Abstract
Penelope Cowell Doe’s Queering the Church is a much-needed book, and entirely apposite. In it, she explores – in detail, and yet in an accessible and helpful way – the recent machinations of the Church of England in matters of sexuality and gender, and specifically the Pilling Report, the outworkings of which continue to significantly impact upon the life of the Church. Doe’s analysis does not merely engage with the report and its afterlife, but with the whole idea of this genre of report and its appropriateness (or lack thereof) for its stated purpose. Does this way of engaging, she asks, achieve what we actually want it to achieve – and, indeed, who is the ‘we’ that does the wanting?
Through careful application of these questions, and interrogation of how ‘theology’ has been done ‘about an issue’ – in this case, homosexuality – Doe provides a devastating critique of the way in which the Church of England continues to ‘other’ those who do not sit at the nexus of power, not only in its pronouncements but in the very processes that it makes use of. The rot, she finds, is not merely in the outcomes but in the way the Church has sought to engage with division and disagreement – and she suggests that a focus on ‘resolving’ this, and finding a ‘solution’, is itself a problematic symptom of a structural and institutional malaise.
This book is a work of serious queer theology that engages on several different and interrelated fronts, and with a number of key authors in the field. Doe’s primary contribution is to undertake an analysis of the dynamics and power structures of the sexuality debate, yet in doing so she also offers up some clear suggestions of how queering might help the content of the debates as well. The theme of ‘troubling’ recurs a number of times throughout the book, and this word neatly sums up Doe’s contribution to current disagreements – she refuses to play on the playing field of winners and losers, and instead urges for a total shift in how the debate (for want of a better word) should and could be engaged with. She highlights how many of the participants, whether official or unofficial, continue to play by the rules set by normativity, and in her analysis she provides much food for thought that should be of interest to, and provoke challenge among, those on ‘all sides’.
Doe makes use of the motif of Holy Saturday as a place where ‘liminality, abjection, alterity and failure’ are not defeat but instead a ‘“middle time” that resists that prolepsis of redemption’ (p. 163). Her thesis is an uncomfortable one, yet it is primarily uncomfortable for those who currently hold the power, whose comfortable assumptions might find themselves ruptured. Yet such a rupture, she holds, is not only possible but necessary if the Church is to move beyond a mere sanctification of normativity (a normativity that goes well beyond sexuality) and a baptism of neoliberal norms. Such a Church holds much promise, yet in order to release this promise, Doe suggests, the Church must recognize the theological and ecclesial potential of failure. This book is an excellent first step along that journey.