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Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of PosthumanistDiscourseAuthor(s): Sharon V. BetcherSource: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 107-118Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/FSR.2010.26.2.107 .

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JFSR 26.2 (2010) 107–139

Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland

Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist DiscourseSharon V. Betcher

“Oh, you’re one of those,” the interviewing nurse summarily concluded, as I indicated that, no, in fact, I did not wear or own a prosthesis to “remediate” my left leg amputation. To be sure, my unprostheticized—or should I say, “un-proselytized”?—body often receives social comment: really, Why would I, given the supposedly remediating wonders of technology, assume to go public so “un-rehabilitated”? Given cultural encouragement for bodily health, but given that I am a more active person without what is, in my case, the encumbrance of a prosthesis, I suppose I am offending a social norm. More specifically, I sus-pect that the divergence in cultural aspirations social commentaries hold about my disability and my own lived capaciousness sit somewhere between body, to which we have all been encouraged to aspire given the politics of health, and the unrehabilitated flesh, which opens off the terrain of my amputation.

Body: feminists recuperated the term and its material terrain from the underside of an earlier cultural, dualistic management strategy that values the masculine spirit or mind more than the feminine body or physicality. Femi-nist theology contrarily argued appreciatively for human embodiment with and through an immanence of spirit. Yet feminism’s recuperation of the un-dervalued body has not necessarily impeded either disability abjection or the ways in which cultural ideologies today capitalize upon the body. Given the cultural command performances expected of the body’s ability, health, beauty, and productivity, I wonder if—just as Nature has proven to be “a transcendental term in a material mask”1—body, even loosed from any conscious religious scal-ing, might likewise hide its transcendental demeanor in a corporeal overcoat?

1 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14.



Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2108

Whereas body can invite the hallucinatory delusion of wholeness, and thus the temptation to believe in agential mastery and control, flesh, I want to propose, admits our exposure, our vulnerability one to another, if also to bios. Flesh, the dynamic and fluid physics of embodiment, cannot as easily as the body submit to transcendentalist metaphysics, to the logic of the one. Flesh suggests that the capaciousness of a life resembles a teacup crackled with ten thousand veins. Spirit, lived in relation to flesh, might then not be so interested in wholeness as in passion.2

This essay celebrates the work of feminist and disability theologian Nancy Eiesland, who died in March 2009, and revisits the roundtable conversation between feminism and disability in which she first participated in 1994.3 Here, I think yet again from the ecotone of philosophical difference between body and flesh. Feminist and disability theologies might, I suggest, find in the flesh a shared religious agenda. From a disability perspective, thinking from the flesh challenges the naturalization or normalization of the body and thereby the sociocultural and economic value of ability. Flesh might comparably remind feminism that, whereas body has already been submitted to a cultural regime of wholeness—by way of hallucinatory imagistic totalization, as even Jacques Lacan insisted, corporeality differs with itself daily. Flesh, in other words, makes alterity central and might also, therefore, allow us to talk about that which meta-physics has often hidden from the sociocultural agenda, that which we know to be true of lives—pain, difficulty, disease, transience, aging, error, and corporeal limit, if even also the epiphanies and critical insights that come with illness, as Virginia Woolf insists.4

On Thinking Flesh without Recourse to “the Body”

In the 1994 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion roundtable conversa-tion, feminist disability theologians lamented the ways in which feminism, un-conscious of its own valorization of ability, had joined itself to liberal humanist discourse: laying claim to the “fitness” of women’s humanity, feminism—at-tempting to shrug off the note of “degeneracy” that “woman” had carried in philosophical discourse since Aristotle’s time—unwittingly thereby also ac-

2 Yvonne Sherwood, “Passion-Binding-Passion,” in Toward a Theology of Eros, ed. Vir-ginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 169–93. While Sherwood’s vocabulary does not necessarily employ the nominative flesh, she suggests that passion “gesture[s] to the dynamic zone of interhuman living” within which a subject is not always agential in charge (171), which resonates with how I use flesh here. 3 Elly Elshout, Dorothee Wilhelm, Carole R. Fontaine, Nancy L. Eiesland, Valerie C. Stiteler, Adele B. McCollum, and Margaret Moers Wenig, “Women with Disabilities: A Challenge to Femi-nist Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 99–134. 4 Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, introduction by Hermione Lee (Paris: Paris Press, 2002).



Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 109

cepted “patriarchal” ways of judging personhood.� That feminism could align itself with body, while culturally concurring with the measure of the deficient flesh of disabled persons, suggested to women with disabilities that body itself had already and/or could easily be capitalized upon within the cult/ure of pub-lic appearance. Even while reclaiming the underside of the rationalist dual-ism, each of liberal humanisms’ colonial rejects—in terms of race and ethnicity as well as gender—aspired to the “wholeness” implicit to a platonic ideal of “the body,” consistently refusing the “flesh” that had been marked against them under the admittedly demeaning rhetoric of “degeneration”—a projection “the disabled” then still carried. In fact, “diss-ing” the body in this way (as in “dis/ability”) always already “subjects” us to the sociocultural imaginary of the body. Body, already subdued and disciplined by the politics of health and the eco-nomics of ability, insists upon a good and proper form—even as it might secretly enjoy its pathological disorders.6 Eiesland consequently insisted (as I am here reasserting) that “the body be represented as flesh and blood, bones and braces” lest the sedimented “refus/al” of that good and proper form get marked against the flesh of and carried by those categorically labeled “disabled.”7 Frankly, lest normative culture use disabled persons toward its own mythological ends—as, for example, celebrating us as those who overcome tragedy, when, in fact, dis-ability is just something that happens to flesh, that occasions our persistent ne-gotiation with limits and finitude.

In Western culture, disability names the abject refus/al of industrial capital-ism (that is, disability as “unemployability,” as deficit of “labor power”), which has now become aesthetic, consumer capitalism. It remains as true today as in Eiesland’s groundbreaking text, The Disabled God, that because individual experience of flesh differs markedly, “the disability community” shares noth-ing in common except the experience of social exclusion. Only within a cul-ture wherein one’s impairment remains “the primary identifiable attribute” of a person do we end up with a category of “the disabled,” Eiesland asserted.8 In this way, persons disabled have come to claim that disability names a struc-ture of exclusion veiled by the politics of health. As capitalism goes global—in its search for an ever-cheaper labor supply, this insight from disability studies needs to become more analytically central, lest this bias—veiled by our ana-lytics of individual pathology and consequent pity—go unanalyzed. The U.S. State Department under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hill-ary Clinton has formulated an agenda focused on women’s well-being. Whether

� Ibid., 100. 6 See, for example, the satirical video clip “The Disabled Girl,” www.youtube.com/watch ?v=tSBxE9haiQ+NR=1. 7 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nash-ville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 22. 8 Ibid., 26.




this will simultaneously culturally and economically redress that form of racism named “disability” might have to do with whether this political agenda assumes the humanist body or the alterity of flesh as paradigmatic.

While both concurring with and expanding upon Eiesland’s sociological insights, I suggest also that disability refers us to a deep anxiety inherent in humanism’s relation to the flesh—a fear of being “humiliated” (from the same Latin root as “humus” or earth) by life. When bodies are labeled “disabled,” so-ciety marks out and makes these refused others carry the dread fear of the pre-carious vulnerability of flesh. Feminist philosopher Mary Daly was well aware that “sex racism” had in no small way to do with the “mind-binding societal/mental embeds” within consciousness—with, for example, women’s loathing of our own flesh—and thus with grueling regimes of self-surveillance on behalf of patriarchy.9 That we might today speak of a regime change, might acknowledge living amid the aesthetic phase of globalizing capitalism, does not invalidate, but might actually exacerbate feminist and disability concerns for the ways in which disgust and dread have been shaped into culturally powerful, “mind-binding,” if positivist forces—namely, “the politics of health.” The ways in which West-ern culture encourages the anxious conscience to patrol the flesh, which tears, tears up, trembles, tables, and tires, might lead in one instance to those social technologies of food disorders and surgical enhancements, readily fit to the fe-male form. In another instance, it creates an economic and cultural structure of exclusion named “disability,” thereby categorically multiplying abject and eco-nomically “waste/d” bodies.

Cultural normativity still harbors and indulges that psychically comforting, because controlling, power of totalization—in this case, as somatic, morphologi-cal reification. Disability studies can remind feminism about aesthetics: when wed to representational totalization (as with “the body”), aesthetics can become “mind numbing.” Feminist theology can learn again from disability theology the insidiousness of the politics of health and how women might be tempted to metabolize that politics so as to embody acceptable hetero-femininities—out of both conforming pleasure and the fear of defect. Consequently, it seems to me, that this terrain of the flesh—where dread and disgust and humiliation get played out, in economic, cultural, and political, if also deeply personal regis-ters—marks still or yet again an important site of shared work between feminist and disability theologians. One possible way forward might be this: As ecology must now learn to do without that romantic neologism “Nature,”10 perhaps fem-inist as also disability theologians must learn to think flesh without “the body.”

9 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 8. 10 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 20.




Theological Practice with the Flesh in Mind

Eiesland first ventured to think disability theology within a liberationist methodology. While the disability rights movement has made political headway in the United States, the liberationist model has not necessarily proven very amenable to disability. Even as I find myself in emphatic agreement with disabil-ity theorists’ sensibility that the construction of “disability” creates a structure of social exclusion, the public stubbornly sees “disability” as individual pathology. That disability seems so categorically apparent to the public, thus suggests to me that persons religious (Christians being those with whom I’m most familiar) too remain within the scope of a totalizing force—of the idealism of “the body.” If Christian theology is, for one example, to separate itself from the aspirations of aesthetic capitalism, it needs to release this overdetermined body and its judgmental conscience (aspirational “wholeness” constitutes a frequent litur-gical litany) so as to lean into an alternative, posthumanist philosophy of the capaciousness of the flesh—surely, with limits, but not necessarily split between wholeness/brokenness. Flesh names a locus of flux; insomuch as flesh differs with itself day to day, flesh situates difference as preceding identity. While I cannot speak for other religious traditions, Christian theology, given that God presumably enters into finitude, constituting thereby something of a metaphysi-cal reversal, should not be so surprised by the fact that “life happens.”11

Because the Western cultural politics of health can and do exclude along the lines of wholeness/brokenness, I’d like to propose two theological options for cultivating religious practice in relation to the flesh—the first, hoping to build upon the ways in which Buddhist philosophies deal with the formations of fear, disgust, and dread; the second, an encouragement for theology to recuper-ate a discourse or theological pedagogy for pain. Following upon these propos-als, I point out several other theological venues where disability and feminist theologies might share a co-incidence of interest.

First, when disability theology begins from the terrain of the flesh (rather than assuming, as culturally prescribed, the outlines of the deficient body), one point of interruption that comes immediately into view is the psychosocial structure creating exclusion of persons disabled: flesh names, as Judith Butler has put it, a “precarious . . . vulnerability to the other”;12 consequently, anxiety, fear, disgust, dread, and shame haunt the flesh and can be borrowed by cultural technologies like the politics of health. Eiesland herself was aware of the fact that the stigmatization of disabled persons, resulting in institutionalized forms of discrimination, involves “conditions of the modern human psyche.”13 Disgust—

11 Moses P. P. Penumaka, “Luther and Shankara: Two Ways of Salvation in the Indian Con-text,” Dialog 4�, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 2�2–62, quotation on 2�3. 12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 29. 13 Eiesland, Disabled God, 92.




that formation of sentient consciousness caught on the cusp of always already offering up judgment about fleshy matters—as philosopher Martha Nussbaum points out, has become part of social stigmas and cultural norms and, most dan-gerously, has even been instantiated in laws (as, for example, where disability is concerned, the “ugly laws”).14 Disgust might be that formation of conscious-ness most easily co-opted by the generative power of cultural normativity. For example, as I am shamed for refusing prosthetic rehabilitation (according to a visual cultural norm not particularly interested in my physical capaciousness), so even very young girls cannot evade cultural messages aggravating body dis-satisfaction. When “successful,” these messages culminate in self-surveillance, which makes the production of the work of art named “the body”—in romantic relief—a primary preoccupation—often thereby foreclosing upon energies that might have been expended toward matters of democratic citizenship or other collective interests.

In her recent work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler situates the practice of nonviolence proximal to the fold of the flesh, where we remain ever vulnerable to one another. As she explains, “if violence is the act by which a subject seeks to re-install its mastery and unity, then nonviolence follows from living the persistent challenge to egoic mastery that our obligations to the other—[whose presence may not be invited or wanted]—nevertheless in-duce and require.”1� A person religious hears in Butler’s assertion the allusion to kenosis or ego displacement as the beginning of the practice of nonviolence and the consequent hope for a practice of nonviolence situated where disgust threatens to root itself. I would suggest, for example, that we can combine But-ler’s insight with those of Buddhist meditative philosophy to renovate Christian theology’s own historical commitment to the flesh—which should not simply be heard in terms of “mortification” thereof. Martin Luther, for example, insisted that a dread of persons disabled was not reasonable, but more precisely an anxi-ety roused by Satan to occasion the sin of avoidance.16 Comparably, we can read the Genesis account of Eve and Adam clothing themselves in the garden sympathetically—in such a way as to respectfully recognize the exposure of the flesh as pivotal.

Equally important will be the recuperation of some wisdom practice for dar-ing to dive the deeps of humiliation, when the pall of disgust has been thrown, such that we resurface insightfully aware of the capaciousness of the flesh. The

14 Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14, 74–7�, 92–93. 1� Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 200�), 64. 16 Martin Luther, cited in M. Miles, “Martin Luther and Childhood Disability in Sixteenth-Century Germany: What Did He Write? What Did He Say?” Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health �, no. 4 (2001): �–36, cited on 9.




use of disablement as a political technology to humiliate the flesh, for example, acid scarring or mutilation in Sierra Leone as in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and, likewise, rape, that other military technology used to control female flesh or hu-miliate an enemy, may seem extreme examples, but should serve to remind us that this vulnerable tissue can and will be threatened, that, as scholar of late an-tiquities Virginia Burrus puts it, “there is no escape from shame.” That Burrus’s study takes us through historical “possibilities for a productive transformation of shame and through shame” suggestively insinuates that we too can creatively renovate or construct practices for living in proximity to flesh, for navigating the riptides of shame, humiliation, and disgust.17

In a similar if second vein, I encourage feminist and disability theologians to renew their discourse on pain. Disabled persons are assumed to be “bod-ies in pain.” We carry iconically that which our culture has rejected—a way to metabolize pain. In a culture that read Sigmund Freud’s descriptive pleasure/pain divide prescriptively, we have little or no cultural wisdom for navigating pain, for making sense of it or with it. We need pain, religious studies scholar Linda Holler (among others) has asserted, as a moral compass.18 To think with pain in this way is neither to transcend “the pain body”—as spiritual gurus like Eckhardt Tolle advise19—nor to assume that we know whom “the needy are,” a stereotype that has lead toward the charity model in relation toward persons disabled. That charity model preserves a superior to a presumed passive infe-rior, avoiding both the humanity and capaciousness of persons with disabilities and the political deconstruction of the social structure of exclusion itself. So navigating the value of pain otherwise would be significant for disabled persons’ “coming out,” for our coming into justice, at the same time as a pedagogy for pain will be important as this culture learns to navigate a world in less-than-ideal ecological and economic circumstances. Theologian Wendy Farley’s essay “ ‘The Pain-Dispelling Draft’: Compassion as a Practical Theology,” proposes in this vein to renovate Christian theology through comparative theological con-versation with Buddhism.20 I have ventured the same in my most recent Ameri-can Academy of Religion presentation, “Breathing through the Pain: Engaging the Cross as Tonglen, Taking to City Streets as Mendicants.”21

17 Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion) (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), xii. 18 Linda Holler, Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 78. 19 Eckhardt Tolle, “Breaking Free of the Pain Body,” in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Penguin, 200�), 183. 20 Wendy Farley, “‘The Pain-Dispelling Draft’: Compassion as a Practical Theology,” Journal of the NABPR 26, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 291–302. 21 Sharon Betcher, “Breathing through the Pain: Engaging the Cross as Tonglen, Taking to City Streets as Mendicants” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Montreal, November 2009).




Toward both these ends, disability and feminist theologies may find, I would venture, intriguing partnerships for rethinking flesh in certain venues of popular culture and postcolonial theory and theology. The heavy metal music scene, while overwhelmingly a male-dominated form of performance art world-wide (for example, Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper—but need a feminist comment on their chosen, “Christian” names?), like more recent pop phenom-enon Lady Gaga, have not been averse to moving conversations about the body into non-innocent terms of the flesh—of pain, anger, fear, disease, and decay, if also the carnal and the corpse, the conclusiveness of mortality. Indeed, Lady Gaga argued in one of her 2004 academic papers for New York’s Tisch School of the Arts that over against “social bodies,” disabled bodies might claim the only and enviable authentic ground of difference, of individuality. In other words, as she explains, “for the deformed, there is an ownership of one’s difference, an ownership that is visible and indisputable.”22 Lady Gaga’s recent Monster Ball Tour presumably took its name, at least in part, from her ongoing reflec-tions on the primary sixteenth-century text she used in her essay—Michel de Montaigne’s “Of a Monstrous Child.” And in one of her most recent music video “operas”—namely, “Paparazzi,” Lady Gaga herself can be seen in wheelchair and on crutches. If some disability theorists find her not at all “representative,” I’m less worried about “disability realism” than I am excited to see the audience invited to metabolize—with and through her performance art—a different re-lationship to the “monstrosity” of flesh, the mix of pleasure, pain, and performa-tivity (especially given that disability is often flattened into “suffering” and ever suspected then of false performance). Such art may allow us to fabulate with and beside these figures an escape from the performance of “the social body.”

Likewise postcolonial literature, from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chil-dren to Anosh Irani’s The Cripple and His Talismans as well as Barbara King-solver’s narrative character Adah in The Poisonwood Bible, has attempted to think toward a posthumanist horizon with and through the trope of the disabled body. Donna Haraway summarized this trajectory of thought in her essay “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” noting that “my focus is the figure of a broken and suffering humanity, signifying—in ambiguity, contradiction, stolen symbolism, and unending chains of noninnocent translation—a possible hope.”23 Whether these coincident discourses of the posthumanist imagination actually help carry the flesh, this differing of the body with itself, or simply borrow upon the iconog-raphy of disability remains to be seen. The socioeconomic and political future

22 Stefani Germanotta (aka “Lady Gaga”), quoted in Robert Everett-Green, “Going Gaga,” Globe and Mail, November 28, 2009, R�. 23 Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 86.



Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 11�

of persons with disabilities resides therein. The interests of capitalism—that is, our interests in capitalism—could well overrun the possible reach of these discourses to think flesh . . . and therefore bodies . . . differently.

In certain ways, postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s anthropological turn—her sense that we are “human in answer to an outside call,” a sensibility a theologian might recognize as resonant with a sense of call and equally with the command of neighbor love—seems at least as promising for a person disabled.24 For persons living with disabilities, human interdependence names the infra-structure of our freedom. Spivak encourages the suturing of human responsibil-ity into the human rights agenda, that model of autonomous propriety, such that the web of the freedom of flesh might here be reemergent.

Further, the “apophatic anthropology” forwarded in postcolonial feminist theologies may be promising for persons living with disabilities—at least to a point. In The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God, theo-logian Mayra Rivera invokes “apophatic anthropology” as the basis of ethical relations. Based on Levinasian sensibilities, “apophatic anthropology” suggests a practice of refusing to “name” the other, sidestepping “the imperialism of the same,” thereby also keeping oneself ethically open to “the gleam of transcen-dence . . . in [the] radical singularity” of “the Other.”2� Insomuch as Western culture presumes to know one like me as “disabled” (as it has also claimed to recognize its colonial and ethnic others), I find a touch of humor and honor in Rivera’s proposal for “unknowing” me. Catherine Keller has comparably in-voked “The Apophasis of Gender” as a practice of keeping feminism alert to its “own multiple unfoldings,” to thinking “gender without firm foundations and unquestionable boundaries.”26 Yet living in a culture that uses disability as a social and/or economic structure of exclusion, disappearing the disabled into the apophatic “cloud of unknowing” will not wholly suffice. Apophatic unknow-ing could further suppress that which culture holds abject. Rather, I might dare suggest that all might be invited to recognize themselves as “flesh of my flesh.” Any human (persons with disabilities say with a chuckle) is only ever temporar-ily “able.” That which allows us to self-identify as “dis/abled” is the queering snigger that all of humanity always also lives precariously on the virgule.

Within Christian theologies, disability theologians may also find some co-incidence of interest with those theologies loosely said to be developing in the wake of “death of God” theologies—as proposed, for example, by John Caputo,

24 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): �23–81, quotation on �4�. 2� Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 61. 26 Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Un/Saying of Feminist Theol-ogy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 4 (December 2008): 90�–33, quotation on 927.




Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gianni Vattimo.27 While the concept of “weak theologies” causes as much concern for disability as for feminist interests, that within these venues God has been positively ruined (that is, that the distinction between God and world or Spirit and Nature does not hold), it may yield deeper respect for the flesh. Eiesland broke into the sociosymbolic life of classic Christian the-ology and offered a counter projection of God: “I saw God,” she recalls of her dream sequence, “in a sip-puff wheelchair. . . . Not an omnipotent, self-suffi-cient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. In this moment, I beheld God as a survivor.”28 Later, with the scarred hands and feet of the resurrected figure of Jesus in mind, she continues: “Here is God as survivor . . . , a simple, unself-pitying, honest body, for whom the limits of power are palpable but not tragic.”29 Such symbolic innovation, Eiesland hoped, would allow Christians to “recognize . . . the incarnate Christ in the image of those judged ‘not feasible,’ ‘unemployable,’ with ‘questionable quality of life.’ ”30 This image has proven to be one of the most profound gifts Eiesland offered the Christian community, hitting up against a theology that thought itself as already endorsing incarnation and therefore embodiment at a deeply primal level. “Christians do not have an able-bodied God as their primal image,” wrote Rebecca Chopp, appreciatively reflecting upon Eiesland’s imagistic offering, but rather find “grace through a broken body.”31 Eiesland’s image echoes Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s evocation of a “suffering God”32 and these more recent images of a God emptied into the flesh of the world. Promising nothing yet, I simply put my finger on the potentially catalyzing intersection of disability, postcolonial, and radical or recent “death of God” theologies.

Toward a Twenty-First-Century Urban Theology

Given economic and ecological forecasts, it is not hard to imagine that something less than progress and/or capitalist aesthetic idealism will be in our future, that the body will be vulnerable to each of these scenarios (not only does disability often occasion poverty but poverty also often occasions, owing to lim-

27 “Weak theology” admits the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, the loss of foun-dations, and the loosening of “truth” claims and, hence, assumes an immanentalist, historicist, and more tenderly humbled frame. See, for example, Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Mi-chael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 28 Eiesland, Disabled God, 89. 29 Ibid., 102. 30 Ibid., 89. 31 Rebecca Chopp, introduction to Eiesland, Disabled God, 11. 32 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (19�3; reprint, London: SCM Press, 2002), 134.




ited access to survival, if not health resources, disability). While most of human-ity will, during these upcoming decades, migrate to cities (as we have already on the North American continent), urbanization has not necessarily resulted in human solidarity. Rather, as urban and disability theorist Harlan Hahn has argued, cultural isolation has motivated our interests in the cultivation of self-image—in the capitalist, romantic aesthetics of how we present ourselves one to another, reducing solidarity—in this age of spectacle—to being or looking like another.33 The disparity between a cult/ure of public appearance and those consigned to flesh interrupts the transcendence of human-to-human responsi-bility in the city.

Intriguingly, while Eiesland, a sociologist of religion, did not (as far as I know) comment on the intersection of disability with urban issues, these con-cerns marked her research34—as they now mark my own (and as they have been and remain linked in the disability studies area from the work of Harlan Hahn to Brendan Gleeson). To me, this averts to the on-set of the category of “disabil-ity” with industrialization and therefore urbanization, the problematics of the construction of the city, given the science of normativity, and the aesthetic poli-tics of global cities. But Eiesland might also ascribe this insight to the “kinesis of knowledge” among persons disabled—that is, the way in which disability oc-casioned a “thereness,” an undeniable location; the fact that disability demands disciplined attention to our social and physical bearings, to our world.3� But this rather surprising intersection of urbanism and disability also marks an interest-ing venue for theological praxis.

Sociologist Richard Sennett, assessing the Protestant demeanor of con-temporary urbanism, noted its disinclination to the presence of the alterity of flesh: “The Protestant imagination of space . . . expressed a desire for . . . a kind of egoistic power. Obsessive inner struggle may imply a deep hostility toward the needs of other people, a resentment of their very presence. . . . This hos-tility marks now the way the homeless or mentally disturbed are seen on the streets; they are resented because they . . . are visible. The very sight of their need is an intrusion upon the self.”36 But if so, then certain ways of performing flesh might—as Lady Gaga has also surmised—work as something like “social acupuncture.”37 Spirituality—in the name of culture critique and now turned toward “the practice of everyday life” (Michel de Certeau), with attention to

33 Harlan Hahn, “Advertizing the Acceptably Employable Image,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), 176. 34 Nancy L. Eiesland, A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 3� Eiesland, Disabled God, 31. 36 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1990), 4�. 37 Darren O’Donnell, in Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance, and Utopia (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006), defines “social acupuncture” as deploying the techniques of




what urbanist Jane Jacobs calls “the street ballet”—might engage a certain theatricality, whether street theater or a “mendicancy of attitude.”38 Given that power today is felt as mobility, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the “inconvenience” of disabled and differently abled bodies on the city sidewalk may offer other persons a “time hole”—a breach in the whole value network of “time is money.”39

In conclusion, feminists and disabled persons will be challenged to hold together as globalization plays with women and disabled slightly differently—employing, given our recent “mancession” and labor costs, more women than ever before (if even at lower wages and by putting women into migratory labor flows), while the aesthetics of globalization create greater and greater dumps of human refus/al, of what Bauman calls “wasted lives.”40 As I’ve tried to empha-size, the individual pathologization of “disability impairment” can prevent us from seeing that “disability” is a kind of racism, a social class exclusion. Eiesland borrowed an image from writer Nancy Mairs to mark out the truth of the body that remembered its limits, its precious and shared flesh—namely, the “body in trouble.”41 Neither writer was thereby sounding a note of despair, but rather loosing an ironic insight about how humans try so hard to evade, to elude, the contours and limits of flesh. Their quip even rings out with gratitude, given that disability com/presses us, re/minds us, to the sheer sensuousness of the flesh. Then again, within Christian theology, God too has irrevocably become, as Eiesland’s image so insightfully suggested, flesh of our flesh.

street theater to open “system-wide holding patterns” within the social body that have been occa-sioning “democratic deficiency” (48). 38 Philip Sheldrake, in Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), borrows upon the work of Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, to redirect spirituality—away from interiority, toward a theology of place, specifi-cally the city. In other words, the practice of spirituality has to do, in this view, with how we enter into what Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1993) calls “the ballet of the good city sidewalk” (6�). On “mendicancy of attitude,” see Stephen R. Munzer, “Beggars of God: The Christian Ideal of Mendicancy,” Journal of Religious Ethics 27, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 30�–30, quotations on 327–28, 309. 39 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity 2000), 119–20. 40 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 41 Nancy L. Eiesland, “Roundtable Discussion: Women with Disabilities: A Challenge to Fem-inist Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10, no. 2 (1994): 114–17, quotation on 116.

