Abstract
The Indecent Theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid, edited by Lisa Isherwood and Hugo Cόrdova Quero, was created out of a Symposium ‘Fetish Boots and Running Shoes’ held at the University of Winchester 2019 to mark the 10th anniversary in honour of the late Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952–2009). This book engages a plethora of experiences within a group of Asian and Latin America context. It is heartening to see that Marcella’s work is alive as a platform to hear the voices of these communities into speech, voices that may otherwise remain silent on the margins of their communities. The scholars in this book, a number of which are younger PhD candidates, are using Marcella’s work to express and evolve their lived experience through an LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or questioning) lens. An interesting point made by the editors of this book is that the emerging queer authors of each of these articles have to write in an alien language (English) to their own, so have to work twice as hard to be heard. This is because of the Global divide of the North (where the English language dominates in academia) and so the Global South scholars’ voice inevitably does not feed into the academic conversations of the Global North (p. 3). Marcella’s legacy is very much alive and thriving in Latin America and Asia, and because of its versatility, it enables each author the freedom to express what they have to say from their own Queer perspective.
Ana Ester gives us a taste of her ‘Dirty Martini’ in relation to a queer liturgical trans-performance, bringing the social context of the bar seen equally as a sacred meeting place to the altar of the Metropolitan Community Church that she is a member of, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The theoretical becomes praxis as she toasts with Marcella the reality of this celebratory queer transforming process, in the lives of those who engage and witness this liturgical rite ‘preparing the drink’ in their worship.
PhD student Lai-Shan Teresa applies Marcella’s work to highlight the heteronormative family values of Hong Kong’s colonial sociocultural life and the difficulties this presents for the LGBTIQ+ community because of its anti-gay policies. She uses an independent film of a poor lesbian girl sexual stories to illustrate that sexual stories are the very materials for a deviant perverted sexual theology to tell us about human relationships which are to reflect the human–divine interactions (p. 4). This counternarrative holds the power to ‘decolonise the hegemony of hetero-patriarchal iterations of family values’ (p. 4).
Columbian lecturer and scholar Carlos Alejandra Beltrán Acero’s chapter looks at reclaiming queer seeds of theological agriculture. He interrogates ideas around using Marcella’s indecent theology, the dangers of it being misconstrued as privileged, eroticised, the danger of sanitisation of her post-colonial insights and asking whether her work is worthy of critical analysis out of which he asks if so, how we build on her legacy. He moves from global to local, teasing out the human and agricultural interconnected relationships through a queer discourse. The colonising of women and nature go hand in hand, both are related which Beltrán Acero parallels both seeds and the way women are treated sexually in relationship by men. He looks both through a feminist lens and Marcella’s indecent theology in order to promote and see how to grow better relationships both with the environment and each other beyond the social construct of heteronormativity by being more fluid in our sexuality and gender relations.
These are just three authors out of six others from Buenos Aires, Malaysia, Argentina, Indonesia, Japan and Puerto Rico, each of which is using the bridge that Marcella’s work has created. I would highly recommend this book as a necessary read for students, emerging scholars and mature academics alike who are interested in queer theology. These are queer perspectives of brave, brilliant and courageous writings of marginalised authors who come to speak their truth in order to be heard and taken seriously.