In Review
Speaking “Sex” into Living Languages
An Interview with Mark D. Jordan
Mark D. Jordan is the Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and a scholar of Christian theology, European philosophy, and ethics for sexes and genders. Jordan discusses his latest book, Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires, with the Bulletin’s managing editor, Faye Bodley-Dangelo.
Bulletin: What is the relationship of this book to your previous publications on gender and sexuality?
Jordan: Queer Callings began as a suggestion from Douglas Mitchell, an editor who had become a friend. Doug wanted to do a last project together—not a summary so much as an attempt to say succinctly what I had come to think after 20 years of writing. At about the same time, I had asked another friend—the novelist Susan Stinson—to help me break stubborn habits of academic writing, like the nervous tics of the footnote and the defensive crouch of qualification. Queer Callings is a book prompted by friends—which I count as one of the more trustworthy motives for publication.
Of course, the book also flowed from teaching. I first rehearsed its interpretations of queer texts in divinity school courses. I then argued its main points before undergraduates in a college course on sexual ethics—at this point, students would remind me to explain that I use the word “queer” as a place-holder, like an x in algebra. The word gestures toward people that find themselves poorly named within majority classifications for sex/gender.
Bulletin: For whom is Queer Callings written?
Jordan: That is a harder question than it might seem. One sort of answer pictures every book as a product trimmed to a specific segment of buyers. But I can’t write or read books as products. To me, interesting books are records of sustained efforts to escape from cliché—or logs of searches for uncoined words. Failures can be at least as interesting as successes. So, I wrote the book for the sake of language—if that makes any sense.
That doesn’t mean I wrote it for myself. While drafting sections of Queer Callings, I did call up an ideal reader: someone who often found herself put off by coercively reductive languages for sex and gender—or anything else truly important to her life. I also kept looking beyond her, to those who would read the eventual book in ways I could neither predict nor imagine. In that respect, books are like courses: you really can’t control the effects you produce—especially when treating emotionally charged topics. Sex/gender is too useful for systems of power not to be politicized.
Bulletin: Early in the introduction, you say that you “hope to lift questions about sex/gender names away from our current practice or malpractice of politics.” How hopeful are you about that, given what you just said?
Jordan: I’m hopeful that we can become more conscious of the flows of power through our languages—in at least two ways. First, current U.S. “culture wars” over sex/gender have damaged our capacity to talk or think with any subtlety. I should say, have continued the damage. Campaigns against variety in sexuality or gender are launched again and again. Some of them are brief and local, like Harvard’s “Secret Court” in 1920. Others are sustained and national, like the panics around “sex perverts” in the 1950s or “bra-burning libbers” in the 1960s. Typically, such campaigns reduce sex/gender language to panicked slogans. Damage to language restricts possibilities for thought. Can we stop the cycle of overtly political campaigns against sex/gender diversity? Not without changing human nature, which is beyond our power. Can we resist the campaigns’ harms to language? Yes, not least by inventing new speech.
Which leads me to a second ground for hope. We need to step back from shouted slogans to remember that there are other kinds of language for reflecting on human sexuality. We are not confined to the alleged certainties of political manifestos—or social policy or the latest therapy.
Bulletin: How is that connected with your aim to “denaturalize” the terms that have become dominant for naming and speaking our sex, gender, and desires?
Jordan: “Denaturalize” is a bit of jargon that I probably should have avoided. The word is a reminder that our ways of describing human behavior quickly come to seem obvious, self-evident, natural. “Men should behave like this, and women like that.” “Girls should be attracted to boys, boys to girls.” “Everyone is born to be either a woman or a man.” And so on. “Denaturalizing” refers to pedagogies for helping people look behind their certainties to consider sex/gender more critically—which is to say, more freely.
The verb is associated with recent movements like queer theory, but the practice is much older. Socrates was notorious for “denaturalizing” the civic certainties of his fellow Athenians. Jesus was notorious for “denaturalizing” religious certainties about purity or righteousness or transactions with God. Both teachers were executed for the ways they taught—which says something about how violently we defend our settled certainties.
Bulletin: That kind of certainty sounds like a general problem. But in the book you single out “sexual identity” and “gender identity.” Why these categories?
Jordan: I concentrate on “sexual identity” because it has become an unquestioned scheme of classification. Historians of sexuality are curious about concepts or categories that go without saying—that are simply assumed. They become even more curious when those concepts or categories are recent arrivals. Sixty or 70 years ago, Americans didn’t know that they possessed a sexual identity or needed one. Now we take sexual identity as a starting point for discussions of sexuality. How did that happen?
There was another reason for concentrating on sexual identities: their rapid and to my mind uncritical appropriation by Christian theologians. The adoption of “sexual identity” is an astonishingly clear case of an old pattern in Christian moral theology. When dealing with sex/gender, moral theologians tend to import labels from criminal law, medicine, natural philosophy, and other dominant bodies of knowledge. They also import prevailing models for applying labels. I wanted to understand what this new term offered to Christian writers—and what it cost them.
Bulletin: And “gender identity”?
Jordan: A satisfying answer to that question would require another book. Throughout this book, I try to keep “gender identity” always in view. One reason is that the origin of “sexual identity” is tangled with that of “gender identity.” Another and more important reason is that efforts to draw a bright line between the two kinds of identity are misleading. Both technical and ordinary notions of sexual attraction usually assume a model of gender difference. Hetero-sexual and homo-sexual are the obvious examples: a person is attracted to the other sex or the same sex. (I used to ask my students, “When you desire a certain sex, what exactly are you desiring?”) Again, from the late nineteenth century on, many sexological analyses of same-sex attraction postulated some sort of gender reversal or inversion. The same is true, of course, of old insults against “mannish women” or “effeminate men.” In short, I am less and less convinced that we can separate sexuality from gender. Between the two, I suspect that what we call “gender” is the more basic, the more important thing (if it is a thing).
That said, the recent history and current experiences of “gender identity” are not simply reducible to the history and experiences of “sexual identity.” My book focuses on the second.
Bulletin: You want your readers to unlearn habitual names in order to relearn others, to develop a multilingualism around how they speak their desires. What are some of your methods for doing so?
Mark D. Jordan. HDS Photo
Jordan: Queer Callings uses several means to shake unexamined confidence in “sexual identities.” The first is retelling the term’s quick conquest of everyday speech. “Sexual identity” was invented in the 1950s for various clinical purposes. It was promoted by a general rise of identity-language within psychotherapy, sociology, and cultural politics. Very quickly—say, between the early 1960s and 1970—“sexual identity” spread through liberation movements and community journalism into much wider use, including by Christian theologians with otherwise opposed views. The result is that we now hesitate to describe ourselves unless we can choose from a menu of identities. What’s more worrisome, as this label passed from clinics to movement politics, it somehow became a person’s essence. In Christian writing, explicitly, it gets tangled with old notions of soul. People are increasingly encouraged not just to have a sexual identity but to be one.
Such a confused origin-story should encourage us to reconsider our trust in this particular terminology—or, indeed, in any single terminology that claims to be literal and comprehensive. In conversations about sex/gender, privileging a single vocabulary is not only reductive but risky. You should be very careful before entrusting your enigmatic self to the experts who enforce the reigning terminology.
Bulletin: Speaking of “experts,” near the end of your book you mention a performance of “knowingness” that you observed in your undergraduate students when lecturing on sex/gender. Why did you find it problematic?
Jordan: I don’t say anything in the book that I hadn’t already said in class! In fact, I used to tease those long-suffering undergraduates that no matter how unusual or arcane the sexual taste I mentioned, heads in the lecture hall would nod as if to say, “Oh, that? Again?”
You might reply that their performance was predictable boasting or the reflex of students never allowed to admit ignorance on any topic. I would agree up to a point. But there was something more at work: a societal imperative to prefer expertise about sex/gender over bodily and affective discovery. As if there were no need to learn from experience about one’s own (changing) desire(s), orientation(s), gender(s). Knowingness in the lecture hall may have been boasting or anxiety, but it was also a microcosm of our dominant forms of speech about sex. No matter how often I pulled off the magisterial mask, I found them in myself too. I mean, I was the one being paid to give expert lectures on sex.
In Queer Callings, I don’t stop with a criticism of knowingness or expertise. I invite readers into some half-serious exercises for breaking away from sexual identities. I also resort to gentle irony and even a little self-mockery to undo the dogmatic earnestness of so much critique. But the book aims to persuade most of all by sampling the magnificent variety of other ways of speaking sex across the last century. From novelistic twisting of scientific or legal terminology to the invention of new languages in poetry or science fiction or mystical testimony, I let these beautiful languages lure the reader. I don’t want to scold people into some version of correct speech. I hope to attract them into more artful language-making.
Bulletin: A recurring theme in your book is the loss of the ability to speak (or to speak confidently). Is this loss a necessary part of your pedagogical project?
Jordan: Loosening your assumptions about how to name sexuality is a necessary step toward taking fuller responsibility for speaking your own desires and hearing those of others. It can feel like a loss, I suppose, but then it is the loss of a lie. It is like the loss that opens the way to philosophy or genuine religious conversion. For some of us, it is also taking off a muzzle.
Though I’ve scribbled in journals or notebooks for almost 60 years, I find it very hard to speak about my own sex/gender in public. I don’t think I’m the only queer person who suffers this. Being cast out into the space of the unnamed, or stigmatized with an insult, or never daring to speak what sounds like your name—these are old figures for queer experience. Many of us can also recall the moments in which we first declared ourselves against the lessons we had been taught, the assumptions made about us. In the pause of that declaration—pulse racing, mouth dry, trembling with fear—in that pause before renaming ourselves, we put language at risk to speak otherwise.
Of course, stammering before declaring a self isn’t confined to queer folk or to sex/gender, is it? As infants, we all have to learn language. As vulnerable mortals, we all may have to relearn it after illness, accident, or trauma. Indeed, we may be or become unable to learn it. Escaping the grip of mechanical languages for sex/gender—or for anything else of fundamental importance—requires a willingness to pass once again into speechlessness. We are never strangers to that condition.
Bulletin: Is this experience related to the function of your “two cautionary tales” (“Linguistic Orientations” and “Interludes”), sections which, in the print copy, stand out visually in gray-toned paper?
Jordan: Yes, very directly related. I put those sections into the book to remind readers of the multiplicities and other certainties that encircle our speaking any one language at a particular place and time. As a child, I grew up speaking both U.S. English and Mexican Spanish. I was taught to read and write in the single public school of a small village that was proudly marked on the map of the Estados Unidos Mexicanos displayed in our classroom. I discovered not only that I couldn’t translate certain Spanish words into English, but that I moved differently—felt differently—in Spanish than in English. In the section titled “Linguistic Orientations,” I recall Ludwig Wittgenstein and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to emphasize that speaking or writing are bodily activities and that bodies are always individual. Then, in the “Interlude,” I bring in Samuel Johnson’s preface to his great dictionary, in which he describes collecting words from “the boundless chaos of living speech.” The ideal of a stable, precise, and perfectly transparent language is a dangerous fantasy—especially when it comes to human sexuality.
Bulletin: But you also borrow from Wittgenstein the image of a language as a collection of blocks from different historical epochs. You even say that your book might be read as “a travelogue of walks through old and new neighborhoods of an old city” (29).
Jordan: Let me tie that quotation from Wittgenstein to a specific episode in the archives. One day in San Francisco, I was reading the responses to a 1964 survey by the U.S. Council on Religion and the Homosexual—despite its grand title, the Council was then a tiny group of “homophile” leaders and sympathetic clergy. The responses were deeply moving. They recounted much suffering caused by families, the police, schools, religious organizations. But as individual suffering was put into words, it entered a complex linguistic history. Each of the key terms in the survey responses had its etymology. “Sodomy” is a Christian misreading of the Hebrew Bible put into wide circulation around 1050 CE. “Homosexuality” is a supposedly scientific term brought into English from German during the 1890s. Many of the words on the pages I was reading conveyed histories of legal judgment and punishment, or diagnosis and so-called treatment, or insult and assault. These intensely personal survey responses were also public elements in the history of language. They were, in Wittgenstein’s image, old and new neighborhoods in the city of English.
When we speak sex, we speak it into shared and shifting language. If we want to be recognizable, even to ourselves, we have to join the common labor of language-building. We have to inhabit neighborhoods built by other hands. That is why the common care of language is an ethical imperative—indeed, an imperative on which ethics itself depends. You cannot reflect together on human lives until you can describe them.
Bulletin: “Spirituality” is another category that you explore. You say you remain curious about the choice of this term by very different authors “to protect possibilities of queer transformation” (137). Can you give us examples? Tell us a little about what you found?
Jordan: Let me reply twice—once as a student of religions, then again as a student of Christian theology.
The archives make one thing clear: Much influential writing on behalf of queer flourishing from 1970 forward has been frankly religious. It understood the progress of queer lives to depend upon recovering mythological memories and anticipating more-than-secular futures. If it was associated with political movements, its politics embraced magic and called forth poetic prophecy. One word that these texts use to describe their own religious character is “spirituality.”
The word is tricky. I tether it to two definitions, one from Susan Sontag, the other from Michel Foucault. In an essay on silence from 1967, Sontag inserts this parenthesis: “Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.”1 Fifteen years later, Foucault claims the word at the start of a public lecture series: Spirituality will name “the ensemble of those searches, practices, and experiences that may include purifications, ascetical practices, renunciations, redirections of gaze, modifications of existence . . . [that constitute], for the very being of the subject, the price to be paid for access to the truth.”2 Spirituality is about the completion of consciousness and transcendence. Spirituality is a set of practices that offers access to truth. Many queer texts would agree with one or both of those definitions.
I offer one selection of texts to show how deeply spirituality runs through queer writing. The selection is neither the only nor the best, it is neither comprehensive nor representative. It is not even a complete list of my favorite texts. My criterion for selection was just that the texts show the power of language to record and to elicit queer lives. I chose the explicit myth-making of Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Gloria Anzaldúa. The ecstasies of bodily reshaping in Geoff Mains and Sally Gearhart—not to say, at women’s music festivals or on gay dance floors. The explicitly spiritual teachings about mystical excess and cosmic transformation. Could I have made other choices? Of course. In fact, I did. The examples in the book changed up until I sent off the manuscript’s final draft.
Bulletin: I was struck by the entwining of spirituality, autobiography, and the craft of language invention in your readings of the science fiction of Samuel Delany and the poetry of Marilyn Hacker. Can you tell us about your journey through this neighborhood?
Jordan: The chapter on Delany and Hacker may be the most personal in the book. I had been a fan of Delany for almost 50 years. By contrast, I did my first serious reading of Hacker in the course of writing Queer Callings. An old love and a new one.
For me, reading science fiction started out as a safely obscure declaration of deviance. As a boy, I found in sci-fi novels a gallery of “queer” lives. I would not have known to call them that, at least not at first, but I studied the portrayals as intently as if they held my secret. They did. I read my way onto exotic worlds where people were allowed to be queer (in an older sense, which still carried exotic shame). They unriddled strange religions. They endured monstrous visions that transformed them into gods. Often enough, they ended by preferring life out there, beyond terrestrial orthodoxies, to life here. I could only agree.
I encountered Samuel Delany during graduate school: his massive novel Dhalgren appeared in 1975. But the book that sealed my fandom appeared the next year: Trouble on Triton. That novel was—is—about my enduring preoccupations: categorizations of sex and gender, the limits of individual transformation, race and desire, religion and spirituality, language and silence. Its subtitle, An Ambiguous Heterotopia, is a reference to Michel Foucault. One of its main characters is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein. So, I had to write about Delany in Queer Callings.
Delany led me to read Marilyn Hacker attentively. The two of them were married for almost 20 years. I have no interest in speculations about what their marriage was or wasn’t, but I am very interested in how it became a space for making languages, together and apart. Two gifted writers learn each other’s bodies, share work, and then present, separately, unabashed songs to desires not for each other. Around their bodies, between them, they improvise a baroque frankness for queer love, unabashed and formally constrained, sweating and lucid. Hacker’s first two collections contain poems named after their traditional forms: sestina, villanelle, sonnet. At the same time, the poems excerpt “popular culture” and daily speech. The play of structure and sensation is also a theme in many of Hacker’s early poems.
The marriage of Hacker and Delany might make us think again about desire and relationship. The works by Hacker and Delany testify, in all their difference, to the motions of queer spirit.
Bulletin: You promised another reply about queer spirituality—as a student of Christian theology.
Jordan: This late in Christian history, after the failure of so many Christendoms, the only safe way to write theology is sideways—tentatively, surreptitiously, through unexpected language. Writing sideways is especially needed for theology about sex/gender, where Christianity has authorized—still does authorize—so much violence.
Queer Callings mentions Christianity only rarely and then as a cultural artifact. The authors it treats, the stories it tells, are almost all non-Christian or anti-Christian. That deliberate exclusion of official, of habitual “answers” about sex/gender is my way of seeking truer theology—without the clichéd falsehoods that have denied so much grace.
At one point, the book explains its own title by punning on the word “callings.” One pun I don’t mention in the book is the title’s assertion that a present calling of Christian theology—a calling to it—comes through the literature, the bodily arts, the rituals, the visions of communities it has cursed before casting out. The queerness of the book is its radical hope for a Christian theology in those despised bodies.
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