Black Queer Pathways in Black Theology

Using a mix-method approach, I engage Cultural Anthropology, Narrative Theory, and Black Queer Theology within a Black Posthumanist lens to investigate how Black Trans-masculine identities are shaped by and resist traditional hegemonic theological and cultural structures. This unique perspective allows me to both examine and develop contemporary literary works that elevate Black transmasculine identities. I argue that the intersecting identities of the Black Transmasculine experience are liberatory in and of themselves in that they challenge and reshape dominant notions of gender, race, and religion. Through narrative, I seek to illuminate how Transmasculine experiences challenge and reshape traditional theological frameworks, offering new possibilities for religious practice, community building, and freedom.

In his preface to the 1997 edition of God of The Oppressed, James Cone looks back and writes of his 1975 publication: “It still represents my basic theological perspective—that the God of biblical faith and black religion is partial toward the weak” (Cone, 1997).  However, he acknowledges in no uncertain terms that the perspectives of feminist, gay, womanist, Native American, and South African theologians, in particular, have transformed the content, form, and approach of his work.  This paper focuses on the significance of Cone’s critical reflection on and reconsideration of his own work – with an emphasis on the ways Cone’s perspectives on gender and sexuality evolved.  Through this paper contends that Cone’s way of looking back models a politically powerful form of humility that remains one of the most effective technologies available to those who are oppressed in quests for liberation.

This paper suggests a recalibration of Cone’s Black Christology. Drawing insights from queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam, it rereads Cone’s Black Christology and then argues that the way of the Black Christ is that of disidentification and queer failure. This is to say, that by assuming flesh, the eternal Word not only fully assumes the conditions of the oppressed but also the entirety of the fallen human condition. In his queer way of being in the world, even unto the point of death on the cross and in his exaltation, Christ addresses the powers of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that oppress as well as our complicity with those powers. In this way of disidentification and queer failure, the Black Christ is truly for all Black people. This Black queer engagement thus critically retrieves Cone’s Christological perspective while at the same time pushes his thought in new directions.