An Alternative to Gender Complementarity: The Body as Existential Category in the Catholic Tradition

Theology of the Body

Roman Catholic gender essentialism has a deep root in Greek philosophy. When Aristotle wrote about reproduction, he incisively deduced a theory that looks similar to our understanding of genetics today. Men contribute a kind of “blueprint” from which the new person emerges. The error in Aristotle’s thinking, however, is that only the man contributes to this blueprint, while women, their blood specifically, contributes the raw material. ¹ This dichotomy, in which women are connected to the earth, the passive material of creation, and men are connected to the organizing active principle of creation, to God, has reiterated itself countless times in Catholic theology.

The patristic fathers interpret Genesis to claim that Eve’s creation shows women are not made in the image of God. Tertullian writes, “Do you not know that you are Eve? … [Y]ou are the devil’s gateway … How easily you destroyed man, the image of God.” ² Clement of Alexandria taught that it is “shameful for woman to think of what nature she has.” ³ Origen and Augustine connect original sin and its transmission with women’s materiality and carnality. In the Middle Ages, Bonaventure and Peter the Lombard wrote that woman is connected to sensuality and so we are less connected to God. ⁴ For Thomas Aquinas, women are naturally “defective” in their passive procreative capacity, which leads him to conclude that “in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman.” ⁵ Our secondary nature as women makes us unlike God. Being a man means that one is, by nature, like God. This is not just anti-woman sentiment sprinkled throughout the history of theology. These examples fashion the foundational understanding of the human as male/female. Each rhetorical act a sedimentation in the bedrock. To be a woman is to be passive, carnal, tempting, and wild. To be a man is to be active, logical, and in charge.

Pope John Paul II developed the most recent iteration of this binary in his TOB over the course of his weekly homilies from 1979 through 1984. The difference is that rather than describing these differences as evidence that women are less godlike than men, John Paul II describes these same differences as evidence that men and women have different but equal and compatible gifts, and together as man and woman image God.

Commenting on Genesis he writes, similar to his theological predecessors, that women’s nature comes from being created as man’s helpmate in reproduction, and sex is the means of that dynamic. “The woman stands before the man as a mother, the subject of the new human life that is conceived and develops in her, and from her is born into the world. Likewise, the mystery of man’s masculinity, that is, the generative and fatherly meaning of his body, is also thoroughly revealed.” ⁶ Here we see the original Aristotelian dynamic. A woman stands before man as the passive means of his reproduction, as mother-potentiality. Conversely, the male body is “generative.”

For women, one’s fulfillment and dignity is derived from receptivity to insemination, as exemplified in Mary, whose “yes” to God maps “the culminating point, the archetype, of the personal dignity of women.” ⁷ The fulfilment of what it means to be a human as a woman is the ability to receive one’s husband and his child in her body. For men, the fulfillment of what it means to be a male human is to inseminate, to be actively (pro)creating. ⁸ This passive–active, inseminated–inseminator, female–male dichotomy characterizes not just the body, but the being of the person. The person is male or female, and the “body expresses person.” ⁹ This stands in distinction from Aquinas, who held that men and women share a human nature, and that it is in our secondary sexed nature as the passive material of procreation that we lack the means of imaging God. By offering a double ontology that requires the complimentary unity of male and female to image God, John Paul II is able to argue that the apotheosis of sexed personhood is licit reproductive heterosexual sex. ¹⁰

John Paul II argues that men and women are equal in this complimentary unity by introducing the philosophy of personalism. ¹¹ Personalism is the idea that the value of a person is the criterion by which one should judge the meaning of work, commerce, or relationships. An anthropology that reduces persons to mere producers and measures their value by their products is sinful. People are never a means; their value is always the end. ¹² John Paul II claims that our culture frames and celebrates sexuality as a means of possessing one another. Sexuality is about taking pleasure rather than giving oneself. He makes the counter-claim that a person’s dignity is authenticated not in what he or she possesses but what she or he gives freely to the other in a sexual relationship. For John Paul II, it is precisely in gendered difference that men and women are able to be freely as gift to one another.

In the Genesis narrative and in the context of marriage commitment, women are given as “gift” to men as the “helpmate” in procreation. ¹³ “The man not only accepts the gift. At the same time he is received as a gift by the woman.” ¹⁴ Both men and women are a gift to the other, and receive the other as gift. For John Paul II, what a woman gives is precisely “her own person and femininity.” ¹⁵ For a man, the reception of this feminine gift and giving of himself “manifests the specific essence of his masculinity.” ¹⁶ It is therefore only as man and woman that two people are able to be as gift to one another. TOB maintains the age-old gender binary that casts women as passive material and men as active form. But John Paul II elevates female “receptivity” to the status of an equal-but-opposite gift to be given, like male “activity,” in reproduction. ¹⁷

However, John Paul II’s maintenance of a gender binary renders him unable to sustain the aim of his turn to personalism. He reduces the fullness of personhood to a notion of male and female defined as producers, and measures their value by their sexual products. In this ontology, women’s bodies, as an expression of their constitution, are defined by the function of child-bearing. Men are defined by the function of inseminating. This binary, and the limits it sets, corrupts and degrades what it means to understand ourselves and one another as John Paul II intends: as free humans, able to give ourselves in relationship with one another. Contrary to personalism, the value of a person in TOB is circumscribed by what one can produce. Even as it seeks to elevate the position of women, by restricting personhood to a gendered binary predicated on reproduction, TOB denies full humanity—the ability to give oneself to others and to God freely—to all.

My aim below is to present an embodied ontology—an account of being that begins with the body—which holds to the goal of personalism in TOB, to be freely a gift to one another, but across sexual difference and across different kinds of relationality.

The Body as Existential Category

To understand the meaning of the body, I do not rely on an a priori understanding of sex, but instead on history as that which gives the body meaning and legibility in society. The argument is that one cannot dissociate the material reality of our bodies—skin color, sexual characteristics, size, height, muscles, fat, wrinkles, hair—from the regulatory norms, the taboos and ideals shaped by centuries of narratives that inform the meaning and signification of our material bodies. Our bodies bear histories of power dynamics. The histories of slavery, the histories of patriarchy, the histories of colonialism, histories of ableism and more are reiterated in our bodies, and give them social significance today. The body is its social meaning, all the way down.

This reiteration is what theorist Judith Butler calls “performativity.” By “performative” she means that the body has meaning because of histories, different symbols and chains of meaning, that are expressed in and give meaning to our bodies. Butler writes that bodies are “the effect of the dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects.” ¹⁸ We all “perform” who we are, not in the sense of an actor who can choose what to say and how to dress as an expression of self, but as an actor who cannot choose, embodying a script and a blocking that has already been set out by history. Some of us embody chains of meaning that are protected by historically cemented social and cultural norms, others of us are violently rejected by them. Embodiedness is a way to describe one’s dependence for one’s being on systems of power in history that are beyond one’s self.

To be a woman or man, then, is not an ontological reality, but a series of historical constructions which give real social meanings to our bodies. Moreover, it is a social construction with a flawed biological basis. There is no biological binary. There are women born without a uterus, without ovaries or vaginal muscles, women with genetic disorders that veer from the usual “XX” chromosome placement. Many people are born with ambiguous genitalia. Secondary sexual characteristics are even more assorted and varied. Women have hysterectomies and mastectomies. Many women may have a few things in common, but when it comes to an essentialist proposition, no one characteristic or property is shared among all members of the group identified as “male” or “female.” While there may be difference, there is no basis for a biological binary.

To claim an embodied identity as a man or woman is not, then, to make a “ontological” or scientific distinction. It is a description of one’s dependence for being on systems of meaning in history that stretch far beyond one’s self.

If it is not, as TOB articulates it, as a male or female body that one experiences God, then how does one experience God? How does one experience God with a body that performs its meaning based on history?

I find Johann Baptist Metz offers the best way to understand what it means to rely on history, on systems of meaning that stretch beyond one’s self, to give an account of oneself in relationship with God. In what follows I describe Metz’s thought, and apply it to the constructivist understanding of the body I laid out above. My argument examines three elements of Metz’s thought: poverty of spirit, suffering in history, and existential philosophy, and presents each as an integral aspect of performative embodiedness. The outcome allows us to understand the body as the means of human self-understanding in relationship with God in history. The subsequent sections of the essay then go on to tease out the implications of this synthesis of Metz and Butler.

First, the importance of poverty of spirit. In the forward to his first monograph, Poverty of Spirit (PS), Metz argues that the fullness of being human is found in the acceptance and love of the self as “poor.” He writes, “To become human means to become ‘poor,’ to have nothing that one might brag about before God.” ¹⁹ Metz distinguishes this poverty of being from poverty of spirit. He defines the poverty of spirit, writing, “We are all beggars. We are all members of a species that is not sufficient unto itself.” ²⁰ Poverty of being is neediness (Bedürftigkeit), a constitutive inability to be a complete subject without others. Poverty of spirit is the acceptance of one’s poverty of being in relationship with God. Because humans are free, one may choose self-acceptance, which is “surrender to the ecstatic poverty of our being, through ‘poverty of spirit.’” ²¹ Alternatively, one may choose self-alienation by rejecting the poverty of being.

Accepting one’s poverty before God is not a diminishment of the subject: “God brightens our true greatness as human beings. Because of the divine transcendence, the world and we do not wither away in God’s presence but assume our own proper value.” ²² Poverty of being is thus not only the essence, but once accepted as poverty of spirit, it is the fulfillment of what it means to be human. A resonance with Metz’s mentor Karl Rahner, SJ, is clear: it is only in relationship with God that one may become an “authentic human being.” The “Yes” to one’s fundamental neediness before others and before God is a “Yes” to being human.

Jesus’ life and death are the preeminent example of this relationship of poverty of spirit between humans and God. Metz writes that the temptations of Christ are assaults on the poverty of Jesus. Offering Jesus the possibility of being like God, “Satan wants the Incarnation to be an empty show, where God dresses up in human costume but doesn’t really commit totally to the role. The devil wants to make the Incarnation a piece of mythology, a divine puppet show.” ²³ As a piece of mythology, the Incarnation would be a story that suggests to humanity that there is nothing to fear, nothing unknown, nothing outside of humanity’s control. The Incarnation would be a story letting one believe one was not, in fact, “poor” before God. Mythology tells humanity that it is God. Christianity instead describes a God, Christ, who says “No” to these temptations of mythology. Jesus’ “No” to Satan is his “Yes” to humanity and its impoverishment. By choosing death, Jesus becomes utterly human and poor: Jesus “reached his destiny, stretched taut between a despising earth that had rejected him and a faceless heaven thundering God’s ‘no’ to sinful humankind. He paid the price of futility. He became utterly poor.” ²⁴ In this death, Jesus said “Yes” to being human.

It is precisely and only as body that a “Yes” to poverty of being is possible. Human being is “the ecstatic appearance of Being, and becoming fully human is an ever-growing appropriation of the ecstasis of being.” ²⁵ While human being “appears” to be self-contained, it is ecstatic; to be human is to be beyond one’s self, comprised of that upon which one is dependent. This ecstasis is the fundamental neediness or “poverty” which humanity cannot escape. Becoming human depends on the world beyond one’s self.

As a body, one is dependent on histories of meaning that are ecstatic, beyond one’s self, in order to perform/become. Embodiedness reveals a material dependence on history for being. Embodiedness is our poverty of being, it is what makes us poor before God and one another. Poverty of spirit, the “Yes” to our poverty of being, is a “Yes” to ourselves as embodied beings before God.

Second, we might reflect on the importance of suffering in history. In his essay, “A Passion for God” (PG) Metz returns to the theme of “poverty of spirit” almost thirty years after writing PS. ²⁶ In this essay, we see two important shifts. “Poverty of being” is no longer dependence on history in general; it becomes dependence on specific histories of suffering. “Poverty of spirit” similarly shifts from a radical acceptance of one’s dependence before God to a radical cry before God for justice for those who have suffered.

Metz’s development of the concept of poverty of being in light of the suffering of others in history is clear in his discussion of the Exodus narrative. Metz explicitly defines the notion of poverty as the inability to forget and mythologize suffering in history:

Israel was incapable of successfully distancing itself from the contradictions, horrors and abysses of reality—by mythologizing or idealizing the contradictions of life, for example Israel knew no mythological or ideational riches of spirit with which it could lift itself above its own fears, the alienation of exile, and the history of suffering that was continually breaking into its midst. ²⁷

By mythology Metz means the attempt to mimic nature in order to control it, ridding humanity of fear and the danger of the unknown. ²⁸ Mythologizing for Metz is the opposite of the virtue of poverty. Poverty of being is remembering events in history—events of disruption, suffering, or exile—that make the illusion of control or safety impossible today. Impoverishment before God is having “little aptitude for forgetting” ²⁹ these histories of suffering, while at the same time showing little capacity to let these memories become resolved in consoling and idealistic narratives. Remembering history without being consoled by it is to understand that one’s own life is not protected from the threats that affected the past.

This leads to the second shift. Metz describes poverty of spirit as dependence on God to make meaning of history without mythologizing or being consoled by it. Poverty of spirit is no longer simply the acceptance of one’s dependence on others, it is the acceptance of one’s dependence on others’ suffering in history for one’s own meaning today, and a cry to God to change that status quo. It is the recognition that others’ suffering in history shapes who one is today, and the turn to God to redeem that history in order to redeem the self today. Poverty of spirit therefore orients the subject to God in the face of other’s suffering.

When one mythologizes the past, closing the meaning of past suffering with consoling narratives, one does not need God. One is not dependent on God to redeem or make sense of history. When one does not forget the past or close its meaning, one is dependent on God for hope and salvation. This is what Metz means when he writes, “Israel remained ultimately an eschatological ‘landscape of cries,’ a landscape of memory and expectation.” ³⁰ Remembering histories of suffering, one cries out to God in dependence—in a spirit of poverty—with the hope of justification and redemption for history. In this way, poverty of spirit is a virtue of hope, which does not forget, as opposed to the optimism of mythology, which is blind to the past.

For Metz, if one is to have a relationship with God, one cannot forget suffering in history. Poverty of spirit means one must not only wrestle with one’s contingency in history when seeking a relationship with God. One must wrestle with being contingent upon histories of suffering. In this way poverty of spirit is developed into “Leiden an Gott,” a cry for justice and the redemption of history. ³¹ Like poverty of spirit, Leiden an Gott elevates the intrinsic human “incapacity to forget,” or “poverty of being,” toward hope for self-knowledge against the horizon of God in the company of all those in history who have suffered.

Embodiedness is the means by which we can best understand how one is constituted by histories of suffering. One’s body is history in dialogue with the present. When I walk down the street as a white woman, histories of violence and protection shape every interaction I have. The police tip their hats to me and keep my way safe; they stand back. Their presumption is my innocence, and their priority is the maintenance of my well-being. Histories of slavery and lynching inform how my body is read and how I am treated—they make meaning of my white skin today. On the same walk, histories of patriarchy, of treating women as property, of sexual violence, will mean that I guard myself. Being read as a woman means that I am presumed to exist for the sexual gratification of onlookers, the passive material of male satisfaction; they have a right to my body. The intersection of being white and a woman is the intersection of being property, but “valuable” property, presumed innocent and good, the possible mother of white children.

It is as a body that one is brought into being and maintained as legible in systems of power. It is as a body that one may be objectified, suffer, or be negated in history, and it is as a body that victors are connected to and benefit from histories of objectification, suffering, and negation. Subjects are incapable of forgetting the past, even a past one didn’t live or won’t remember, because the past is inscribed onto the subject as the meaning of their body. As a body, it is impossible to “forget” histories of suffering because they shape who we are today, even if one chooses not to acknowledge it.

Third, Metz’s use of existential philosophy best expresses his connection between one’s relationship with suffering in history and one’s relationship with God. An “existential category” is a category through which one knows oneself as authentically human. Metz’s argument is that human nature is “poor,” as we saw above. What makes one fundamentally human is our formation in history, our dependence on narratives shaped by others’ suffering, our poverty of spirit. The site of the memory of others’ suffering in history therefore functions for Metz as the limit-situation of our existence, or existential category, where one can try to know oneself as ultimately human. ³² Metz calls these existential moments of the contemplation of other’s suffering interruptions, or dangerous memories.

When one seeks to know one’s self at this limit-situation, at a dangerous memory, one is oriented to God, in a suffering cry for justice (Leiden an Gott). The body makes possible such dangerous memories. Our embodiedness is itself an “existential category.” Self-knowledge through the existential category of embodiment is not just an acceptance of all the entanglement and contingency that being in history implies. Self-knowledge through the existential of embodiment is an acceptance of the way histories of suffering are precisely what makes meaning of one’s body and subjectivity in the present. If one is to know oneself as authentically human, one must come to terms with the meaning of one’s body in society today.

It is because bodies are citations of the past, performative, that they have meaning and are recognized as human—or inhuman—at all. Any meaning one’s body has is based on a performance of histories of violence or protection, suffering or acceptance, negation or recognition. Embodiedness is an expression of the subject’s intrinsic “incapacity to forget” at work in Metz’s notion of poverty of being. Further, when one cries out to God to redeem history, this redemption is ultimately revealed in the meaning our bodies have in relationship with one another.

What it means to have a body is not defined by a male or female ontology. There is no a priori feminine or masculine that is manifest in the body, as in the TOB. It is our poverty of being as bodies in history, each uniquely constituted at the intersection of different narratives, that informs our particular being. The body is not an expression of sex, but of history. What puts us in relationship with God as bodies is not the fulfillment of maleness or femaleness. What puts us in relationship with God as bodies is the acceptance of them as existential categories, which demand our call to God to redeem all in history.

The Body as Complicit

In the previous section, I argued that the body is the site of history’s effect on the present, and that embodiedness might thus be understood as a category for authentically knowing oneself as human. In this section, I focus in on the way in which embodiedness makes us complicit, implicating subjects in structures that cause suffering for others.

Metz describes guilt as an intrinsic part of our existence in history. One cannot just “be” good. For Metz, history seen through the lenses of Marxism and Auschwitz presents a serious challenge to theology. This view of history makes it impossible not to remove the abstract, “ideal” subject from the center of theological discourse and view history through the “eyes of our victims.” ³³

According to Metz, Marxism is a paradigm shift. It moves us from the idea that humans are subject to history toward the idea that humans are responsible for history. The “epochal discovery of Marxism” is “the discovery of the world as history, as an historical project in which human beings become subjects of their histories.” ³⁴ There are two implications to this shift. First, a view of history that sees human beings as actors in or “subjects of their own histories” means that each person is tied into a shared history: the one history of the world. The meaning of events in history is constantly placed at the feet of the victors, those who have the power to tell the story. Human subjects are responsible for history, for the meaning it bears, and the future it creates. Second, this shift implies that histories of suffering remain outstanding; the project is not yet finished. Histories of suffering have not been resolved in a parallel history of salvation that runs alongside the material history of the world.

The Marxist challenge makes it clear that poverty of being, dependence on others for existence in history, implies one’s dependence on and complicity in events of suffering for one’s existence. In Marxist theory guilt is seen as an expression of alienation, or the separation of the subject from its sense of dignity. Metz disagrees with Marx here, and suggests that Marx’s “discovery of history” and its challenge to theology indicts subjects in history as precisely guilty, “wherever guilt is denied as a primordial phenomenon, or is denounced as false consciousness, exculpation mechanisms arise in the face of suffering and contradictions of historical life.” ³⁵ Far from creating alienation, for Metz guilt is the only thing that sets the subject in right relation with history, and guilt opens the hope of existential fulfillment in relationship with God. The notion that one is a subject in one’s own history is therefore linked to what Metz calls guilt as a “primordial phenomenon.” Which is to say, one’s historicity implies one’s “primordial” guilt or complicity in histories of suffering. This is why Metz equates being a subject in history and historical responsibility. Being human means being contingent upon history, and for Metz, this means having responsibility and guilt in history. To deny this guilt is to project one’s guilt one-sidedly onto an illusory historical opponent. It is only by taking responsibility for histories of suffering on which one’s own being is dependent that one may hope for justice for those who have suffered, and in this way hope for one’s own subjectivity before God.

The second challenge to theology is Auschwitz. Metz writes, “there is no God of history whom one can worship with one’s back turned to Auschwitz.” ³⁶ If one is to worship God, or claim existential self-understanding, one must be able to account for one’s worship and self-understanding squarely facing the horror of Auschwitz. Metz is posing a question of theodicy: of the possibility of a God worth worshiping in a world filled with evil and suffering. Metz’s tack is different from the traditional question of theodicy, which is centered on the abstract subject, and its reasoning capacity. Traditional theodicy questions ask, for example, how a reasoning subject can believe in a good God as the creator or sustainer of a world filled with evil. Metz instead frames the question politically, asking “about the salvation of those who suffer unjustly, of the victims and the vanquished in our own history.” There is no answer to this question for Metz, only the prospect of turning to God and remaining faithful to the questions: Why have you forsaken us? When will you come again? With the Marxist challenge, Metz writes that subjects must view history through the eyes of those who have suffered. With the challenge of Auschwitz, Metz argues that subjects must view God through the eyes of those who have suffered.

Reflecting on embodiedness as an existential category requires one to view history and God through the eyes of those who have suffered. This means embodiedness, as an existential category, is itself an interruptive. Interruptions are those moments when others’ suffering challenges one’s self-understanding as “good,” radically orienting one to God. Embodiedness, as an existential category, surfaces others’ suffering in history as the limit-situation for understanding one’s self as truly human. The histories of suffering that give our bodies meaning should interrupt a contained sense of the self as good—without guilt—before God. As an existential, the body implies others’ suffering as a part of one’s being. Embodiedness shapes human self-knowledge with guilt and complicity, which is written into the histories that give meaning to our bodies. Embodiedness is therefore not just an existential; embodiedness as existential interrupts, pointing to the distance between oneself and God, to the need for Leiden an Gott. To reflect on our embodiment should cause one to lament, to cry out to God for justice, to demand with Metz, When will you come again? When will you redeem history, and redeem my body?

This understanding of the body as an existential category reveals that we must be interrupted by the ways in which the performance of our sex has made us complicit in the suffering of others. To be masculine is to be complicit in and benefit from histories of violence and possession of women. If one wants to be oriented to God, it must be through the dangerous remembering of violence and oppression, and the cry to God for justice for the oppressed. To express one’s body as heteronormative is similarly to be safeguarded in a history predicated on the violent erasure of homosexuality. To be oriented to God is to be interrupted by, to recognize and lament, the guilt written onto one’s body in the spaces of heteronormative protection. Because of the violent history of heterosexual masculinity and femininity, the propagation of these ideals does not allow us to be free, or freely give ourselves to each other and to God. In order to give ourselves as free gift to each other and to God, we must recognize complicity in the violence this binary has created. We must recognize the ways in which we each benefit from the histories that violently police masculinity and femininity, across a multitude of racial and economic intersections. What makes us human, what makes us free, can never be that which has enslaved others. Those who are complicit must cry to God for freedom for all.

The Body as Hope

This cry to God is not one of hopelessness or inaction in the face of our complicity. The question before us is, can one do something about complicity, about the norms into which one is born? For a performative body, what hope is there for redemption, freedom, and justice? What can we do about those bodies whose performance is not counted as human? What can we do for ourselves to be counted as human? I argue here that the interruptive remembrance of suffering orients subjects to the hope of a new history. An embodied cry for justice takes the form of re-citing one’s body in its vulnerability with those whom history and society has deemed not-valuable and un-real.

Performativity allows us to embody historical norms in troubling or normative ways. Whether a performance is read as troubling those norms or reinforcing them depends on recognition. ³⁷ The way in which our bodies are and aren’t recognized by the address of another, what is lost and what is surfaced in recognition, brings us into being at each interaction. One becomes who one is through the other, and the transformation required in recognition means that one cannot know one’s self except through the recognition of the other. The body, then, is constituted at the site of the reproduction of norms that form subjects as discernable, recognizable beings. ³⁸ How those norms are discerned and recognized by others forms one’s subjectivity.

This can mean two things. If my body is in any way indiscernible to the other as fully human—if I am a woman, if I have dark skin, if I challenge sexual norms or class or cultural norms, if I am fat, if I don’t have normative physical or mental abilities—I may be negated in certain contexts: unrecognized as human, presumed without real subjectivity. On the other hand, I may in my own contingency let myself be recognized and named by another, and in this way the other may call out from me previously veiled ways by which I might know myself. I may come to understand myself as one who needs the recognition of someone unlike myself in order to gain my own humanity. One’s dependence and culpability may be recognized by another. “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.” ³⁹ We can be receptive to recognition by the unknown, and in doing so may become in a way that will transform and expand the boundaries of personhood. With every address and account one gives of one’s self in response to another, one has the chance to interrupt the way one once knew one’s self with the new self-knowledge from another, and so become again in conversation with that other. One does not incorporate another into one’s personhood, but in being recognized by another, one expands how one understands oneself as a person in terms of the other’s personhood.

Far from Descartes’s private search for an interior ground of being, in Butler’s formulation, it is by opening one’s self to others’ recognition that one may become. To become is to be recognized in the depth of one’s vulnerability. Bodily vulnerability, for Butler, is the necessary condition of being open to and even determined by the recognition of others; it is the precondition of subjectivity, the context in which one attempts to achieve and reproduce intelligibly to others the conditions of existence. We must let others’ humanity interrupt our own in order to become ourselves.

Butler’s ingenious suggestion is that it is through this dependence that one is able to “trouble” the social structures that produce subjects as human and inhuman.

The body itself and the histories of meaning it keeps alive function as the “gate” through which the past can interrupt the present. Metz suggests we can use dangerous memories to form the narrative of history in a way that is redeeming; I suggest that as the existential category where we might find ourselves able to be open to God, the performative body as Butler has described it is precisely the site where this narrative can be reshaped. ⁴⁰ Understanding and re-citing the meaning of one’s body in terms of the recognition of those not deemed “human” is what offers a chance to fight for the oppressed past; a hope to change history. One may work for this hope today by re-citing one’s body in its vulnerability with those who are oppressed and who suffer, those who are and have been deemed “unhuman” and “unreal.”

With this understanding of the body, we may hope for justice and gender flourishing not by entrenching the ideals of masculinity and femininity that perpetuate histories of violence, as with TOB. Rather, hope exists when we understand the most marginalized bodies as truly human and reiterate our understanding of our own value based on that humanity. For example, what would it mean for men to participate in “feminine” realms, devalued because they are associated with women? To make themselves vulnerable by reciting their humanity in those places? To participate in what has traditionally been women’s work and labor and demand equal pay and dignity be given to women? What would it mean to grieve the violation of sexual minorities as a loss of how one knows oneself as a man, rather than constitutive of it? What would it mean for white people to put themselves in the place of danger and vulnerability calling for the rights of black and brown people?

This is what it means to give oneself freely as gift to each other and to God. When those in power performatively give themselves to others and to God by crossing the binaries and borders that ensure their protection, they reveal the lie of the binary. They reveal the ironic inhumanity of the secure, and the humanity of the vulnerable. The body reveals our complicity in others’ suffering, but it is also the means by which we can be as gift to one another, the means by which we can hope: hope to reshape history, hope to expand our own humanity, hope to recognize more people as fully human, and hope to be in relationship with God.

The Body as Holy

This article draws ideas from Butler, the child of two Jewish émigrés who had family murdered in the Shoah, and Metz, who, as a young teen, was forced into the Nazi Youth and fought in the war, and puts those ideas into dialogue. The defeat of Germany is viewed by history as just, the work his company accomplished among the most horrific in human history. The bombing of Metz’s camp happened in 1943, and was part of the tide that ended the war, a tide seen as just. Butler was born in 1956 after her parents had emigrated to the United States to escape the horror inflicted by the men in Metz’s company, not long after (or before) the time Metz himself was brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. Are Metz and Butler a clear-cut victor and victim?

While it is easy to point to examples of people who have unequivocally led fully protected lives at the expense of others, and easy to point to examples of others who have died of horrifying violence and oppression in order to maintain the status quo, there is also a lot of in-between. One is often both the object of oppression because of their body, while at the same time an oppressor because of it. Metz never suggests that, as a Christian European, he is anything other than a victor in history. In his writing on theology after Auschwitz, he clearly sees the millions murdered in the Shoah as unequivocal victims of not just history, but of his own personal history. It is the memory of their murder, and his complicity in it, that comprises his dangerous memory. But who would argue that boy soldiers are anything but victims of hateful ideologies?

As a queer person, a woman, and a Jew, Butler has confronted objectification, violence, and oppression, but she is also a light-skinned American. Like mine, her life is highly protected, and many have been unjustly murdered and exploited to maintain that protected status. Vulnerability means complicity and oppression run together in our veins.

Embodiedness, knowing oneself in relationship to the histories to which one is bound, does not separate humanity into sheep and goats, a clear group of victors and clear group of victims. We must not equivocate between kinds of violence. That most people experience some form of violence does not mean that all that violence is equal or has an equal effect.

However, for most, facing one’s history means there is grieving to be done. There are others whose loss has made a “self” possible, and that violence needs to be existentially recognized as a part of one’s being. Likewise, for most, there is more life to be had. There are ways in which we all still need to be recognized as fully human, where one was once negated and objectified in history, unrecognized and unreal. Confronting the body as the existential horizon of being, no one is blameless before all. And yet, no one has experienced the true fullness of what it means to existentially understand one’s self as human. For most, the pain of grief and the hope of recognition both await.

Metz argues that freedom is the choice to be affected by interruptions, to see history and one’s self through the eyes of one’s victims. This leads to the hope of a relationship with God. But what about the interruptions where one has not done violence, but is the victim? I have suggested that in different ways and to different degrees, we are all complicit in histories of suffering. Likewise, in different ways and to different degrees, I argue that most have suffered and been negated as embodied subjects. As bodies, we experienced ourselves as less-than-human.

Theologian M. Shawn Copeland suggests that in the context of being made less-than-human as a body, freedom is not the choice to see history and one’s self through the eyes of one’s victims; freedom is the choice, the grace, to see one’s body through the eyes of God and love it.

Copeland writes about a sermon in Toni Morrison’s Beloved as facilitating a moment of freedom, of embodied grace, a moment in which the body is called to understand itself again, but not according to those signifiers of meaning and histories of suffering that give our bodies desecrating meaning. Rather, the grace of the sermon by the grandmother figure Baby Suggs calls men, women, and children to know their bodies again, love their bodies, centered on the beauty that God accords to the flesh. ⁴¹ It is precisely as bodies—flesh, feet, eyes, hands, mouth, arms, neck, guts, womb, genitals, re-membered as fully human and holy—that Baby Suggs calls the children, men, and women to love themselves and know themselves as free and authentically human, and thus in relationship with God. ⁴²

For the “victor,” grace is the freedom to see history through the eyes of one’s victims, and to perform the value of one’s body centered on the humanity of those who have suffered in the hope of eschatological fulfillment. As “unreal” body-subjects, however, grace is the freedom to see history and one’s body through the eyes of God, today. Baby Suggs does not ask the congregation to forget their traumas, or to love themselves despite history, ignoring it as if it did not affect them. Nor does she call them to find their value in the suffering they have endured. Copeland writes that grace is the freedom to retell the story, with the same events but with one’s humanity and beauty as the central truth. Grace is the freedom to love one’s body and to perform its value in the world, in light of the meaning and histories that would cast it as invaluable. It is in these experiences that are ultimately of love of one’s body as valuable before God over and against structures that value persons as less-than-human that we might experience God today. This is not an experience of God that turns our back to suffering; this embodied experience of God recognizes suffering. The body is loved as holy in a way that changes the meaning of that suffering, that names it as wrong. It is an experience of the body, as Copeland writes, as “resacralized.” We must “resacralize” our bodies, love them through the eyes of God in a way that does not erase history, does not erase our complicity, does not declare slavocracy and patriarchy non-existent, or their effects forgotten. We love our bodies, give them as gift to God, by remembering them as fully and beautifully human, and declaring dehumanization as wrong. To do this, to see oneself as holy, through God’s eyes, is to be able to give oneself to God as gift. Resacralizing oneself as victim and as victor is in both cases exercising the freedom to love oneself for what makes one like God, rather than for what dehumanizes.

Unlike TOB, the ultimate fulfillment of the human person is not according to procreation with a sexual binary, it is love. Love of one’s embodied self in defiance of histories that shame it; love of one’s embodied self that is not based on violence to others. When we appreciate the value of our bodies along a binary maintained through violence, we are not free. When we love our bodies for what makes us holy—what makes us like God—then as Copeland suggests, we will be free. This performative acceptance of the body reshapes history, making us able to reach our full dignity as gift to one another and to God.

Conclusion

The Theology of the Body presents an understanding of what it means to be a body that limits the freedom of a person to the binary realms of the feminine and masculine, and the expression of that freedom to child-bearing and insemination. I have presented a different and original theology of the body based on history, in which we come to a relationship with God by confronting our bodies as existential categories for self-knowledge.

In this ontology, bodies do not just matter, they are the very means of our self-becoming before God. But our bodies are not given to us a priori in sexed terms. Our bodies bear the weight of histories beyond our control, both opening us up in vulnerable becoming with all others, and causing us to bear the weight of all the bodies excluded from our historical understandings of who counts as human. Our bodies interrupt any sense that we are independent or guiltless in history, but they also make possible a hope for changing history. This formulation of the body as existential category, as I hope is clear, does not depend on pregiven binaries of sex or gender. It does, however, have something to say about the histories of our gender binaries.

The notion of embodiedness that I have set forth in this article challenges us to think differently about how we understand women in the Roman Catholic theological tradition. It challenges us to performatively break down binaries and recite our histories in solidarity with those who are excluded from being recognized as human, if we hope to be in relationship with God. I understand “woman” as a category that is not a priori, but one created in history, and predicated on violent possession and exclusion from power. The theology of the body for which I have argued reveals that, for Christian churches and the Roman Catholic tradition out of which I speak in particular, a gender binary is an obstacle to freedom and to the fullness of relationships with each other and with God, for every person.

If we hope to right sexual violence in our history, if we hope to be in relationship with God today, the powerful at the center must let themselves be interrupted and named by those on the margins. We must not only recognize those who are not men, not heterosexual, not reproductive, or non-gender conforming as human; we must reconfigure what it means to be human based on their humanity. We must cry out to God for the violence done in the name of dehumanizing so many, and humanizing so few. Masculinity and femininity as a binary must be performatively deconstructed by loving and resacralizing ourselves, as Copeland suggests, in full light of the histories of violence, and based on what makes us holy rather than on what does violence.

Our holy bodies are the site of our communion with history, our dependence on one another, and our relationship with God. When we give ourselves to others by performatively crossing the sex binaries, we perform our own humanity, and reveal sacred humanity across gender expression. This limit-situation makes possible the very goal of TOB set out by John Paul II, not only to be gift to one another, but to give oneself as gift in relationship with God.