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1. Theological Posturing
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| 17 1 Theological Posturing The modern world focused a new type of attention on the difference of bodies, and created a hierarchy of bodies that gave felt or lived meaning to aesthetics.1 Enslaved Africans and their descents as victims of this discursive arrangement sought and continue to seek (in that the process is ongoing and always unfinished) to transform this discourse by turning it on its head and by gaining new visibility and new spaces of life for their natural bodies . The materiality of the body, both the individual body and the collective body, became a venue for struggle against the damning effects of language and modalities of knowledge. While institutions and discourse place certain restrictions on particular groupings of bodies, forcing them to be perceived in relationship to the restrictive arrangements (e.g., stigmas) of the recognized social order,2 resistance or struggle involves the very effort to expose and undo this coercion within the social context of everyday patterns and practices. Thus, according to Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson, “everyday life is therefore fundamentally about the production and reproduction of bodies.”3 Effort to reconstitute the body does not produce a unified self and no single “truth” upon which to rely. As the body is really bodies plural, the relationship between the body and the self must also mean multiple selves; therefore multiple ways of viewing the world and the demands for justice placed on the world. Agency is not lost, nor is the desire for transformation diluted. Rather, this recognized need to challenge everything changes black theology—stripping away its certainties and its rather flat depiction of the history of struggle—but it does not destroy the ability to do theology. It is simply the case that embodiment must mean a new kind of theological posture.4 I found useful insights for such a theological posture in a newspaper article read some years ago. The February 28, 2003, issue of the Minneapolis Star Tribune contained a story titled “Modern and Muslim” describing the “Scheherazade : Risking the Passage” show in which Muslim women used their 18 | Theological Posturing artistic creativity to explore the intersections between personal faith, culture, and world developments. Of particular interest, because of its controversial nature, was the photo exhibit by Lalla Essaydi. The context for one of Essaydi’s photographs is a “‘House of Obedience’ belonging to Essaydi’s family in Morocco.” This refers to the place where women are imprisoned for “extended periods, apparently to compel repentance after they’ve broken an Islamic custom.” This “space,” as Foucault might note, is meant to individualize (as problematic), manipulate, reconceive, and reconstitute the body as docile. Within the context of this confinement or discipline , the practices and movements of the body are defined and surveyed. Bodies enter that space through a discourse of knowledge depicting them as “sinner” or “disobedient,” and they are to exist supple and easily controlled. These houses are local points of power, offering specific examples of force—a type of “spectacle.” Within this space of confinement, the body “is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions.”5 While physical pain may not be the primary mode of punishment with respect to the discursive body that concerns Foucault, the physical body is also present within that confinement. The bodies entering or displayed in these “houses of obedience” are also material; they are physical beings that experience pain, suffering, and demoralization in order to control the manner in which they respond to traditional authority. In short, within these spaces of confinement, bodies—discursive and material—are trained to accept the “truth” of the structures and institutions defining and guiding their discipline and punishment. Hence, punishment within the houses of confinement might entail privation of movement as a form of discomfort or suffering. Pain is an unavoidable dimension of confinement.6 The point in either case, in this context of punishment as religious process, is not to destroy but rather subdue the body, to determine how the body occupies time and space and what the body does within time and space. Both the symbolic and the expressed dimensions of the body are captured through punishment. As Foucault notes, “it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.”7 Confinement in this case is meant to produce discursive bodies marked by the “truth” of the socioreligious arrangement of society, and material bodies equipped and...