Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa

David Spurrett, Kwok Pui Lan, Charlene van der Walt,
Lilian Siwila, and Federico Settler

In May, I attended a conference on Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in Africa sponsored by the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. I was invited to deliver the opening keynote address on theology, gender, and sexuality from a postcolonial perspective.

This was the first time that I had the opportunity to discuss gender and sexuality outside the North Atlantic context and I have gained a lot of insights from the experience. I am very grateful to the organizing team Professors Lilian Siwila and Charlene van der Walt and Dr. Federico Settler for their hospitality during the conference. I hope to continue to learn from my African colleagues.

South Africa is close to my heart. The first rally I participated in the US during the time when I was a graduate student in the 1980s was to protest against the apartheid government in South Africa. In a travel seminar to South Africa several years ago, I had the opportunities to visit churches, seminaries, and social agencies working for women’s rights and HIV/AIDS issues. 

         Keynoters: Kwok Pui Lan, Sinenhlanhla Ngwenya,
Cheryl Anderson, Madipoene Masenya, and Kakay Pamaran

Professor Cheryl Anderson of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary was also a speaker and she delivered a stimulating keynote address on “Intersecting Identities: Exploring Race/Gender/Sexuality Constructs in the United States Today and Their Theological Implications.” Other keynote presenters addressed the issues of “disabled sexuality,” gender and sexuality in the Philippines, and African women’s biblical hermenetics today. In addition, more than 50 papers were presented in the concurrent sessions, with presenters from South Africa and other African countries.

Although I have participated in discussion on gender and sexuality in denominational gatherings, academic institutions, and professional guilds in Asia and the US, the scope of the South African conference was most comprehensive! The papers touched on biblical interpretation, masculinity, public health, queer theology and practice, language and liturgy, ethnography, HIV/AIDS, mass media, and digital humanities.

It was delightful to meet Professor Sylvia Tamale from Uganda at the conference. She was the first female Dean of Law in Uganda and the editor of African Sexualities: A Reader. When I asked her why she took on the massive job and editing a volume of 670 pages, she said that she was tired of hearing what Westerners and outsiders have to say about sexualities in Africa. The media tends to portray African sexualities in sensational and biased ways to reinforce the colonial construct that Africa is a “dark continent.” For example, the media widely reported that Uganda passed an Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2013. But the Constitutional Court of Uganda ruled the Act invalid in 2014.

As an Anglican, I am particularly interested in the debates on human sexuality in the African churches and societies. The Episcopal Church in the US took a progressive stance on LGBTQ issues. In 2003 the first openly gay bishop Gene Robinson was consecrated in New Hampshire. Later, the Church resolved that the call to ministry is open to all, including transgendered persons. In 2015, the Church decided that the rite of marriage is available to all people, regardless of gender. These practices have been looked at with scorn by some African bishops, who even declared that there are no LGBTQ people in Africa!

At the conference in Pietermaritzburg, LGBTQ issues were fully included in the discussion. A particular highlight was the discussion of the politics of race, sexuality, and nation-building. Participants discussed whether the labels LGBTQ were suitable in African societies and whether there are indigenous terms. Others discussed alternative forms of sexual practices in Africa and queer Christian voices in charismatic churches. Professor Melanie Judge has published Blackwashing Homophobia: Violence and the Politics of Sexuality, Gender and Race. She examines the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class identities and the politics of violence in a postcolonial context.

We watched a documentary prepared by the “Destabilizing Heteronormativity Project,” in which civic and religious leaders talked about their work educating and supporting people to challenge heteronormativity and cisnormativity. The conference included NGO partners, such as the Gay and Lesbian Network, Inclusive and Affirming Ministries, Global Interfaith LGBTQ Network, and Queers without Borders.

Since I was so stimulated by the conference, I hope a similar conference can be organized for academics, activists, and NGO partners in Asia. Questions of sex tourism, prostitution, LGBTQ rights, gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS have long been important issues in Asian feminist theology.

I returned from the conference with renewed commitment to explore further the intersection of gender, sexuality and religion from postcolonial perspectives. Future research issues and some of the resources include: constitutional rights, human rights, and sexuality (Grace Y. Kao, Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World); psychic and national trauma and gender-based violence (Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce, Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry, and Politics), African churches, homosexuality, and US Christian Right (Kapya Kaoma, Globalizing the Culture Wars); and African postcolonial thought (Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony and Critique of Black Reason; and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader). 

Religion, Theology, and Class

Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence edited by Jeorg Rieger has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book wants to re-emphasize class as a critical category in theology and ethics, because people tend to focus more on gender, race, and sexuality issues in North America. Divided into three parts, the book presents new definitions of class, situates religion and class in the context of early Christianity and the United States, and examines the relation between class, poverty, gender and race. 

Gary J. Dorrien, Stephanie Mitchem, Santiago H. Slabodsky, Susan B. Thistlethwaite, and I reviewed the book at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on November 24, 2013 at Baltimore, Maryland. My review used a postcolonial perspective to examine the contribution of the book.

Postcolonial theorists have criticized the limits of the concept of class in classical Marxist theory, based as it was on the development of industrialized and capitalist societies. It is less useful to study pre-industrialized societies and other forms of oppression in society. They have also pointed out the Orientalist biases in Marxist writings.

In this book, the contributors seek to bring the concept of class up to date in the context of global capitalism. The nuanced and pluralistic approach is most helpful and it points to the difficulties of formulating a generally accepted theory of class. Less is said in the book, however, about the vision or shape of an alternative global economic system and the role religion and theology will take part in it.

While the poor are often mentioned, they are discussed in the context of Marxist or other theories. The Occupy Movement is mentioned in several chapters and offered as a clear example of people rising against the transnational capitalist class. In addition, Vítor Westhelle speaks briefly about the transgression and resistance of migrant people, while Pamela K. Brubaker refers to the factory workers in Mexico, who struggle to live out according to the values of sustenance economy in relation to transnational production. Toward the end of her chapter, Brubaker also mentions Vandana Shiva’s work on sustenance economy and nature’s economy to contest the dominant market economy.

Corey D. B. Walker’s chapter presents a sustained reflection on class from a subaltern perspective by offering an account of “thinking blackness” in the work of black religious scholars and theologians. He challenges us to work for “a categorical infusion of an/other logic the opens up onto new and that in/forms novel conceptual intelligibility as well as the orientation of human life.” Walker finds Walter Mignolo’s concept of “colonial difference” and Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power” valuable for his project.

Edward P. Antonio’s important essay on “Black Theology and Postcolonial Discourse” in the Cambridge Companion to Black Theology has brought to my attention the often unexplored overlapping concerns of black and postcolonial theologies and possibilities for mutual learning.

Joerg Rieger

I would like to see the following areas articulated in future discussion about religion, theology, and class. Postcolonial theorists discuss the intimate relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, such as mutual inscription, collaboration, attraction, and repulsion. The book often presents stark contrast between the rich and the poor and toward the end, Rieger says that dualism is necessary to articulate the realities of class struggle. But class in today’s global capitalism must be seen as more fluid and multifaceted, and indeed in relational terms.

While the exploitation by the transnational capitalist elites should be criticized, we need to investigate the role of the poor and the middle class in collaborating with or sustaining the global economic system. This is not to blame the victims, but to see how global capitalism interpellates different kinds of subjects through its ideologies and practices. Without articulating how and why the poor are absorbed, coopted, and bought into the system and become the instrument of their own oppression, we cannot see through the maze to propose alternatives and mobilize resistance.

I hope that gender and sexuality will feature more prominently in future discussion of religion, theology, and class. Except for Brubaker’s chapter, other chapters have either left these categories out or mentioned them only in passing. The work of Marcella Althaus-Reid has convincingly shown the intersection between heterosexism and colonialism and empire building. We need to investigate for example how gender is racialized and has a class dimension, how race is genderized, and inflected by class, and how class intersects with race and gender especially in the consumerist culture.

Finally, I would like to see contributions from China, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe as their move from Communism to adopting capitalist measures will offer another perspective to look at how religion and theology is inflected by class and economic injustice in these rapidly changing societies.  I hope the publication of the book and this panel will stimulate further interdisciplinary research and conversation.

A New Wave of Scholarship

I came to the United States in 1984 to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was an exciting time to do feminist theology and religious studies. Womanist ethics just began to emerge, as Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon had just completed a dissertation on the subject at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. I count it as a blessing that she was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School, on the other side of the Cambridge Common.

The mid-1980s saw the paradigm shifts in feminist studies in religion, as womanist, mujerista/Latina, Asian and Asian American women began to articulate their own theological understanding. If Womanspirit Rising (1979) was a reference text for our field, which contains essays by white women, we had the first reader by radical women of color, This Bridge Called Our Back (1981).

We began to discuss multiple oppressions and multiple identities, and the need to integrate race, class, and gender into our analyses. We challenged white women who have universalized their middle-class, white experience as if women are all the same.

In the past several years, I participated in a group investigating the intersections among race, sexuality, and postcoloniality, since we were using critical race theory, queer studies, and postcolonial theory in our work. We wanted to see what are the commonalities and differences if we looked at the intersections through different racial lenses, sexual practices, and (post)colonial experiences.

I am glad to see many new works have been published that push us to see the intersections in radically new ways. The subtitle of Strange Affinities is worth paying attention to: “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization.” The cutting-edge essays explore the production of racialized, genderized, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions or the “strange affinities.” Even the headings of the different sections make me think, “alternative identifications,” “undisciplined knowledges,” and “unincorporated territories, interrupted times.”

If you are one of those who think psychoanalysis is nothing more than a mind trick of middle-class Europeans, think again. Unconscious Dominions says, “By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism.” In Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Ranjana Khanna reveals “the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity.” The collection of essays in Unconscious Dominions pushes the envelope even further, with the ambitious subtitle “Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.” The contributions touch on French West Africa, Algeria, Australian aborigine, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti. It is nothing less than “psychoanalysis writing back.”

If you are puzzled by why the police and officials used so much force to harass and arrest the peaceful Occupiers, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State will offer you much food for thought. Chandan Reddy examines “a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational.” Remember that Newt Gingrich told the Occupiers to “go get a job right after you take a bath”?

If I belong to the generation that has pushed against the boundary of the white canon and scholarship, I see a new wave of scholarship is on the horizon. This new wave radically interrogates assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, culture, national citizenship, global sovereignty and global futures. Brilliant and groundbreaking, these new works stretch our static concepts and methods, introduce the new vocabularies of globalized unconscious and fragmentation of sovereignties, and investigate the connection between violence and social formations of difference. It theorizes the nation and the global in ways much more sophistically than what our generation has done.

There is a time lag between religious scholarship and scholarship in other disciplines, usually about 10-15 years. Edward W. Said published Orientalism in 1978, and the first essay on postcolonial biblical criticism by R. S. Sugirtharajah was not published until 1994. The first book on postcolonial theology appeared in 2004.

I sincerely hope that the upcoming generation of religious scholars will catch up sooner and engage with this new wave of scholarship in earnest.