Pub Date : 2019-08-20DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0006
Melissa E. Sanchez
This chapter focuses on lyrics written from the point of view of the unfaithful lover. Theological concepts of charity, forgiveness, and confession can inform secular discussions of erotic accountability: what we owe those we love and those who love us. Understanding accountability in the dual senses of responsibility and narration illuminated by Judith Butler, this chapter considers how aesthetic creation—the struggle to tell a coherent story of the self and its desires—constitutes an unattainable ethical obligation. The devotional and libertine poetry of John Donne, like the writings of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin before him, represents confession not as what Michel Foucault called an act of truth, but as an imaginative acknowledgment of guilt in potentia. Donne’s attention to the entanglement of matter and spirit resists the ideals of romance and rationality that have often been deemed the signal characteristics of “human” sexuality; instead, he writes from the perspective of a being coopted by foreign forces within and without. Counterintuitively, Donne is at his most religious when he defends promiscuous, impermanent, and impure intimacies. For the indiscriminate desire that Donne’s speakers pursue is a secular approximation of divine forgiveness and caritas, the arbitrary yet generous love for imperfect creatures regardless of merit.
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Pub Date : 2019-08-20DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0004
Melissa E. Sanchez
This chapter traces the effects of Pauline and Augustinian soteriology on Protestant views of marriage. The Reformation is conventionally understood as elevating conjugal love above the lifelong celibacy privileged by the Catholic Church. But this redemptive vision of marriage overlooks a key argument of leading reformers like Luther and Calvin: both deemed marriage superior to celibacy not because marriage sanctifies shameful creaturely desires, but because it publicly acknowledges them. This view of marriage as humbling confession of impurity runs counter to the ideals assumed by the US Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the majority affirmed the constitutional right to marriage equality on the grounds that marriage confers unique dignity. By contrast, Protestant anxiety that nuptial sex shares the excess and indignity of fornication structures the sexual and racial fantasies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion. When Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets cast poetry as a reproductive technology free of the contamination of lust, they valorize not only same-sex desire but also the preservation of specifically “fair”—white—life and culture. Spenser reveals that the ideal of chaste romance generates sadomasochistic fantasies that naturalize white male sexual violence and racialize female innocence.
这一章追溯了保罗和奥古斯丁的救赎论对新教婚姻观的影响。传统上，宗教改革被理解为将夫妻之爱提升到天主教会所赋予的终身独身之上。但这种救赎性的婚姻观忽视了路德和加尔文等主要改革者的一个关键论点:他们都认为婚姻优于独身，不是因为婚姻使可耻的肉体欲望神圣化，而是因为它公开承认了这些欲望。这种将婚姻视为谦卑地承认自己不纯洁的观点，与美国最高法院在奥贝格费尔诉霍奇斯案(Obergefell v. Hodges)中所设想的理想背道而驰，在该案中，多数法官肯定了婚姻平等的宪法权利，理由是婚姻赋予了独特的尊严。相比之下，新教徒担心婚姻中的性行为会分享通奸的过度和侮辱，这构成了莎士比亚十四行诗和斯宾塞的《阿莫雷蒂》和《上节课》中的性幻想和种族幻想。当莎士比亚的生殖十四行诗将诗歌作为一种不受欲望污染的生殖技术时，它们不仅强调了同性的欲望，而且还强调了对“公平”白人生活和文化的保留。斯宾塞揭示，贞洁浪漫的理想产生了施虐受虐幻想，使白人男性的性暴力自然化，使女性的纯真种族化。
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Pub Date : 2019-08-20DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0003
Melissa E. Sanchez
This chapter examines how an ideal of monogamy helps sustain intersecting gendered and racial hierarchies. Woman of color feminism has long censured the association of female sexual respectability with whiteness and social privilege, but this work generally dates the advent of that association to the establishment of modern slavery and colonialism. William Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, register the development of a fiction of somatic, heritable whiteness as a correlate of respectable sexuality, one disseminated in classical discourses celebrating male friendship and in imperial allegories of sexual conquest. Yet in their depiction of a three-way affair between the poet, a “fair” young man, and a “black” mistress, the sonnets conspicuously fail to cordon off rational and mutual “fair” male friendship from the humiliating enslavement of “black” female appetite. Instead, drawing on the Pauline theory of sin and grace that influenced thinkers from Martin Luther and John Calvin to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the sonnets dissolve the oppositions ostensibly embodied by the poet’s “two loves”—agency and passivity, mastery and submission, fidelity and promiscuity, purity and pollution—to imagine intimacies beyond the couple.
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Pub Date : 2019-08-20DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0002
Melissa E. Sanchez
This chapter analyzes the theological roots of secular understandings of erotic temporality and fidelity. It begins with a discussion of Saint Paul’s Epistles, in which the radical humiliation that manifests divine love is necessarily beyond human capacity. It then turns to Saint Augustine’s conviction that the divided human will renders confession incomplete and conversion provisional. Based on the premise that as a human creature he can always change, Augustine’s depiction of faith as a result of miraculous passion is cause for optimism as well as anxiety about who he will be in the future. Salvation for Augustine inheres in the consequent realization that professions of faith are in fact ambivalent prayers for it. Finally, this chapter traces the centrality of Pauline and Augustinian theology to the structure of fidelity in Francesco Petrarch’s secular love lyrics, which limn in excruciating detail the mille rivolte—the thousand turns, revolts, and returns—of his competing attachments to Laura, God, and his own worldly ambition. These poems confront a fragmented self incapable of the conviction and fidelity to which it desperately aspires but does not entirely want.
{"title":"The Queerness of Christian Faith","authors":"Melissa E. Sanchez","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes the theological roots of secular understandings of erotic temporality and fidelity. It begins with a discussion of Saint Paul’s Epistles, in which the radical humiliation that manifests divine love is necessarily beyond human capacity. It then turns to Saint Augustine’s conviction that the divided human will renders confession incomplete and conversion provisional. Based on the premise that as a human creature he can always change, Augustine’s depiction of faith as a result of miraculous passion is cause for optimism as well as anxiety about who he will be in the future. Salvation for Augustine inheres in the consequent realization that professions of faith are in fact ambivalent prayers for it. Finally, this chapter traces the centrality of Pauline and Augustinian theology to the structure of fidelity in Francesco Petrarch’s secular love lyrics, which limn in excruciating detail the mille rivolte—the thousand turns, revolts, and returns—of his competing attachments to Laura, God, and his own worldly ambition. These poems confront a fragmented self incapable of the conviction and fidelity to which it desperately aspires but does not entirely want.","PeriodicalId":394925,"journal":{"name":"Queer Faith","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115392649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-20DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0005
Melissa E. Sanchez
This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.
{"title":"The Optimism of Infidelity","authors":"Melissa E. Sanchez","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.","PeriodicalId":394925,"journal":{"name":"Queer Faith","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130553883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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