"Femme Fatales of Faith": Queer and "Deviant" Performances of Femme Within Western Protestant Culture
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University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2019 "Femme Fatales of Faith": Queer and "Deviant" Performances of Femme Within Western Protestant Culture Kelsey Waninger Minnick University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Christian Denominations and Sects Commons, Christianity Commons, and the Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons Recommended Citation Minnick, Kelsey Waninger, ""Femme Fatales of Faith": Queer and "Deviant" Performances of Femme Within Western Protestant Culture" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1603. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1603 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. “Femme fatales of Faith:” Queer and ‘Deviant’ Performances of Femme within Western Protestant Culture _____________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver _____________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________ by Kelsey W. Minnick June 2019 Advisor: Darrin Hicks Author: Kelsey W. Minnick Title: “Femme fatales of Faith:” Queer and ‘Deviant’ Performances of Femme within Western Protestant Culture Advisor: Darrin Hicks Degree Date: June 2019 ABSTRACT Women and queer folk are changing the religious landscape of Christianity in America, and the scope of visibility for these figures and their apostolic endeavors is widening as more and more Christians are seeking out communities rooted in doctrines of love and connection rather than exclusion and hegemonic piety. Thinking on this phenomenon, this dissertation focuses on the intersectional dilemmas of faith practice and rhetorical discourse with Western Christianity, particularly as it revolves around those female pastors and clergy—considered “dangerous” by many within the church—who are advocating for a more inclusionary church space. By conducting a rhetorically-motivated investigation centered within feminist and religious dialogues, this project attempts to answer the following questions: How can the femme fatale, as read through a lens of queer performativity, be a hallmark of identity-making for women within religious spaces? How does the rhetorical act of confession, specifically the memoir, work as a performative tool of resistance when used by the “femme fatales of faith?” What do the alternative and ‘out-law’ narratives and embodiments of Nadia Bolz-Weber, Paula Stone Williams, and Pamela Lightsey speak to in terms of female church leaders marking themselves as “femme fatales of faith?” ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One ……………………………………………………………………………..1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………..1 Research Challenges and Motivations ……………………………………..4 Research Questions ……………………………………………………………13 Implications ……………………………………………………………………13 Theoretical Foundations and Previous Scholarship ……………………………15 Chapter Two ……………………………………………………………………………29 Gender and Performance: From Butler to the Monster ……………………29 The Femme Fatale ……………………………………………………………36 Confession: Memoir and Feminist-Religious Rhetoric as Genre ……………49 Methodology: Using Narrative to Access Outlaw Rhetoric ……………………53 Chapter Three ……………………………………………………………………………65 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………65 Her Words, Our Lives: Context as Confession ……………………………72 A Case for the Sacred, Black, Queer Body: Imago Dei and the Femme Fatale ……………………………………………………87 Chapter Four ……………………………………………………………………………95 Paula Stone Williams: An In-Depth Look ……………………………………95 And So It Goes: The Confessional “Liveness” of Blogging …………………..103 Trans-Parenting: Good Mothers, Bad Mothers, and “Never Mothers” …..109 Conclusion: Trans-Theology …………………………………………………..122 Chapter Five …………………………………………………………………………..124 Nadia: An Introduction …………………………………………………..124 Pastrix as the Pastoral Femme…………………………………………………..129 Shameless, A Femme Fatale’s Story …………………………………………..136 Paving the Way for Redeeming Grace …………………………………..146 The New Femme Fatale: Performing Femme Through Race, Motherhood, and Excess …………………………..148 Chapter Six …………………………………………………………………………..159 Living in the Problematics: Investigation Through Story …………………..159 Theorizing the Why Behind the Writing …………………………………..165 Desire as a Rhetoric of Belonging: The Future of the “Femme Fatales of Faith” …………………………..175 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………..180 iii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The sanctuary was large—an old synagogue renovated in the late 2000s—but it was crowded that day and felt much smaller than usual. I had been coming here most Sundays for the past two years, my husband and some other close friends usually joining me during those times. Denver Community Church (DCC) had branded itself as Christian, missional, and, recently, inclusive—three phrases that had never gone together in my spiritual vocabulary. I was excited to re-explore the church in a space that aligned with my feminist and activist beliefs. On this particular Sunday, in the wake of DCC announcing that it was publicly accepting/affirming of the LGBTQ community in the Spring of 2017, I sat awaiting that morning’s lecture with much anticipation. Every summer over the span of five or six weeks, DCC hosts guest speakers for the Sunday services—bringing voices from all over the Denver area to preach. When the speaker for that day walked up onto the stage, you could feel the immediate tension in the room— both from those who were unsure of who this person was and from those who were, for the first time, seeing a member of their own community at the pulpit. Dr. Paula Stone Williams, a transwoman pastor and counselor based in Colorado, began the morning with reading scripture—the story of the prodigal son. A popular biblical story, Williams used this parable from the book of Luke to tell her own story: of transitioning, losing her community, and establishing hope through her new life as a woman of faith. She was 1 soft-spoken, yet theatric in cadence. She smiled often throughout her sermon—even if it didn’t reach her eyes. As I sat and listened to her speak, my throat tightened and my eyes began to water. Even after attending DCC for almost two years, I never thought I could feel truly at home in a church space again—not after everything I had seen go on in “the name of God” at the hands of the Christian church. Not after the harassment, gas-lighting, and division that had plagued my religious upbringing. But here was a kindred spirit: a woman—ridiculed, persecuted, and called a heretic by her peers—speaking to my soul about love, inclusion, and storytelling as faith works. Growing up in a Pentecostal Christian household in rural South Carolina, I knew very early on in life what my gendered and sexual aesthetic was meant to portray to the world: docility in my actions, subservience to God and my future husband, and the absence of all sexual desire until marriage. I would go so far as to say that this wasn’t just a regional “Bible-belt” ideology, but a strongly historicized and universal image of the Christian woman. This archetypal image of the good woman was not even a purely social construction—there was biblical precedent for the female’s endless journey out of sinfulness and into sanctity. When I first began conceptualizing this project, I knew I would be reaching into a very deep and old wound—both within the history of the Christian church and within myself. The “woman’s story” within Christianity is a history that is to be both celebrated and rebuked, especially within the Western doctrine. Originating with hegemonic, masculine origins of biblical interpretation, Christianity’s timeline is wrought with anti- 2 feminist rhetoric that demonizes any form of performance—particularly sexual—that falls outside of those heteronormative and supremacist understandings of order and rule. From the immediate threat of Eve as the temptress in Genesis, to the Salem witch trials of the 1600s, to the “Billy Graham Rule” or “Pence Rule” of the late 1900s and early 2000s—the female body has always been a social outlier within systemic religion. What is interesting to note, however, is that the positionality of outlier (outside, but within) has afforded women a space of connection (to the earth, to the body, to one another) through the very realm of abjection. The female body is an affective body because it is abject within societal hierarchy. When allowed the opportunity to channel this alterity through non-normative processes of identity formation and meaning-making, the outcome is often one that disrupts not just those spaces outside of systemic religion but, also, the spaces within the systems that created the divide. Thinking critically on the possibilities of affective and abject bodies—particularly those that play on ‘deviant’ forms of the feminine—I am proposing a project that would foster a new kind of conversation around the relationship between women and the church. This conversation is one that is rooted in intersectional and feminist discourses, cultivating rhetorics of re-visioning and re- claiming as its central priorities (instead of trauma and erasure) as they merge with both historical and contemporary rhetorics of Western Christianity.