This panel gathers three papers that collectively explore theologies and theories of sex, religion, the body, and technology. This panel engages debates around Eucharistic theologies, Christologies, and sanctified celibacy, and demonstrates the various ways that these reinscribe normative sex binaries and hierarchies. The panelists jointly suggest that the problem lies in the ways that these theologies and theories have utilized deceptively fixed and abstract conceptualizations of the body, substance, and the self. In various ways, the papers demonstrate the inability of these static ideas to recognize the fluidity enabled by technologies that make transformation and modification inevitable. This panel reveals explicitly the cost this has had on ‘indecent’ bodies and proposes potential queerer theological constructions and concepts.
In conversation with Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex, this paper analyzes the developments of substance metaphysics in medieval treatments of Eucharistic transubstantiation and sex difference. Focusing on the distinction between separable and inseparable accidents, I ask how Aristotelian categories that had been adapted into Eucharistic theology to defend insensible change resulting in the real body of Christ on the altar were also being deployed to argue for the metaphysics of binary sex difference.
This paper overviews the conceptual framings of Christotechtonics, the portmanteau of Christology and dildotechtonics. Drawing from the theories of Paul B. Preciado, Christotechtonics interrogates the biopolitical deployment of Christ to naturalize somatic expressions of sexual difference. Within Preciado’s oeuvre, sexuality is a technology, one that has managed to effectively disappear the arbitrary foundations of sexual difference as normal, thus functioning in a dual necrobiopolitical manner. Following Preciado’s work, Christotechtonics questions the deployment of Christ in contemporary theology that seeks to either reify or confound sexuality and other attendant intersectional analyses. Christ, far from only functioning as a theological category, aligns with sexuality’s necrobiopolitical function, producing theological claims that concretize sexual difference. In relation to sexuality, such framings foreclose any future for trans, queer, and intersex bodies. Christotechtonics, drawing form Preciado’s theories of the dildo, also seeks to short-circuit the logics of heterosexualism that have aligned with theology.
Involuntary celibacy is an acute problem for the men it affects. Gathered on violently hateful websites, “incels” make sense of their unwanted condition in ways that complicate conventional religious understandings of celibacy as a feat of discipline. Theirs is a computational problem, they explain to each other. Drawing on scholarship about neoliberal striving and the idea of the quantified self, this paper uses incel writing to theorize “data fatalism.” Users render their bodies as “metrics” or “data” that women process, and they attribute their fate to features discipline cannot change, such as their faces, heights, and races. Incels trace their sexlessness back first to the strange data of the dispersed and countable self and then to a nebulous ranking and sorting “out there” that definitively separates the sexually elect from the doomed. Inextricable from their misogyny, incel data fatalism reveals both the becoming-computational of social life and its human costs.
| Lisa Isherwood | lisa.isherwood… | View |