Erotic Justice: Authority, Resistance, and Transformation

Several years ago, I first heard Judith Plaskow talking about her research that would eventually become a chapter in the anthology Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World's Religions.¹ The wheels in my mind immediately began turning over what I, a black womanist Christian ethicist, would have contributed had I been invited to participate in this project. As a person who teaches sacred rhetoric, specializing in the construction of titles for sermons and essays, wherein the emphasis is on the fact that if we name right, we aim right, I fell in love with the title of this particular text, Good Sex, as soon as I heard it.

In 2001, when my advance copy of Good Sex arrived in the mail, I turned first to read Judith Plaskow's chapter, "Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflections on Good Sex." This type of selective reading is consistent with my normal way of mastering the content of anthologies. I begin by becoming acquainted with chapters my friends have written. Judith's well-conceived essay not only provides an overview of feminist sexual ethics in Judaism but she also charts new directions for those of us who have cast our lot with her in the "constructive reworking of tradition in thinking about good sex."²

I focus here on three concepts upon which Judith makes her case for erotic justice; three ideas that broaden, deepen, and make us wiser as ethical beings. First, a coherent critique of authority; second, an emphasis on resistance to compulsory heterosexism; and third, a moral mandate for transformation. We gain much when we juxtapose Judith's essay with my essay "Sexing Black Women: Liberation from the Prisonhouse of Anatomical Authority."³

To enter into this dialogue, I organized my thoughts around the real-life consequences of iconographic lookism, wherein the societal understanding of female sexuality places white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) woman at the apex of "genteel" femininity, as the ideal, representative, prized possession in a privileged, white supremacist, masculinist culture. I considered the following questions: What can women who possess white privilege but are not Protestant and Protestant women who do not possess white privilege learn from each other about articulating sexual values conducive to the health and well-being of women in our respective communities? Beneath our differences, can we discern a common understanding of what good sex looks like, feels like, tastes like, smells like, and sounds like when Jewish feminists and Christian womanists formulate sexual norms that are life affirming within the particularity of our religious traditions?

One might think that in such a multicultural, religiously diverse society as the United States that these questions would not boggle the mind. Yet here in the twenty-first century, thanks to Judith's scholarly work, Jewish feminists and Christian womanists are conversing about good sex for the first time.

Authority

Rather than present a series of isolated ethical examples, Judith and I both start with specific sources of authority. However, in form and scope, our primary point of departure is quite different. Our delineation of powerful evidential influence is not the same. Judith's in-depth discussion of the textual authority of Hebrew scriptures parallels my elaboration of the philosophical duality of binary opposition in the historical, sociocultural context of freed African people. On one hand, Judith creates a multilayered reading experience of scripture in which she threads her exegesis of good sex back and forth between the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic commentaries, exploring ideas about the regulation of sexuality for Jewish women that overlap instead of simply bumping into one another. On the other hand, I lay bare African Americans' persistent and collective struggle to counter more than four hundred years of dehumanizing, racist stereotypes that both cast the black body as ugly and fetishize it as an object of sexual desire. The vast majority of African American churchwomen are caught in the midst of two competing sexual realities. This moralizing hegemonic construct of irreconcilable opposites insists either that sex is a positive blessing for procreative purposes only or that sex is a negative curse that lays claim to...