Three years ago, in the final term of my third year at university, I sat in the sun-lit library reading room and opened a copy of John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. The topics I’d chosen to revise for my historiography exam were religion and gender. It was the thirty-fifth anniversary edition, and, attentive to its historiographical importance, I read the foreword by Mark D. Jordan carefully. Jordan remembers the first copy he owned of Boswell’s book, inherited from a retiring colleague:
I’m a little disappointed by this piece, though the historical stuff and the personal reflection are great as usual. I just think it doesn’t really go far enough. You write,
“I think it’s helpful to set out a defence of trans and queer life within the theological and historical tradition of Christianity”
The fact is, you didn’t really do this — you set out a defense of celibacy within the theological and historical tradition of Christianity, while also saying that queerness and transness are sort of like ancient Christian celibacy, mostly by analogy (just as queerness and transness might subvert normative, reproductive family structures and gender roles in dominant heteropatriarchal society, so did Christian celibacy in Late Antiquity…). This piece doesn’t really contain a defense of trans and queer sexuality as actually lived by human persons. It sounds like it’s written in the language of a queer theological argument, and it almost goes there, but it mostly reiterates traditional Christian doctrine around celibacy.
You could have gone further by exploring what it might mean ethically that non-normative sex (i.e., sinful, prohibited sex according to the Catholic Church) might in some way prefigure the eschaton (as many queer theologians, like Gerard Loughlin, have done), because the argument here sort of starts to suggest that. Instead the piece mostly resorts to historical celibacy, rather than exploring an actual major part of “trans and queer life” as it is lived. Of course, going there would contravene official Roman Catholic doctrine around human sexuality…
I’m a little disappointed by this piece, though the historical stuff and the personal reflection are great as usual. I just think it doesn’t really go far enough. You write,
“I think it’s helpful to set out a defence of trans and queer life within the theological and historical tradition of Christianity”
The fact is, you didn’t really do this — you set out a defense of celibacy within the theological and historical tradition of Christianity, while also saying that queerness and transness are sort of like ancient Christian celibacy, mostly by analogy (just as queerness and transness might subvert normative, reproductive family structures and gender roles in dominant heteropatriarchal society, so did Christian celibacy in Late Antiquity…). This piece doesn’t really contain a defense of trans and queer sexuality as actually lived by human persons. It sounds like it’s written in the language of a queer theological argument, and it almost goes there, but it mostly reiterates traditional Christian doctrine around celibacy.
You could have gone further by exploring what it might mean ethically that non-normative sex (i.e., sinful, prohibited sex according to the Catholic Church) might in some way prefigure the eschaton (as many queer theologians, like Gerard Loughlin, have done), because the argument here sort of starts to suggest that. Instead the piece mostly resorts to historical celibacy, rather than exploring an actual major part of “trans and queer life” as it is lived. Of course, going there would contravene official Roman Catholic doctrine around human sexuality…
This is excellent and persuasively argued. Voices like yours are a breath of fresh air in the Church. God bless you, Rose!