Reforming a Theology of Gender: Constructive Reflections on Judith Butler and Queer Theory

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Judith Butler and conservative Christian theology are often perceived to be antithetical on questions of gender. In Reforming a Theology of Gender they are shown to be strange bedfellows. By engaging in dialogue with Butler on her terms–desire, violence, and life–this book absorbs the heart of Butler’s critique, revealing a righteous law and a seductive image in conservative theologies of gender. The law of Adam and Eve manifests in the unjust administration of guilt, grief, and death. By confronting this law, which in fact condemns all in their bodies, further reflection on Butler’s thought leads to thinking about where one finds life in one’s body of death. The seductive image of Adam and Eve is revealed to be a false hope and a site that induces slave morality or body-works-based righteousness. Butler’s voice is strangely prophetic because it calls the church to offer hope and life by reorienting its gaze from the beautiful yet lifeless bodies of Adam and Eve to the bloodied and scarred, risen body of Jesus Christ. Gender, in the end, is shown to be a vocation of becoming what one is not.