UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Interrogating Pope Francis: On Gender Theory and Ideological Colonization Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6743q3gx Author Dempsey, Danielle Publication Date 2020 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Interrogating Pope Francis: On Gender Theory and Ideological Colonization A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies by Danielle Marie Dempsey June 2020 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Melissa M. Wilcox, Chairperson Dr. Paul Chang Dr. Molly McGarry The Dissertation of Danielle Marie Dempsey is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and my niece and nephew Jackie and A.C. for your unconditional love and support and for being understanding of all the time I had to miss for school, when I would have preferred to be hanging out with you. Aunt Patti, Uncle Marv, and Aunt Lori, you have supported my educational endeavors for as long as I can remember – I think I was ten when I first told you I wanted a PhD, and you have encouraged me ever since. To my cousins Michelle, Megan, and Sadie, and to my Godmother Aunt Pami and the rest of my family, thank you for your love and encouragement now and always. Ms. Paige, you taught me everything I needed to know about life in kindergarten. Mr. Kammer, Ms. Millikan, and Sra. Renzi, thank you for seeing something in me in high school that I didn’t see in myself. At one point I wasn’t sure if I would graduate high school; this achievement is a direct result of your time, effort, and confidence in me. James Fredericks, Charlotte Radler, and Jonathan Rothchild, you guided my Masters thesis when I was in the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount. That work inspired this dissertation, and I don’t know if I could have done it without your open-ness and expertise. Molly McGarry, thank you for the insights and positivity you brought to this project – more than anything, thank you for agreeing to take part in it! Your wealth of knowledge and perspective has been instrumental. Paul Chang, I will always be grateful that you agreed to learn about queer and trans studies in religion right along with me. In addition to your depth and range of knowledge of global Christianities, which contributed iii immensely to my studies these past years, your kindness and enthusiasm as a mentor have shaped me as a student and educator. Melissa Wilcox: There are no words. Having you as my mentor has been transformative. I will miss being your office neighbor and our off-topic conversations more than anything, but I am indescribably lucky to have had a committee chairperson who has transformed the field of queer and trans studies in religion. Thank you, for everything. Tammy Ho, Andy Smith, Wesley Leonard, and Sherine Hafez, I deeply appreciate your official and unofficial mentorship over the years. Thank you to everyone else in the Queer and Trans Studies in Religion research group and the Holstein Fellowship for your comradery and insights. I am grateful to Taylor Riley and Sonja Trattner for providing helpful feedback on my work and for being awesome neighbors. I am so deeply indebted to my friends, with whom I have developed profound and feminist relationships over the years. I express my heartfelt gratitude to Christy Charles, Rochelle Gray, and Samantha Park for being some of my longest and truest friends and accomplices. And to my fellow disserteers, Katie Phillips and Jess Rehman, you are the best “frolleagues” I could have hoped for, but you are so much more than that! Thank you for quickly becoming some of my closest friends, confidants, and advocates. This experience wouldn’t have been the same without each of you. Lastly, I spent my final months writing this dissertation at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. I would like to acknowledge all the losses that have already occurred and that we will continue to experience throughout this global pandemic. Congratulations and condolences to my fellow COVID graduates of 2020. iv For my mom - we did it! v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Interrogating Pope Francis: On Gender Theory and Ideological Colonization by Danielle Marie Dempsey Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Religious Studies University of California, Riverside, June 2020 Dr. Melissa M. Wilcox, Chairperson Interrogating Pope Francis employs institutional genealogies and a queer and trans studies lens to analyze the power dimensions binding the colonial project and the rise of the nation-state to the Catholic Church. In this dissertation, I contextualize the charismatic Pope Francis amongst his predecessors, the institutional Church’s direct adoption of colonial ideologies in the past, and its current support for exclusionary identity politics within national arenas. I conduct close readings of Church documents alongside Pope Francis’s public statements to reveal the evolution and stagnation of Catholic sexual ethics, and the ways in which the Church has intentionally separated sexual ethics from Catholic social teachings as a means to reject platforms for gender and sexual justice. This genealogy unearths the interrelated but paradoxically juxtaposed Catholic teachings on natural law, human dignity, sexual ethics, and social justice. My analysis further reveals the intentionally divisive and exclusionary direction Francis and vi the Catholic Church continue to assume in relation to peoples of nondominant sexes, genders, and sexualities: a direction that directly upholds the Church’s colonial legacy. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………..1 Intellectual Histories, Power Regimes, and Foucauldian Genealogies…………………………………..13 (Re)-Reading Intellectual Histories: A Foucauldian Lens………….………………………………....15 Deconstructing the Vatican (Archives): An Outline……………24 1. A Genealogy of “Gender Theory” and “Ideological Colonization”…………………………………………29 Gender (Theory)………………………………………………...30 Ideological Colonization………………………………………..39 2. The “Nature” of Human Dignity: Inscribing a Traditionalist Sexual Ethics………………………………73 Natural Law and Sexual Ethics………………………………...74 Gender Theory Backlash and New Natural Law Theory………………………………….88 Human Dignity…………………………………………………111 3. Queer, Sex, and Catholicism: Modernity and its Effects on Social Justice and Moral Theology……………………...119 The First Vatican Council: Institutional Responses to “Modernity” (And Other Signs of the Times?)……………...123 The First Vatican Council: The Sitz im Leben in Europe and its Settler Colonies………………………………126 The Queer, Trans, and Feminist Problem………………………152 4. Between Church and Nation: Catholicism, Colonialism, (Post)Modernity………………………………………….167 Colonialism, Christianity, and Nationalism……………………168 viii Women as Signs (…of What?)………………………………...176 Who (What) is the Nation?.........................................................186 The Rhetorics of Meta-Nationalism………….………………. 192 Disasters of Nationalism……………… ………………….…...196 Conclusion……………………………………………………….…….203 Bibliography……………………………………………………….…..207 Appendix……………………………………………………………....224 ix Interrogating Pope Francis: On Gender Theory and Ideological Colonization Introduction I became inspired to conduct the research that appears in this dissertation when I heard of Francis’s comments decrying gender theory in the summer of 2016: In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these - I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] “gender”. Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this [is] terrible!1 A student of Catholicism and of postcolonial theory, and at the time, as someone who was relatively optimistic about Francis’s papacy, when I heard that he referred to gender theory as ideological colonization, my reaction was a mixture of anger, hurt, and scholarly fascination. I decided to enact my scholarly revenge on the pontiff by writing a dissertation on him. I am privileged to have had the resources to interrogate Pope Francis. I should also mention that although I was lucky to have something as topical as Francis’s ongoing attack on gender theory traverse my own path to my degree, this project began long before Francis became the first pontiff to appropriate the term “ideological colonization.” Indeed, I started formulating this project well before Francis’s papacy. I used to cry when I would do my moral theology homework. I am an expert – or literally a master, if you will - in Catholic moral theology. Catholic moral theology, which deals broadly with the meaning and nature of the human person, makes evaluative 1 Francis, “Meeting with the Polish Bishops,” Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Pope Francis to Poland on the Occasion of the XXXI World Youth Day, 27 July 2016, accessed September 2019, http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2016/08/02/0568/01265.html#en, question 4, first brackets original, additional brackets added. 1 claims about