dickinson, and Chris Kraus, opening the door to new considerations of relations between the erotic and the mystical. Histoire d’O (1954) has frequently been compared to works of Christian mysticism, predicated on the assumption that both the subjected erotic heroine and the mystic abnegates her ‘self’ in relation to an all-powerful Other. Drawing from Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, I argue that the relation between the protagonists of these erotic texts and Christian writers such as Teresa of Avila is rather that both assume the role of the bride in the Song of Songs: by addressing themselves entirely to absent masters, they fragment hierarchized distinctions of self/Other and freedom/unfreedom, thus laying bare the inextricability of lover and beloved, and standing in hungry, desirous relationality to artmaking, to others, and to language itself.
Being promiscuous lovers and praying to an irreducible God can be talked about more, and especially as theology itself. The work of Rowan Williams on theological integrity, the anti-capitalist theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, and the vast, eclectic, transdisciplinary archive of psychosocial and critical religious theorists can bring together compelling evidence of this hopeful turn in theological anthropology. This paper will reflect on the merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness by speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper hopes to contribute to the furthering of a queer and sapphic theology unapologetic and radically committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects of desire and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.