Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines

 Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines A M Y H O L LY W O O D You can reduce religion to sex only if you don’t especially believe in either one.—michael warner, ‘‘Tongues Untied’’ In the face of what the social historian Judith Bennett refers to as ‘‘the virtual absence of actual women from the sources of medieval lesbianisms ,’’ a number of literary and cultural scholars have recently turned to texts by or about women to uncover homoerotic possibilities within the metaphoric structures of women’s own writings or in the practices ascribed to women or female characters within male- and female-authored literary and religious documents.1 Karma Lochrie, for example, looks to a number of medieval devotional texts and images in which Christ’s bloody side wound becomes a locus of desire.2 According to Lochrie, not only is Christ’s body feminized through its association with women’s (and particularly the Virgin Mary’s) nurturing breasts, as Caroline Walker Bynum famously argues, but religious representations also ‘‘genitalize’’ Christ’s wound, associating it both imagistically and linguistically with the vulva.3 When women mystics write about eagerly kissing the sacred wound, then, their relationship with Christ is queered, for the body they desire and with which they identify is both male and female.4 For Lochrie , ‘‘neither the acts / identity distinction nor the focus on same-sex desire is adequate or desirable as a framework for queering medieval mysticism.’’5 Rather, Lochrie argues, the complex interplay of gender and 120 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y of e ro s sexuality in medieval texts and images effectively queers simple identifications of sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Bennett describes the work of Lochrie and other cultural and literary critics with care and enthusiasm, yet worries that while ‘‘as literary criticism , these readings reach plausible conclusions . . . as guides to social history, they are considerably less convincing.’’6 ‘‘It’s great fun, for example , to read Lochrie’s impressive exploration of the artistic, literary, and linguistic ties between Christ’s wound and female genitalia, and to speculate , therefore, that the kissing of images of Christ’s wound by medieval nuns somehow parallels lesbian oral sex. Yet Lochrie very wisely does not claim that any medieval nun who contemplated Christ’s wound ever, in fact, was thinking about last night’s tumble in bed with a sister nun.’’7 Bennett’s worries about ‘‘actual people’’ and ‘‘plausible behaviors’’ lead her to argue that queer readings like Lochrie’s are ‘‘intriguing-but-notfully -historicized.’’ Bennett’s argument depends, however, on assuming that the history of lesbianisms is or should be centrally concerned with same-sex acts or identities derived from the pursuit of such acts, precisely the categories of analysis questioned by Lochrie (and, Lochrie would argue, by at least some medieval texts and images). Bennett herself introduces the notion of ‘‘lesbian-like’’ in order to broaden lesbian history beyond its focus on ‘‘certifiable same-sex genital contact.’’ Where she differs from Lochrie is in her focus on ‘‘broadly sociological’’ affinities between contemporary lesbians and women in the past—‘‘affinities related to social conduct, marital status, living arrangements , and other behaviors that might be traced in the archives of past societies.’’8 The pursuit of these affinities is certainly important historical work, both for women’s history and for what Bennett calls the history of lesbianisms. Yet Bennett’s argument is problematic if she means to suggest that these sociological categories give access to ‘‘real women’’ in a way that attention to the religious imagery and desires found in texts written or used by medieval women do not. Some medieval religious women did use intensely erotic language and imagery to talk about their relationship to the divine. No matter how implausible it might seem to us to understand Christ’s side wound as a bloody slit that feminizes and eroticizes his corporeality, this is in fact what some medieval women (and men) did.9 a m y h o l ly w o od 兩 121 Lochrie and Bennett are surely right to resist an easy movement from the relationship between the woman believer and Christ to sexual relationships between women (or between men and women).10 Yet why shouldn’t the complex interplay between sex, gender, and sexuality in representations of relationships to the...