Voyeur Bodies, Liberating Identities

Abstract

“If you visit my city, Buenos Aires, please try and go see the women lemon vendors who sit in the streets of some neighborhoods.”1 No, rather, I welcome you now to Buenos Aires. In your theological imagination, I welcome you. I, Marcella, will be your guide for a few sentences. Here is the marketplace of Constitución, where my mother would buy chickens still warm. Do you see those stray dogs over there sleeping quietly in the door of the abandoned building? This is my barrio, San Telmo. Shall we sit for a few minutes over cortado? It is a good place to think – to think about postmodernism, liberation, the destruction of grand meta-narratives. The first few pages of Indecent Theology invite us into Marcella AlthuasReid’s world. She tantalizes our senses: sights, sounds, tastes, and smells. Bodies come to life. Places materialize. Histories swirl with their tangled and complicated interplay. Our eyes roam. We not only see women selling lemons in the marketplace; our journey continues under their skirts, into their baskets. We hover in the midst of their interactions. Women without underwear, whose musky smell mixes with the scent of lemons and market. Skirts lifted: exposed, smelled, seen by Althaus-Reid. Skirts lifted: exposed, smelled, seen by us.