2. Turning the subject
After Enlightenment, human beings learned to trust in their own reason more often than previously. In theology, this trust led to the turn to the subject. As a result, human experience has served more readily as a point of departure for theologizing. Along with this shift, a dangerous development occurred. For theologians, the turn to the subject fostered an opaque apprehension of the so-called ideal universal human subject, an abstraction based obviously on the white male bourgeois European. According to M. Shawn Copeland, ‘His embodied presence ‘usurped the position of God’ in an anthropological no to life for all others.’[8] To devastating effect, the turn to the subject created a malignant severing of the ‘the embodied subject from historical or social or religious contexts.’[9] This severing gave rise to a conception of the white male universal human subject as ‘eternal, universal, absolute,’[10] and, antithetically, a conception of black bodies, particularly black women’s bodies and the bodies of other poor women of color, as demonized. This abstract so-called universal human subject brought forward and condoned a ‘totalizing dynamics of domination,’[11] expressed in worldviews that advanced racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of domination.
Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, liberation theology’s option for the poor served as a sharp critique of the white male bourgeois European subject spawned by the Enlightenment and presumed in so much theological work. Indeed, liberation theology’s ‘preferential option for the poor, by definition, accords priority to one group and social location over others – and thus makes the interpretative horizon of that particular group and social location the privileged norm for judging others.’[12] Yet, today we must ask who is the poor that is being presumed? Has the poor become an abstraction, a kind of universal poor subject cut off from context? Is it that the poor functions severed from historical, social, and/or religious contexts? How else are theologians today to understand the paucity of theological responses to the extreme violence in our communities, to the abuse and systematic killing of women, to the ecological destruction of our planet, among other distressing afflictions? Has the option for the poor functioned more as an idea than a concrete reality?
While the twentieth century’s turn to the subject called attention to the human subject implied in theological constructions and liberation theology’s option for the poor made primary the endeavor to speak of God from the persepctive of the poor, the early decades of the twenty-first century clamor for a more critical understanding of the subject. Theology must attend to the material and the historical, argues Althaus-Reid, or we end up constructing ghosts that we refer to as ‘the poor,’ and theological worlds set at a distance from the most pressing questions of our time.[13]
What is needed is a turning the subject away from the subject presummed in the turn to the subject and in the idea of the poor; and, toward the subject presumed when we foreground the material condition of human bodies in history in search of the most exploited and despised among human beings. Copeland’s prescient turning the subject brings to light the dangerous memories of those relegated to the underside of history.[14] The condition of human bodies is changing in our own time with the rising tide of sex trafficking and human trafficking, the abuse and assasination of women, the demonization of racialized bodies, the escalation of disappeared bodies, the savage use of rape as a weapon of war, and similar atrocities. Given the sweep of much of history – and certainly up to and including our own time – the norm of turning the subject would direct our attention to ‘exploited, despised, poor women of color,’[15] a group of human beings whose bodies have been disproportionately objectified, degraded, and destroyed not only in our time but also transgenerationally for many centuries.
What is more, a norm of turning the subject makes prominent the integral relation between physical bodies and the social body. The unnatural or premature deterioration of the physical bodies of poor women of color also reveals the condition of the social body of the people of which these women are a part. For example, the social body in addition to being the economically poor, may also be either racially oppressed, heterosexually oppressed, the oppressed on account of disability, or some combination of these. When a particular social body is devalued and disregarded relative to others human bodies, then this destructive prejudice paves the way for a widespread acquiesence to the negative treatment of poor women of color, often resulting in the violation and destruction of their bodies.[16] Poor women of color belong at the center of our theologizing, not as a form of identity politics, but because our world’s social forces render these women disproportionately vulnerable to systemic suffering. Placing those most vulnerable to systemic suffering at the center of our theologizing holds all of us accountable for the abuse of power in our time and the ways this abuse assaults the bodies of poor women of color.
Notes
[8] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010, p. 89.
[9] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 8.
[10] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 8.
[11] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 85.
[12] R. S. Goizueta, Caminemos Con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995, p. 171.
[13] M. M. ALTHAUS-REID, ‘¿Bién Sonados? The Future of Mystical Connections in Liberation Theology’, Political Theology, 3 (2000); M. M. ALTHAUS-REID, ‘Gustavo Gutiérrez Goes to Disneyland: Theme Park Theologies and the Diaspora of the Discourse of the Popular Theologian in Liberation Theology’, in F. F. SEGOVIA (ed.), Interpreting Beyond Borders (Bible and Postcolonialism), London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.
[14] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 2, 17, 19, 29-38, 89.
[15] M. S. COPELAND, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 89.
[16] M. S. COPELAND Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, p. 8, 60-61.