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Iglesia Descalza
a voice from the margins of the Catholic Church

Friday, October 24, 2014

Solidarity

Embodying dissent: An interview with Beatriz Preciado

and Teresa Forcades
By Andrea Valds (English translation by Rebel Girl)
El Estado Mental
June 2014
Before this interview, Teresa Forcades (Barcelona, 1966) and Beatriz Preciado (Burgos, 1970)
didn't know one another personally. If we put them in touch, it's because they are, in their
respective contexts, an "anomaly", a word they contest, for cramping a heteronormative,
patriarchal and racist system.
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2014 (182)
12/07 - 12/14 (1)
11/30 - 12/07 (2)
11/23 - 11/30 (1)

At a time of huge imbalances, where the government doesn't hide its alliance with the market and
the crises feel like biblical plagues, their political dissidence is striking because it's physical as
well as intellectual dissidence and they practice it within the system. Teresa Forcades specialized
in internal medicine at the State University of New York. After studying theology at Harvard
University, she entered the Sant Benet Monastery. Once she had her doctorates in Public Health
(University of Barcelona) and Theology (Facultad de Teologa de Catalunya), she went off to
Berlin to study and give classes at Humboldt University. Beatriz Preciado, on the other hand,
studied modern philosophy and gender theory at the New School for Social Research in New
York and then got a doctorate in the Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. Until
recently, he was teaching at Paris 8 University and starting next term, he will be teaching at New
York University.
So much cum laude hasn't stopped them from being the object of many attacks. It's what comes
with talking about dildos and vaccinations, pornography and abortion, Hugh Hefner and Hugo
Chavez, without getting married to anyone. But behind these statements, there is research. While
Teresa Forcades incorporates the concept of subjectivity from contemporary anthropology
(Lacan, iek, Butler ...), updating the theological notion of the individual, Preciado, with
contrasexuality and criticism of what she (or he) calls the "pharmacopornographic regime," invites
us to explore other lifestyles that evade the current system and its main claim. Namely: that male
and female are the only two natural, and therefore possible, states. From the two bodies of work,
a political issue with huge potential for change is unleashed, hence we wanted to put them in
dialogue with each other.

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Embodying dissent: An interview with
Beatriz Preci...
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After a long exchange of emails, we attended the inauguration of the Queer Theology School
which took place at Francesca Bonnemaison in Barcelona at Teresa Forcades' invitation. In
Catalonia, she has great media presence. She became known in 2009 with a video in which she
attacked the pharmaceutical industry and, although she has written several books (La Trinitat,
avui, La teologa feminista en la Historia), most remember her for her critical attitude towards the
Church and, more recently, for her civic call for the right to choose a model of government, a
project she is steering with Arcadi Oliveres. Beatriz Preciado is better known abroad than in
Spain. His books, Manifiesto contrasexual, Testo Yonqui ("Testo Junkie") and Pornotopa, have
been translated into English, French, German, even Turkish, and are part of university curricula
today. In Catalonia, from the MACBA Independent Studies Programme that he directs, Preciado
has made "radical pedagogy" a form of political activism.
ANDREA VALDS: We know you have a complicated agenda. What led you to accept this
proposal?
TERESA FORCADES: I'd never met Beatriz personally but a couple of years ago in a course on

07/20 - 07/27 (6)

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06/01 - 06/08 (2)
05/25 - 06/01 (4)
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04/27 - 05/04 (5)

queer theology I gave in Berlin with Ulrike Auga, we used Manifiesto contrasexual to encourage
the students to think about this new way of looking at the human and identities, the limitations in
those identities and opening them, which is something I'm working on from theological
anthropology.

04/20 - 04/27 (4)

04/13 - 04/20 (4)
04/06 - 04/13 (2)
03/23 - 03/30 (2)

BEATRIZ PRECIADO: About four years ago I heard her speak for the first time and then tuned
into the revolutionary energy of her work. Despite the distance, there were times when I said to
myself that in another life, had I been a nun or rather a priest, I could have been Teresa
Forcades. Then I was interested in her criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, which is
something that's at the core of my work. I found it very interesting that coming from such different
worlds and working on the regimes of sexual, racial and gender domination that promote
hegemonic arguments (of the Catholic Church, the scientific or economic establishment), such a
genuine connection came about.

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VALDS: Teresa, you once said that on reading the Gospels in adolescence, you felt you had
been cheated of 15 years of your life because you hadn't found them earlier. Your approach to
religion seems incidental and friendly. Beatriz, on the other hand, mentions a really suffocating
Catholic milieu. Were the situations in Catalonia and Burgos so different in the 70s?

01/26 - 02/02 (3)

01/19 - 01/26 (4)
01/12 - 01/19 (3)
01/05 - 01/12 (4)

FORCADES: I think that in Catalonia, in the seventies, there were also very suffocating spheres
in the religious environment. I don't doubt it, although I discovered them later because if I had
known then, well, who knows?...

2013 (178)
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VALDS: You would have thought twice?

FORCADES: Yes, yes ... or three times. It is also true that the announced end of the Franco
regime and the idea of a society that would finally get up to date after so many years of waiting
coincided in Spain with the aggiornamento of Vatican II, which meant entering into dialogue with
modernity. It's true that the modernity thing lasted only a few years... (laughs). In 1966, when it
seemed we were entering alleged postmodernism, the church goes and gets into a dialogue with
modernity. Great timing! In any case, after a long wait, in which all you could see was opium, a
great wave of people was generated who were willing to question many things and keep what is
essential. That is, the assertion of the inalienable liberty of human beings, their constitutive
relatedness and, above all, the idea of social justice. I went to a parish that was in Montjuc and,
although I don't come from a wealthy family, it was that context that made me discover the world
of immigration and the working class. Christianity, freedom and social justice, to me, are
inseparable.
PRECIADO: In my case it was almost the opposite -- an imposition. My family was very Catholic,
with a tremendously dogmatic view of religion despite the fact that, for example, my grandmother
was Catholic and anarchist, thus there were already "cracks" in my environment. But, for me,
religion was the dominant way of thinking in the city of Burgos, and it was a way of thought
related to military culture, to political repression. That is, I couldn't see Catholic discourse as a
liberating discourse in any way. Although when I was little, one of the things I wanted to be was a
priest. When I was studying with the nuns, when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew
up, I said "a priest". And they said: "No, by God, Beatriz, it's 'a nun', 'nun'..." And I said, "Not a
nun, because nuns are quiet, they clean and make pastries, and I want to talk." I remember that
in school there was very overt tension because I never experienced my sexuality as pathological
or as a sin. I wanted to either be a priest or marry Marta. It was clear that my use of my body and
life choices could not be included within the dominant language of Catholicism.
VALDS: But you ended up studying with the Jesuits.
PRECIADO: It's a bit of a strange story. My father didn't want me to study Philosophy. He wanted
me to do Pharmacy, Law...a decent job. Since he wasn't going to pay for my studies, I entered a
young philosophers' contest in Burgos and won first prize, which was studying in a Catholic
university. Between Opus Dei and the Jesuits, I chose the Jesuits in Comillas. And it's true that I
still have a very tight relationship with some of them like Juan Masi, from whom I learned a great
deal. After Ignacio Ellacura and liberation theology, we would study Marx. It was economic theory
that came almost directly from the gospel! Impressive. That allowed us to make a very detailed
exegesis of his books. We read them like one reads the Bible. It was quite an experience, but of
course, the possibility of interpretation stopped where it stopped. I was with Foucault's History of
Sexuality, Derrida's deconstruction, feminism then, and wanted to explain my own dissent
through a different language. As I went to United States to study Contemporary Philosophy and
Gender Theory, everything changed. Staying in Spain, maybe I would have ended up in
Montserrat, but I felt something that took me beyond myself, like a kind of utopian arm.
Something that grabs you and says, "Come on, you can't stand idly by with what there is. You
have to do something!"
VALDS: What you're calling the "utopian arm", would that be equivalent to Teresa's "calling"?
FORCADES: The vocation to being a nun is one thing, but what Beatriz is talking about is related
to something broader. I'm not "me and me" but I'm "me and more." And that something more also
tells me things, and I feel it challenges me directly...

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PRECIADO: Obviously, but it's a challenge of history. With Walter Benjamin, for example, you
learn that history has been written by the winners and, even though you're on the side of the
vanquished, on the margins of that history, something says to you: "Come, you too can rewrite it
since you can handle that argument." This might sound absurd but it makes me happy and even
brings me close to those people who feel "called" except that, in my case, the call isn't
transcendental. It's the need to collectively reconstruct history from the losers' point of view.

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VALDS: I can understand that need, but relating it to the transcendental is harder for me.
Teresa, are you sure?
FORCADES: Before reading the gospels, at 13 or 14, when I looked at the world I already felt a
challenge, in a generic way. Later, with the first confirmation, at Sacred Heart they would say very
enthusiastically, "that girl will become a nun," but I didn't feel like that at all. It even bothered me
to hear it. It's true that later I studied medicine, but that being open to something beyond yourself
was just one part. When I stayed at Sant Benet to study, I experienced something different, and
the only name I can give it is that God was calling me. I know it can sound strange now; it was
also strange for me when I experienced it...but all I can testify to is that what I experienced was
something new for me that isn't confused in any case with what I felt yesterday or a few months
ago.
SWEAT AND TEARS
VALDS: Teresa, you've commented that during the novitiate there was a transformation. You've
talked about growing pale, losing weight, crying. Beatriz, meanwhile, mentions sleep
disturbances, a change in sweating and other side effects from administering Testogel to himself.
While one made a vow of chastity, the other multiplied his sexual appetite with a shot of
hormones. To change things, is it necessary to go to this extreme, to make a break with
"normalcy"?
PRECIADO: I suppose Teresa experiences it starting from theology. I experience it based on
philosophy which, for me, is a discipline not of the individual body but of the collective one. When
I decide to administer testosterone to myself, I don't do it as an individual whim because I'm given
to that, but because I know this has specific social and political repercussions in a given historical
and political context. What we might understand as "normality" is a set of specific disciplines, of
normative uses of the body. For me, philosophy implies a break with those diciplines of body
normalization and, if you will, the invention of a counterdiscipline.
VALDS: There's a sentence in which you say it very clearly: "I don't take testosterone to
transform myself into a man or even to transexualize my body, but to betray what society has
wanted to make of me."
PRECIADO: Precisely. Now, when I'm traveling around the world and I see the communities in
different places, I realize there's a cosmopolitan queer diaspora that speaks a very similar
language. They're people who share dissenting body practices and subjectification because the
body isn't just the physical body. That's a fiction of medicine...The body is political subjectivity;
there's no separation. It goes beyond the flesh. It's a political and cultural archive, or what I call a
"somatheque" -- living political fiction. What I was getting to, and by getting into a conversation
with Teresa, when I meet all these people -- transgendered, transsexual, queer -- I think we're like
the early Christians, but in the context of global capitalism. Who would give a shilling for those
crazy people? Imagine what the Roman Empire was then and suddenly a gang appears talking
about some guy who appeared thereabouts talking about the resurrection, etc. and the possibility
of tearing down all the legal and business practices that shaped that regime. What they were
doing was inventing a practice of alternative subjectification. They chose to subjectify themselves
not according to Roman ritual but starting from a language that even dissented with the Jewish
religion. And there were only 14. Tremendous! By this I mean that I don't believe there are better
or worse practices, but that it is absolutely necessary that we be able to collectively invent
dissident or alternative responses to normalized subjectification, otherwise we are lost. And if,
moreover, we are able to establish connections with "the other side" (which for me are the
ancestors, history, the planet...) it would be great, because it would no longer be a leakage point
but a tear in that sprawling net that is world capitalism.
FORCADES: For me, the body thing is less deliberate. My change didn't come from wanting to
experiment with it, but as a consequence of a decision. Let's say that with the "calling" a
possibility opened up for me where I was clear from the beginning that here I was to say yes or
no, because however much of a calling there is, this does not imply a destiny. I knew that when
saying yes, I would have to give up a number of satisfactions, of possibilities ... things that
affected my identity and understanding. So a question opened up that's still there, but it's different
now because at first everything was unknown to me. This question is reopened every time I fall in
love. Although there is a very negative discourse about sexuality in Catholicism, I don't
experience it in a stable manner. It's not something that has closed but a constant challenge. It's
also true that seeing the older nuns of the monastery as attractive women helped me a lot. Had it
not been so, then perhaps I would not have fulfilled my vocation. At 90 or 100, they have a sense
of humor and an inner freedom I think are fantastic. And finally, I liked the idea that since the 13th
century there has been a tradition of women living in community. It's not an ideal coexistence, we
have our problems, like everywhere, but that continuity impresses me and I thought maybe it
could be part of it. Nor did I have to decide on the first day. In fact, they made it hard for me. I
remember that, once the pallor phase was over, the novice mistress asked me, "Teresa, do you
you see yourself painting pottery ten years from now?". I said no. She replied, "Well that's what
we do."
VALDS: But something happened. Now there's a web page and you've even begun classes on
queer theology.
FORCADES: I answered that there were two possibilities here: either God would change me -He made us dynamic for a reason -- and in ten years I would be delighted to be painting pottery,
or God would change you. In which case, we could still do something more than pottery.
VALDS: What nerve! (laughter)

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FORCADES: Yes, that's how it was. The mistress told me that from a logical perspective I was
right, those two possibilities existed, but that I should remember that they had been painting for
1,500 years. Since pottery made my back hurt, they finally let me devote myself to more
intellectual issues...And here we are.
PRECIADO: Recalling that, it's interesting to note the eccentric position of women who haven't
entered into the social rites of heterosexual production. They are unused biopolitical uteruses...
FORCADES: And voluntarily, moreover. Yes, I admit that has potential.
PRECIADO: Precisely. There's potential that must be managed in a specific manner. In fact,
nuns, prostitutes and lesbians are three very conspicuous positions and historically close, I would
say. The deviation from the reproduction circuit of heterosexual capitalism leads to a curious
labyrinth of nuns who are also lesbians, lesbians who become prostitutes, and prostitutes who
end up becoming nuns. What happens is that I'm afraid the powers that be might try in some way
to go back to managing this dissident female body. Perhaps the only way to resist is to do what
you're doing -- be a dissident within the Church, just as I am within lesbianism.
FORCADES: And in academia.
PRECIADO: Of course. I'm also considered a dissident in that sphere.
FORCADES: In fact, I've experienced less freedom in the academic sphere and the hospital than
in the monastery. Freedom in the sense of finding people who are able to take individual
positions, outside the mainstream. In the end, for fear of the consequences, you end up
censoring yourself and, in the university, that's sad.
PRECIADO: But, Teresa, beyond the monastery I imagine there's pressure from the ecclesiatical
establishment not to say what you're saying.
FORCADES: Perhaps it will no longer be thus tomorrow but in my context, which is the
monastery, there's diversity. We aren't a clan. Before publishing my letter against the
criminalization of abortion, for example, I asked the community to discuss it, because there would
be consequences for them too. More or less half of them told me they didn't support my position,
and the other half, that they didn't understand it...The abbess told me, "I'm not sure whether I'm in
the first group or the second but, in any case, we're all in favor of anyone being able to say what
they think without fear, so go ahead." Then there's the Diocese of Barcelona which during my
time in the monastery was divided into three. It's assumed that to diminish Montserrat's
ecclesiastical power, it was awarded the belt of Sant Feliu del Llobregat, which is the most
chastized area, which has ended up being a blessing. Rome is now more distant and, yes, they
did send me a letter which I answered. I try to give my opinion without attacking anyone directly.
The bishops don't matter to me. I'm more concerned about other things.
THE INCARNATION
VALDS: Beatriz often speaks of the audiovisual industry and, specifically, pornography as a
means of production and control of gender and sexuality, but maybe we should deal with the
incarnation, which represents the moment in which the divine takes human form. That is, is
embodied. Again, representation. I'll propose this phrase to start with: "I have no doubt that Christ
was male, but I don't think we ought to wait for 'Crista' to come to save women, since everything I
am as a woman is assumed in Christ, except sin." Teresa, what do you mean?
FORCADES: In my theological anthropology that question is key. Knowing whether there's a
male human modality and a female human modality, and what "masculinity" and "femininity"
mean in my understanding of anthropology and humanity. This "Crista" thing isn't mine, it's from
Rosemary Radford Ruether but she bases it on patristic theology where this phrase is an axiom:
"That which is not assumed in Christ is not redeemed."
PRECIADO: That would mean that women are not redeemed.
FORCADES: Right. And all the Christological discourse is like that. God is not alien to the
human, but one possibility of the human. The fullness of the human is deification. Although there
are interesting theories that point out that if Christ was born of Mary, he should be chromosomally
XX, I don't question whether he was male because I don't care to and, in any case, if I did, we
wouldn't gain anything either because if he had been a woman unbeknownst to us, what about
men? They would be left out too.
PRECIADO: Unless you get away from dualism.
FORCADES: Precisely. It must be said that in Christianity, the duality discourse is modern. The
classic one was even worse. It only recognizes one fullness of the human: males, which it
matches with the figure of Jesus. In the Gospel of Mary from the third century, the female
becomes male to enter heaven. She becomes virtuous, which comes from virility -- vir (man).
Since the argument of unity through the male wasn't bearable, with John Paul II two paths of
fullness are distinguished -- female and male -- but creating artificial dualities based on gender or
identity isn't persuasive to me either. There has to be something more open. Although I think
gender duality -- or sexual dimorphism, as Margaret Mead would say -- is not only cultural, but
transcultural, it is only as an anthropological starting point, i.e. in childhood. Very succinctly: you
have the figure of the mother and, with respect to her, you have the girl who identifies with her
and the boy who breaks away from her. In my view, the error of patriarchal society is continuing
this pattern, which is an infantile model, into adulthood. There has to be a caesura in adulthood,
subjectivizing oneself according to a point of reference that is no longer the mother. It may be

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truth, goodness, a rock, or God, you choose, but not the mother, because then you're just
reproducing this dichotomy but not developing as a person. I match the phrase in Galatians 3:28,
"in Christ Jesus there is neither man nor woman" (in Greek, neither male nor female) with the
conversation with Nicodemus, when it talks about being born again and he says, "How can an
adult go back to his mother's womb?". To which Jesus replies, "No, no ... You must be born of
water and the spirit." I understand that as adult subjectification.
VALDS: You're using a language between biblical and
psychoanalytic.
FORCADES: Yes, I use some concepts from psychoanalysis
because if I used the language of Maximus the Confessor, no one
would understand me. Lacan, on the other hand, now sounds
more...(laughter)
PRECIADO: It's fascinating to me that you're trying to feminize, or
offer a possibility beyond the male one for the incarnation of Christ,
although I can't say much about that because, to me, it depends on
an exercise in faith and, as a general rule, I'm interested in the
words of poets or philosophers, not prophets and politicians. I'm
interested in words that can desecrate. Maybe that seems horrible to you but by "desecrate", as
Agamben says, I mean taking language reserved for the use of the divine and bringing it to the
mundane, so we can give meaning to this sphere that has been confiscated from us. In that
sense I'm fascinated that you're making this do-it-yourself project of signs in the theology
environment which has been an environment that for centuries has only been accessible to
certain types of men.
FORCADES: We're forgetting the women mystics who never came to dominate the discourse but
who are a very important exception. Even, if I may be allowed, in "mystic" there's a striking use of
language. How is it that [men] are called theologians and [women] mystics? Since it was
assumed that they couldn't think for themselves, [the women] made recourse to "God has told
me...". In Saint Thomas there is also revelation but he makes it his own through his words.
PRECIADO: Going back to the possibility of conceptual do-it-yourself projects, I'm saying that I
can't say much about the incarnation of Christ. Now, with respect to anthropology I do distance
myself. Where are the intersexuals, the transsexuals, the "others" in your theology? When you
mention that in the Christian discourse of the first era, only masculinity was conceded to be a
pure or essential form of incarnation, notice that this is consistent with the history of sexuality. We
know that until the 17th century the notion of sexual difference as we know it didn't exist.
Moreover, and with all due respect, I'm shocked that, having dual titles -- theological and medical
-- you're working with the anthropology of sexual difference when we know it's anatomical and
political fiction, and that if there's a place of epistemic violence, it's precisely in clinical prenatal
diagnosis (boy/girl). I'm surprised that in your theology you've chosen to start from the
male/female binary, which is a normative construct, rather than from the irreducible multiplicity of
the body in all its variables, and if you will, to put it in your language, God could become incarnate
in all of them.
FORCADES: Yes, for me that's the point of arrival. I mean, what I have to work on. Now, what's
striking to me is the following: Where did that (male/female) dichotomizing that's being replicated
over and over, come from? Where does gender violence and this idea of blaming women come
from? -- I'm following Kristeva, here. Acknowledging the gender dichotomy from the start is the
most powerful strategy I have to deactivate it later.
PRECIADO: But then the theology you're practicing can't be queer. If you're accepting Julia
Kristeva, it doen't work...I would encourage you to not waste too much time trying to fit sexual
difference into your incarnation language because we're experiencing a time of epistemic crisis,
such as happened in the mid-17th century in which the verification apparatuses, that is the social
and political regulatory systems we use to decide what's true and what's false -- which up to now
has been what's male and what's female, are changing. There's more and more evidence,
including in medical discourse they're saying that there are multiple morphological, genetic, and
gonadal forms that go beyond the binary order. Fifty years from now perhaps we may have to
accept the existence of four or five genders...to make the task of the incarnation of Christ more
complicated for Teresa. Or not. Maybe it'll even be easier. For me, one of the problems of the
Church is that it's working with an epistomology of patriarchal domination. I imagine that the main
question is how to change this language into one of liberation and not domination, although I
have a much more skeptical perspective on the history of theology. Lately I've been researching
colonization and the involvement of theological arguments in that task, which supposedly was a
task of evangelization. We know from Walter Mignolo and Anbal Quijano that the secret agenda
of that evangelical humanization was, to put it clearly, colonial exploitation. And I don't know, I
understand your task and it's fascinating to me, but maybe I've given it up for lost in some sense.
Although there are still underground theological arguments, which is what you're trying to
recover...
FORCADES: That's it. In La teologa feminista en la Historia ["Feminist Theology in History"] I
presume that when there's a dominant discourse, there's another one that puts it into question,
and in that sense feminist theology has existed since the beginning; it's not a 20th century
invention. If it were, it wouldn't interest me. I'm thinking of Marie de Gournay, Van Schurman, and
others. In fact, I always say that writing that book made me cry -- because if they already
understood it in the 1st century, what are we doing with all this suffering twenty centuries later? -and it also gave me much joy. What we need to do is provide continuity to this tradition which has
progressed interruptedly.

POLITICAL ECOLOGY
VALDS: Coming back to the present, you have both been very critical of the capitalist system.
What's your diagnosis?
PRECIADO: I think one of the utopian arms I mentioned earlier, and perhaps the most important
one, is political ecology. I don't see how a contemporary theology couldn't wonder what we're
doing today or what the plan of modernity is. And I'm with Foucault. Modernity has been a
thanatopolitical project, in the sense that the only things we have used are techniques of death,
and the concepts of normative sexual difference, normative heterosexuality, race production, the
exploitation of the planet come in here...
FORCADES: I understand what you're saying and I'm also working in the ecology field. I'm
looking at thinking of the world as a whole creation which is also the body of Christ but I should
say that, for me, this is not the same as making humanity in its uniqueness disappear. I'm
responsible for the tree; the tree is not responsible for me. That responsibility is very tied to our
freedom. In that sense, caesura goes back to being essential to me.
PRECIADO: Of course the tree is responsible for you when it makes photosynthesis and
transforms light and water into the oxygen you breathe! Before you were talking about the
concept of relatedness, which for me is more powerful than voluntaristic freedom, because
freedom is in understanding that there is no life apart from a set of relationships that go beyond
the human.
FORCADES: Here we're now getting to my doctoral thesis which is a response to Karl Rahner. In
the 60s, he came to say that we have to change the theological language of the Trinity. We can't
call the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit a "person" because a person, in modern times, is an
autonomous being which has nothing to do with those three. To which I replied, "No, no, what we
have to do is question this notion of a person as an autonomous being who conceives of himself
independently from his relatedness." If I seriously believe that being a person is being made in
the image of God, I will take up my notion of God and based on it, question the notion of the
modern person. For this, I'm drawing on St. Augustine: Esse in would be the dimension of
distinctive irreducibility (personal freedom) and Esse ad, the relational dimension, and, in my
theology, it's not that they complement each other, but that they're two aspects of the same
reality. They are radically simultaneous, constitutive dimensions of the human, that cannot be
divided into female (more relational or loving) and male (more free and independent).
PRECIADO: My notion of subjectivity, on the other hand, doesn't presuppose individual freedom.
Either as origin or destination. As pretentious as it sounds, perhaps it would be easier for you to
work with my notion than with yours. I start with a subject who is fundamentally vulnerable,
relational, not virtuous at all. Historically, we have construed subjectivity as individual sovereignty
based on necropolitics, on the politics of war and domination, claiming that only "man" could be
an agent of history. But there is another philosophy, which is weaving networks so that vulnerable
life can continue to exist, to be viable. And I think the part of mystical tradition you claim goes that
way, and it doesn't specifically demand an autonomous heroic actor, but a relational agent,
always dependent.
FORCADES: No -- yes, I understand your position -- but it's that I don't want to renounce that
irreducibility. The problem, as I see it, is that not everyone in the world has access to that
personal freedom which allows us to individualize ourselves, because our social structure always
tends to generate "second class" citizens, be they women, blacks, etc...Also, it seems very
suspicious to me that just when we all start to have access to that space -- the autonomous
subject -- either it's no longer seen as something positive or it becomes an illusion.
VALDS: Oops! It looks like they're calling us...
PRECIADO: I don't think we're so far apart, Teresa, but you're playing some cards against which
the queer activist can't play. When I'm not paying attention, you bring out the Trinity, the
Incarnation of Christ, God!.... (laughter). I don't have metaphysical cards to put on the table,
simply the need to change the world by critically taking responsibility for our own history. My
answer can't come from Theology because I don't believe anyone is going to come to save us.
We need a different Earth policy and I don't think we can make it by putting the arrogant
dominating myth of the human at the center again. We need to learn from the tree more than from
God.
FORCADES: "I said to the almond tree, 'Speak to me of God,' and the almond tree blossomed."...
At this point, we left the room. Teresa Forcades had to inaugurate the Queer Theology School
with Ulrike Augia and Lisa Isherwood. It must be said that being somewhat hoarse, she had to
whisper during the interview such that her words took on the weak tone of the counterargument
she makes so often. But make no mistake, in her next intervention, she took out a bottle of
Condis black pepper. "They say it's good for the voice. I'll try a little and see what happens..."
After that mini-performance that won over the audience, Forcades went on to update the parable
of the Good Samaritan so that the assaulted one was a woman who had been raped and before
whom neither women professors nor politicians stopped, but rather an immigrant prostitute. She
agreed with Beatriz Preciado that the "excluded" have a lot of courage to share and they will do it.
For a start, a sector has turned an insult ("queer") around to change it into a critical tool. And here
we are, taking notes.
Translator's note: The use of masculine pronouns in this article when referring to Beatriz Preciado
is not a mistake; it's what he prefers.

Posted by Rebel Girl at 6:46 PM

Labels: Forcades, homosexuality, theology

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