Queering is a Process, Not a Destination

July 1, 2024

A Conversation with Dr. Kate Ott and members of the Queer Theoethics Class

In her article, “Taking Children’s Moral Lives Seriously,” Dr. Kate Ott—Garrett’s Jerre and Mary Joy Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics—argues that ethics must “shift from a practice of thinking and doing through logical, independent rationality to an interdependent encounter that requires imagination and creative practices like play or improvisation.” For last semester’s Queer Theoethics class, Dr. Ott implemented a curriculum and pedagogy designed to put these ideals into practice. “The class examined how the theoretical discipline of queer theory intersects into theology and ethics,” Dr. Ott explains. “Our work together was not just to identify the kind of normativity in everyday systems, but also to ask how those same normativities affect us in the classroom.” Since queer theory, as a discipline, is intently focused on destabilizing norms, it’s fitting that the class disrupted hierarchical separation between professor and students to favor a more collaborative approach.

“It was a very exciting course,” says PhD student Grant Showalter-Swanson, “We spent a lot of time reflecting on how often queerness is ascribed to identity, moving toward thinking about queer and queering as a verb, a process that enables us to imagine something more expansive than those essentializing claims.” For Dr. Ott, this understanding was a key part of how she wanted students to change how they thought about the discipline. “Queer theologies and ethics are different than LGBTQ studies,” she says. “Part of queer theory is to help us think about the ways that spaces are normatively defined through gendered and sexual constructions. But queer theory now goes far beyond that: considering how indigenous knowledge systems come into play in conversation with queer theory, how womanist ethics and theology push back against the normative whiteness that also shapes a gender and sexual system.”

This work is deeply personal, and so it was both inevitable and intentional for students to bring their lived experiences into the weekly readings. Part of the course’s structure asked class members to prepare a report on works of queer theory, so colleagues could interact with more books than they could personally read. When MDiv studnt Luke Miltz read Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, he found himself confronting many of the systems in which he was raised in Kansas. “Homonationalism really hit home, because what acceptance I found there as a gay man was always conditional,” he says. “Like, I paid dues to the Log Cabin Republicans as a junior in high school. Or, I’ve been to the Middle East a few times, and when I come home folks will says things like, ‘They don’t like you over there,’ and talk about how Islam is radically homophobic.” As someone who is studying how to strengthen interreligious engagement, Miltz says queer theoethics provides an invaluable addition to that work. “Part of what I feel called to is gently informing other Christians that we are not ‘right’ in what we believe,” he says, “We’re no more ‘correct’ in what we believe to be existential reality than anyone else.” The space queerness carves for fluidity and ambiguity is a powerful intervention against the kind of religious certainty that too often breeds religious supremacy.While queer theory and LGBTQIA+ identity are not synonymous, there is certainly overlap, and part of what MAPM student Millie Piper found was ways to approach her own lesbian identity with expansive curiosity. “I came into seminary with questions about whether it was okay to be queer,” she remembers. “But I came into this class more concerned with, ‘What are the beauties and intricacies of being queer?’” In readings like Indecent Theology by Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid and Queer Soul and Queer Theology by Laurel Schneider and Thelathia Nikki Young, she found new perspectives on embodiment. “This idea of a bodily, even explicit theology put into words something I understood but had never heard before,” she says. “In some ways, a despiritualizing of the incarnation.” It’s a paradox that sits at the heart of so much queer thought: By leaning into mystery, we find surer ground; in moving beyond a stultified spirituality we uncover holiness. That dismantling of formal structures can present its own challenges, however, Piper notes. “If queer theoethics is committed to being antinormative,” she asks, “how can it flourish without tearing itself apart?”

This tension between deconstruction and constructive meaning-making is part of why Dr. Ott uses queer ethics in her own scholarly work. Though she herself is a cisheterosexual woman, she observes that the gifts borne by queer perspectives are by no means limited to LGBTQIA+ people. “My primary work is sexuality and technology with teens and young adults,” she says. “If I can’t think out of queer frameworks personally, I shouldn’t be doing this work because I’m not listening to folks’ experience or the shifts that must be made for us to do more liberative work.” Teaching this class is, in some ways, a tacit proclamation of this central truth: A world shaped by the claims of queerness will be freer for all people. “A liberation theologian at my core, I have rarely, other than being female-identified, been in the most marginalized of communities that we say we want to give preferential option,” she reflects. “It is part of my theological and ethical commitment to both listen to folks who have minoritized experiences and also contest the kinds of theology and ethics I do using the theory that comes from those lived experiences that move us past white supremacist or cisgender approaches.”

Intersection with other liberatory frames is part of what Grant Showalter-Swanson is taking away from the course. “A constant question in my work is where there can be coalitional conversations between queer theoethics and the work of decolonization,” he says. “The ways in which we think about gender and sexual expression in the West—and how we even approach these conversations in the Western Academy—is deeply steeped in traditions that are limiting and colonizing for all people.” The ethical locus of this class, nestled between self-examination and group interaction, provided a liminal space where they could explore new ideas while also being held accountable to others’ experience. “Finding constructive ways of imagining gender and sexuality beyond Western paradigms, it’s really exciting—even hopeful—work,” he confesses. “Centering people’s lived experiences, particularly marginalized and oppressed folks, leads us toward a more innovative and expansive future.” Speaking with Dr. Ott and students from the class, this expansive ethos is what came through most clearly. “Doing Christian ethics in relationship to the institutional inertia of the Church, this class really gave us the chance to think through what theology could look like if people had the space to be creative,” Luke Miltz observes. “How would we be describing God, if we were truly evaluating our human experiences of God?—something that’s very Methodist to do.”

Ultimately, that encouragement toward self-determination—becoming the theologian-in-residence in their own lives—is something he felt Dr. Ott’s guidance nurtured. “She always says, ‘An experience can be a learning experience without you having to report on it or prove it in some way. I don’t have to validate it for it to have been important,’” he recalls. “It’s one of the most impactful things I’ve ever heard in higher education, valuable for theology but also just for forming us as scholars.” Dr. Ott expresses her own gratitude for how joyfully the class adopted this approach. “Within the class, burgeoning queer theory ethicists get to find the points that meant the most to them and their lived experiences,” she says. “It’s a privilege to help them contest some of those legacies.” For Grant Showalter-Swanson, the collective approach to pedagogy was as important as the subject content. “Part of the queering process is having boundaries for safety but also being open to the messiness, the creativity, the innovation,” he adds. With a grin, Millie Piper affirms his assessment. “Apart from being able to engage with the course materials in a way that’s more interesting than a lecture, we also became closer as a class than most—because we were answering each other’s questions, and adding questions on top of questions,” she laughs. “It was one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken.”