Queering the Soul: Homoerotic Spiritualities in African American Literature
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QUEERING THE SOUL: HOMOEROTIC SPIRITUALITIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE By MARLON RACHQUEL MOORE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2009 1 © 2009 Marlon Rachquel Moore 2 This project is dedicated to all the dykes, faggots, sissies, punks, bois, bulldaggers, unwifeable women, bitches, butches, hoes, infidels, heretics, witches, heathens, conjurers, healers and any indecent, uncouth folk who know they got soul. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my advisors, including those who guided me in unofficial capacities: LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Kim Emery, Tace Hedrick, Kevin Quashie, Stephanie Evans, Charles Nero and Mark Reid. I also thank Jean and Robin Gibson for their generous endowment through the Florida Foundation. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 THE WHY & WHAT OF QUEERING SOUL........................................................................7 Why...........................................................................................................................................7 What........................................................................................................................................20 2 SANCTIFIED SISSIES AND SACRED MUSIC: “BLESSED ASSURANCE” AND JUST ABOVE MY HEAD.....................................................................................................24 3 UNGODLY THEOLOGIES: “IN THE LIFE” AND THE COLOR PURPLE ......................52 “In the [After] Life”................................................................................................................53 God is (a) Pussy: Homoerotic and Masturbatory Spirituality in The Color Purple ...............71 4 HOMOEROTICS OF TALK IN THE GILDA STORIES.......................................................84 5 THE EROTIC COMMUNION OF BROWN HEATHENS, BLACK QUEERS AND ANCESTRAL SPIRITS IN BY THE LIGHT OF MY FATHER’S SMILE...........................108 Christian “Lies” ....................................................................................................................123 Heathen Truths......................................................................................................................126 Conclusion or, Wrapping It up in Queer Soul ......................................................................136 Where Do We Queer from Here? .........................................................................................139 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................141 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................149 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy QUEERING THE SOUL: HOMOEROTIC SPIRITUALITIES IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE By Marlon Rachquel Moore May 2009 Chair: LaMonda Horton-Stallings Cochair: Kim Emery Major: English Queering the Soul combines African American literary theory, feminism/womanism, and black theology to argue for a black queer aesthetics that is in conversation with the broader culture in regard to issues of the afterlife, metaphysicality and theological notions. Queering the Soul examines 20th-century narratives of the black experience—some famous, others obscure—that entwine notions of God or spiritual pursuits with prominent characterizations of same-sex desire. This cultural terrain has been, indeed, a site of politicized struggle for decades, and I will show how this literary tradition, “queering the soul,” works to dissolve the sinner/saint binary in discourses that pit people with LGBTQ identities against so-called “people of faith”; and the good/bad binary inherent in many descriptions of the spirit-body division. To that end, Queering the Soul investigates the narrative strategies in the fiction of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Becky Birtha and Jewelle Gomez as they demonstrate the ways representations of homoerotic spiritualities can serve as tools of resistance to such polarizing discourses. 6 CHAPTER 1 THE WHY & WHAT OF QUEERING SOUL Why In Spiritual Interrogations, a fascinating study of 19th-century African American women’s writing, Katherine Bassard claims, “Significantly, the struggle for empowerment, agency, and subjectivity within a cultural and communal frame of reference is nowhere as evident as in black women’s negotiations with prevailing religious discourses (21, original emphasis). Her analysis focuses on four women, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Phyllis Wheatley, Ann Plato, and Jarena Lee, who used their writing to transform white and male supremacist rhetoric into reflections of their material realities and spiritual journeys. Bassard explains the empowering aspects of their appropriation of Christian terminology and their seizing upon conversion discourse in a context of slavery. “For individuals socially ‘cursed’ with a racialized and othered subjectivity, conversion represented one of the few discourses, and certainly the most prominent, holding the promise of a radical change in subjectivity. If one could move from ‘sinner to saint,’ she/he could also move ‘from slave to free,’ [and] ‘from bondage to freedom’ (Bassard 23). The authors in Bassard’s research subtly refashioned the rhetoric and applied their own interpretive lens to the power and promises of religion. Through the gift of salvation they were able to claim a liberated identity and perform a type of freedom in religious rituals. Rebecca Cox Jackson is an especially interesting subject because she not only used her writing to transform discourse in the manner described, she embodied a critique of a “woman’s place” in the church hierarchy through her visibility as an itinerant preacher. Bassard’s title of the chapter about Jackson’s writing, “Rituals of Desire: Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality,” echoes the holy trinity at the center of Queering the Soul, but for different reasons. Jackson practiced celibacy independently for twelve years before she discovered the Shaker community, a radical 7 Christian sect within which celibacy was a theological pillar. She believed that God called her to celibacy as a rejection of the ‘sins of the flesh.’ This stance made of her an outcast from the black Christian community because her message of celibacy was disruptive of the patriarchal construction of family vis a vis the woman’s responsibility to regenerate the race. Meanwhile, her race alienated her in the traditional white congregation. In her autobiography, Jackson decries her spiritual and social isolation: The Christian Church would be set before me, with all their Bishops and Elders, all living in the works of the first Adam. I saw nobody lived the life I was called to live. I then entreated to the Lord to tell me why it was that I was called to live a life that nobody lived on the earth. Then in answer to my request, “I have a people on earth that live the life I have called you to live.” (qtd in Bassard 112) Her reference to the “first Adam” is a way of saying that her contemporaries were following Old Testament creeds that had been superseded by Jesus, who is called the “last” or “second Adam.”1 Jackson critiques their sexist practices as the result of misguided interpretation. Also, her message of celibacy is so roundly rejected that she imagines no one else “lived the life.” So she goes to God—it is he, after all, for whom she lives—seeking affirmation and a fellowship community. He grants her both. “After leaving the AME denomination… Jackson met Rebecca Perot, and the two moved to Watervliet [New York] to join the Shaker family. [They] lived together for over thirty-one years, the rest of Jackson’s life, and Perot was often referred to as ‘Rebecca Jackson, Junior’ (Bassard 114). What I notice first about the list of events is the sequence. First Jackson rejects the masculine hierarchy of “bishops and elders”; then God promises her ‘a people’; she finds a black female companion; together they move into the Shaker family where they share a life until Cox’s death. If a memoirist illuminates a particular memory to create a sense of identity through 8 that image (Murdock 11), what are we to make of these series of events? Cox uses her spiritual autobiography to map and justify the controversial religious choices she made. It has been suggested that, had they lived in a later period, Cox and Perot’s relationship would have been interpreted as lesbian. Bassard finds the evidence “inconclusive.” I raise this issue not to argue for or against a lesbian reading of this couple. Perhaps their racial isolation in an otherwise all- white community was enough reason for them to create a sanctuary in which their shared blackness was privileged. Rather, I want to use their story to demonstrate how a queer space of interpretive possibilities is opened up when their religious bond, or their practice of “spirit, culture and sexuality,” is considered in a nonheterosexist paradigm. In short, I want to queer Jackson’s soul. The verb “to queer” comes from the movement within lesbian