The Queer Violence of Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Mysticism

Scholars of mysticism are well-attuned to how mystical texts intersperse descriptions of intense bodily mortification and the ecstasy of divine love.  Queer scholarship exposes how mystical texts transgress conventional gender and heteronormative categories.  Postmodern psychodynamic scholarship insists that even distant medieval texts have something powerful to say today about how abjection and jouissance might intersect in the soul’s union with God.  Against the backdrop of these approaches, this essay investigates one of Christianity’s most cryptic mystical figures: Rebecca Cox Jackson.  A Methodist-raised 19th-century black woman who lived among white Shakers, Jackson fits in no one’s box.  Unlocking the possible meaning of her erotic and violent dreams and visions requires a special hermeneutical lens. This essay offers an intertextual reading of Jackson’s spiritual autobiography Gifts of Power using the writings of the late-20th-century lesbian French feminist thinker, Monique Wittig.