The New Progressive Christian Transgender Woman

Although this was paper for my queer theory class I think there could some worthwhile information for further discussion. 

Introduction

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... Identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

Judith Butler

Reclaiming my queer identity is a work that arises from my need to more fully engage gender and its many varieties and complexities in the context of a transgender/feminist theology. As such the quote from Mona West frames my life, work and ministry as an African American Transgendered woman. This work is done from an African American Transgendered women’s daily consciousness of her learning curve as it relates to societal and cultural expectations of “womanhood” which is fluid and changing. Not having those experiences when I was in my formative years when most girls learn womanhood I experience acutely the ups and down of learning the expectations of womanhood now after spending over half of my life learning, living and practicing “manhood”. The aforementioned experiences and this paper are framed in the context of Proverbs 22:6 where the Hebrew teacher (Quholeth) writes “Train up a child in the way they should go, even when they are old they will not depart from it.”

When I was in my formative years I would pray that I wake up one day and magically be a girl, a beautiful girl like the ones in Jet or Ebony magazines. I also wanted to get married and have children. But of course being raised in the sixties who would believe a boy dreamed of being a girl in South Central Los Angeles. So I kept it inside and determined to practice, learn and live and master, with my father’s help, boyhood and someday manhood. My father believed that the bible taught parents how to raise a family and he sought to instill these teachings in my sister and me.

Manufacturing an identity of maleness enabled me to adhere to societal and cultural norms and expectations associated with my body. Whether or not that was my authenticity was beside the point because life was not about authenticity, it was about adhering to the expectations of a male oriented society.

To continue to adhere to the expectations cultural and society had placed on me I joined the military, got married, and had children. Thinking that surely that would help me maintain the practice if manhood. It worked for about fourteen years but eventually failed. So now I find myself living in the authenticity that always was. Now I am free to learn my authenticity as a transgendered woman.

Through my experiences of gender I have found that it is a systematic practice and is reinforced through the Church, laws, ignorance and violence. For most of my transgendered brothers and sisters it a harrowing experience that requires a faith in something else other than bible and church.

The task of children learning gender in a certain way of acting and action in society can be a fearful reality, fraught with violence, ignorance and a lack of respect by a public that seemingly thinks in absolutes especially when it comes to gender. It is my daily experiences on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) as well as on the streets of the Berkeley and other places in the Bay area that give my task of learning gender and this paper on performance, performativity, parody and politics such urgency. As such this paper will discuss the pedagogy of gender including its prefabrication, and the task of the American Church as a subversive, transformative change agent that creates a safe space first for the authenticity of the child and then for the inclusion of all of God’s children in the family of God.

II

The Pedagogy of Constructing Gender

The term pedagogy is appropriate for this chapter on the construction of gender because it relates to strategies of instruction or style of instruction and therefore is a necessary link in the discussion of gender construction. The task of gender construction is to define actions, activities and gestures including semiotics-sexualized representations exemplified through pornography in the context of societal and cultural expectations for the appropriate usage and productivity.[1] But I would also add that in addition to the construction of gender I would say that the concept of prefabrication should be considered when discussing gender construction in reference to the practice of acts and actions. I make this observation simply because there are certain acts and action that the male child must do for appropriate activity.

The aforementioned actions of gender construction are necessarily accomplished through the pedagogical action of performance, performativity, parody, and politics (P⁴) affirmed by the powers of culture and society. As discussed in the introduction it is my opinion that this is a pedagogical articulation of Proverbs 22:6 which I will now begin to discuss below beginning with performance.

First and most often, we think of a person’s gestures, tastes, desires and ways of being in the world, as the expression of an innate, autonomous, and unique core, an ‘I’. But according to many post structuralist theorist, the ‘individual’ as it is conceived here, is a truth-effect of systems and power/knowledge that are culturally and historically specific rather than being something that exists in an essential sense.[2]

Proverbs 22:6 specifically states to “train up a child.” During the time of the Quholeth circa. 1000-500 B.C.E the agrarian culture was the primary means of production and cultivation. In that context the individual had a very different purpose of being in comparison to the American Culture in existence today. American Culture has different needs and therefore the individual must have a different construction to accommodate the present 21^st century usage, production and manufacturing. The aforementioned concludes that the construction of gender is different depending on the needs and expectations of an agrarian based culture as opposed to a capitalist based culture. This directly impacts the instructional environment of Proverbs 22:6. While the overall concept of the P⁴ is essentially the same the purpose and outcomes are different and much more pervasive. The articulation of Proverbs 22:6 by American Culture is in part a binary construction of domination, reproduction and sexual control that could be considered a pernicious leftover of a long gone and dead culture.

I remember when I played Tuba in my high school concert band we would practice music for hours until we could perform the piece fluidly, and in some aspect we came to a point that we embodied the piece. The same concept of performance is present in the ideal of creating gender. If the individual keeps on practicing and performing then they will eventually get it, they will become what they practice. Of course this begs the question of whom or what wrote the music or script.

In her seminal text, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that gender is neither natural nor innate, but rather, is a social construct which serves particular purposes and institutions. Gender, she says is the performative effect of reiterative acts, that is, acts that can be and are, repeated. These acts which are repeated in and through a highly rigid regulatory frame ‘congeal’ over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being.[3]

The repetition of the gendered act seeks to solidify the norms of culture and society in existence at the present moment in time and is not necessarily the authenticity of the individual irrespective of the gender construct, necessarily causing more challenges for the individual and the society that created and dictated the script. Many regulations and laws are in existence that criminalize non-conformist gendered individuals and treat the individual as a criminal or commit them to mental institutions.

The gender regulations and laws decry certain acts that each gender is required or made to do. Males do male acts and females do female acts. This is called “Gender Performativity”, a term created by feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act.

This effect produces what we can consider to be 'true gender', a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those manufacturing’s – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them." The performative acts which Butler is discussing she names to be performative and within the larger social, unseen world, they exist within performativity.[4]

Secondly, the concept and reality of performativity acknowledges that the (gender) identity is a compilation of acts, expressions and gestures which are learned over a period of time. The end result of learning the dictated script is that it appears to be a fabrication, a set of instructions dictated by family, school, church and government and not innate at all.

Prefabricated and dictated gender scripting brings back to my memory when I was in junior and senior high school where I spent a lot of time with the girls and in home economics and not big on sports or letterman jackets. I found myself for a time unable to negotiate the constructive fabrication of gender. Living in South Central Los Angeles is was an imperative to master or to parody the gender. In the study of parody for this paper I lift Judith Butler notion of parody as a method of socialization but also I lift it up as a respectful all be it flamboyant homage to the construction and as a thumbed that characterizes the strange absurdity of the construct itself.[5]

P⁴ points to the construction of gender identity, a technique of living, and a technique of existence in the context of the present society and culture and more specifically that Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up.[6] Parody, the third point of P⁴, by the “drag” queens and kings of a fabricated binary gender system attain a humorist point in the world of heterosexuality thereby revealing the scandalous nature of the whole thing.

A parody, a parody with a kind of miraculous gift to make it absurder than it was. Ben Johnson[7]

Ben Johnson’s quote describes parody and the “drag” seen in a nutshell. The parody of drag transgresses, subverts and parodies the very notion of an original, revealing that the supposed original that the performer copies is an imitation without an origin: gender is always already the embodiment and bodying forth of a set of culturally shared gestures, actions, and so on, and these shared gestures have no identifiable origin.[8] Though drag ceases to exist outside of the heterosexual matrix or could be situated in opposition to it, it nevertheless strips bare the fallacy of gender construction and reveal it as and art form of manufacturing with systemic cultural and societal implications. The art form of drag as a parody, a comment on an absurd gender-cult informs the construction of gender revealing gender as a fluid, non-static ontological and temporal effect.

In a P⁴ pedagogical development it is necessary to consider the subject, the human being, and the intention of power structures that seek to maintain their dominance through systems, structures and processes known as socialization thereby marginalizing any authenticity or innateness of the individual. The individual becomes merely an enaction of the socialization of hegemonic patriarchy. Transgender, Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual communities simply through their existence and organizational solidarity debunk the gendered structures of oppression and calls into question those systems and processes of socialization itself as well as compulsory heteronormality.[9]

Another question that parody asks is the question of economic manufacturing. In a highly stylized economic system the gender construct promotes an economic system that polarizes male and female genders. The female lives in the context of a type of ownership by the male as seen in the culturally necessary choice of naming. Seemingly the male is still considered the king of his castle and the rest of the family loyal or disloyal objects. The female is not only in a context of ownership she is also objectified by the cultural establishment.

Traditional pedagogy socializes the female gender in a subordinate framework of domestication to the male gender (this would include take the male gender sir name). The female gender is always supposed to appease the gaze of the male gender. She is the nice tidy gender, the one that manages the household and raises his children. He is the messy gender that always needs to be taken care of. Seemingly her purpose is always to be a caretaker with no real life of her own. In fact her body is not her own as displayed in the abortion debate.

Parody also brings into question the manufacturing of the self. Traditional P⁴ socialization processes produce a self based in part on the existing social construct immersed in part on the economics of consumerism and manufacturing. The self is constituted in and through action rather than being the origin and cause of action.[10] The actions in producing the self are firmly based in a P⁴ pedagogical model without any innate origin centered in a socio-political context with the underpinnings of economics.[11].

The actions in producing the self involve family, government and religious institutions all theoretically supporting the economic and political systems ensuring that the self is produced in accordance with socio-economic and cultural specifications and more importantly expectations. In creation of the self the social, economic and culture matrixes utilize technological systems that seek to ensure the current gender construct.

Michel Foucault in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth writes, as a context we must understand that there are four major types of these technologies,” each matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of manufacturing, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit use to use signs, meanings symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, and objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain certain of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection , or immortality.[12]

The use of technologies in the context of socialization is used in the subordination of the self to structures of power and economics. Although I agree with Foucault on the four major types of technologies I tend to tend look at the reality of technology as another tool of the P⁴ pedagogy development of the self. The manufacturing of the self is not an independent endeavor as previously addressed therefore it is never fully self-styled but rather there is a history that limits the possibilities of the self.

The manufacturing of the self requires the practice of engaging “others” through actions and behaviors that are understood as shared socio-cultural practices. Certain practices have been established over time that seemingly reveals a common social world through which we develop habits, modes of movement, and gestures that have a common meaning.[13] The “others” are an important and vital connection in the body-subjects awareness of the self in the context of socio-cultural practices. The body-subject can only experience itself it they experience the “other” body-subjects as socio-politically constructed beings.

I find that this is most evident in high school or settings where the individuals are not yet secure in their own selves and deem any so called transgression of the heterosexual body-subject construct to be an abomination and something to laugh at. If the individual does not adhere to the socio-cultural practices in those areas it can created a polarizing and fear situation.

The above discussion on parody and socio-cultural practices effectively bleeds into the socio-political aspect of constructing and living gender. Because the self is engaged with “others” and with a global system there is necessarily a political context which is the constitution of relations with others in the world.

Parody necessarily reveals the preexisting or prefabricated gender that acknowledges a programmatic script that children are taught to memorize through practice and continual verbal and visual environmental input. This prefabricated gender comes complete with “natural” identity markers that include political agency based in part on the reproductive organs of the child. Children with “acceptable” gonads and penises are male identified and those with a menstruating are female identified by a doctor licensed by the state and in some cases ordained by the Church. So the culture ends up with an agency based in part on the reproductive organ. This structure of reproductive agency reveals the location of gender politics conceptualized as a matter of penetration and reception.

Practice of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmatic, mimetic-as failed copy, as it were. And surely parody has been used to further the politics of despair, one which affirms a seemingly inevitable exclusion of marginal genders from the territory of the natural and the real. [14]

The aforementioned statement reminds me of all of the times my transgendered sisters and brothers failed or refused to parody the practice of their prefabricated gender and were either put out of their family’s house or put in jail or even institutionalized for being a non-conformist, which brings up the fourth point of politics in P⁴. Judith Butler mentions “exclusion of marginal genders” in her book Gender Trouble which begs the question of the political agency and voice of those that are marginally gendered. What voice does a transgendered, bisexual, lesbian, gay (TBLG) child have in this binary gender political world?

The voice of a citizen in a culture of production and consumerism which is predicated on categories and definitions paint a grotesque picture of culture intelligibility. To be fully engaged and appreciated in a culture that sees absolutes based in part on reproduction in the context of prefabrication the child must be “trained” to adhere to the very ideologies and philosophies that don’t sufficiently develop the child into a strong vibrant adult. These are the children that get thrown away by family and culture to somehow be forgotten and to find their own way.

The tacit constraints that produce culturally intelligible “sex” ought to be understood as generative political structures rather than naturalized foundation. Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of agency that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational or fixed. [15] And then once the vast seemingly ignorant public is educated that the binary gender construct is a prefabricated product of society and culture theoretically agency should be expanded and deepened for all people to have a voice in the public, political forum.

III

Challenge to the American Church

The American Church may conjure up images of a morbid somewhat exclusive institution for people who are part of institutional society and culture, for those who have seemingly practiced long and hard the sacred script of the gospel of American capitalism yet for those of us who see a place of hope and the gospel of Jesus Christ we must consider ourselves in the light of Jesus and the Pharisees of his time. Using Jesus as the model we must grow the Church through a prophetic revelation that calls the Church to engage the challenges that confront it. I have pointed out three challenges that once addressed could go a long way in guiding the Church to the authentic shores of hope and justice.

The first challenge is to overcome the segregation of evangelism from social action and social action for evangelism.[16]

Evangelism is social action. The American Church must see its role as a change agent in the context of social action and therefore evangelism. The task of the Church is to be the articulation of the love, grace and hope that Jesus lived and preached. It is my opinion that the core of what Jesus preached was evangelism and social action in the context of love. While the Church has tremendous agency on a global scale its primary task is to articulate the love of Christ beyond the constructs of culture and society. It should include programs the embrace Children in their authenticity and not try to fit the child into any prefabricated pedagogical model. An example of evangelism and social action occurs at City of Refuge, United Church of Christ, San Francisco, California. The ministry at City of Refuge integrates the concept of reaching through the church food pantry, and transgender services in the form of clinics and educational tools for the community. The greatest articulation of the love of Christ is the radical hospitality of City of Refuge. At City of Refuge the concepts of evangelism and social action are embodied by the congregation.

The second challenge of the American Church is to embrace an historical presence of the Church as a subversive advocate for the people.

All too often the American Church has failed at being the subversive. The Church’s agenda must include all people regardless of gender or sexual ontology. I feel that the American Church likes to be the co-partner with the government in the governing and peace keeping of a population that sleep walks through each day oblivious to the pain and suffering of the people that sit in the pews. Could it be that the Church feels that it is charged with keeping the sacred text of prefabrication that keeps it from truly and freely articulating the words of Jesus.

I suspect that the American Church would never want to be known as being subversive but it is my opinion that the Church must adopt a deconstructive hermeneutics of subversion. I recently saw the movie about Arch Bishop Oscar Romero and his work in San Salvador as an advocate for the people. Surely the American Church can learn from the work of Oscar Romero and reclaim it truest call as a subversive body. As I look back on the life of Jesus as found in the Bible and other historical texts I found that Jesus wasn’t crucified for just helping the people; but was crucified for subverting the will of the Jewish Pharisees and the Roman authorities. If he were just feeding the people food that would be fine but he was also feeding the bread of life. He was creating an awakened population of people to the reality of the Kingdom of God beyond the construct that was present at the time.

The American Church must the advocate for a generation of awakened children. That is children that are awakened to their own authenticity and uniqueness. It must also create parenting programs that center around uniqueness and diversity and the definition of God’s family based on Galatians 3:28 and Romans 8:18-25. The Church cannot continue to be a part of the binary gender construct but it must subvert the binary gender construct through programs, preaching, and development of a pedagogy that reflects the teachings of the gospels and finally the American Church must be the justice it seeks to advocate. The Church must be there for the children, the parents and the community not as an institution and copartner with a government, culture and society of production and consumerism but a subversive advocate for the children and the family.

Finally as the American Church revisits Jesus not only will it see a subversive, a change agent but also a person that created a place and space for transformative experiences. I would say that one of the goals of subversion is transformation. That is transformation on a mental, emotional and even physical plane and beyond. Church must also be that subversive, transformative space and change agent that advocates first for children as an awakened generation and then the family as an awakened kingdom of God.

The third challenge of the American Church is to revisit Jesus to study how he related to community and to people in the context of power.

The first question that the Church needs to ask is how Jesus used his agency? The gospel writers wrote about the healings, miracles, the listening to the woman at the well and even the cross. Yet the question should not be how did he use or even do those divine encounters but how did he use them to articulate his agency. It is my opinion that a study of the agency of Jesus in the context of community would be a very poignant teaching for the Church to give. A second component of a teaching on the agency of Jesus would be his authenticity of Jesus and the power flowing from that authenticity.

The fourth challenge to the American Church is to fully articulate the following words of scripture, “Then Jesus called for the children and said to the disciples, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children.

Luke 18:16

The American Church needs to revisit this scripture to glean the truth of who and what the Church is. The American Church’s efforts to be worldly wise, smart, and intelligent and mature have cast a long shadow of suspicion over the ministry of Jesus. The American Church must ask the question, what does it mean to be a child of Jesus Christ and what does it mean when Jesus say come to me, don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children. One component in the makeup of a child is the authenticity of the child before they practice the ontology of a binary gender construct.

IV

Conclusion

This paper discussed the training of children as written in Proverbs 22:6 in the context of American culture from a transgender/feminist theological perspective. This paper also looked at Proverbs 22:6 in the context of a prefabricated gender script and sought to identify and evaluate the components of performance, performativity, parody and politics (P⁴). In the queering of Proverbs 22:6 this paper also discussed the need to understand the difference between an agrarian culture of 1000 – 500 B.C.E. and a culture of the 21^st center C.E. and how the training of that time was for radically different needs than our culture has today.

This paper also discussed the domestication of the female gender based on an outmoded and insidious heteronormative practice of patriarchical superiority all ordained by the Church and state. Through the lens of the transgender/feminist theology this paper addressed the realities of parody and the politics of agency as it relates to transgendered identities that are not intelligible and therefore have a limited voice in the public forum.

Finally this paper presented three challenges to the American Church that would lead it to the authentic shores of hope. The one challenge that would seemingly do the American Church well would be using Jesus and Oscar Romero as examples to become a subversive Church. It is the subversive Church that creates the sacred space for advocacy, transformation and an agent of change first for an awakened generation of children and then the family as an awakened kingdom of God.

In closing the key component is a subversive American Church. I make this statement because the American is charged in my opinion with maintaining the sacred script. If the Church became the Subversive Jesus of today I think it would radically change how our society functions and even view itself on gender and sexuality and the training of children in accordance with their God given authenticity. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bessenecker, S., Quest for Hope in the Slum Community, A Global Reader Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media, 2005

Bornstein, K., My Gender Workbook, how to become a real man, a real woman, the real you or something else entirely, New York, NY: Routledge Publishing, 1998

Butler, J., Gender Trouble, New York, NY: Routledge Publishing, 1990

Foucault, M., Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, New York, NY: The New Press, 1994

Hutcheon, L., A Theory of Parody, The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms,

Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000

Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003

[1] Bornstein K., My Gender Workbook, How to become a real man, a real woman or something else entirely (New York, NY: Routledge Publishing, 1998) p 134

[2] Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003) p 81

[3] Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003) p 82

[4] Wikipedia accessed November 27^th 2008

[5] Hutcheon, L., A Theory of Parody, The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000) p 33

[6] Foucault, M., Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York, NY: New York Press, 1994) p 89

[7] Hutcheon, L., A Theory of Parody, The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000) p 30

[8] Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003) p 86

[9] Wikipedia accessed December 1^st 2008

[10] Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003) p 89

[11] Ibid, p 94

[12] Foucault, M., Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York, NY: New York Press, 1994) p 225

[13] Ibid, p 93

[14] Butler, G., Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY: Rutledge Publishing, 1990) p 200

[15] Butler, G., Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY: Rutledge Publishing, 1990) p 201

[16] Bessenecker, S., Quest for Hope in the Slum Community, A Global Reader (Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media) p 17