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Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist
Discourse
Author(s): Sharon V. Betcher
Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 107-118
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 JFSR 26.2 (2010) 107139

Roundtable:
Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland

Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies

on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse
Sharon V. Betcher

Oh, youre 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 unprostheticizedor 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 feminisms 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 bodys ability, health, beauty,
and productivity, I wonder ifjust as Nature has proven to be a transcendental
term in a material maskbody, even loosed from any conscious religious scal-
ing, might likewise hide its transcendental demeanor in a corporeal overcoat?


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

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108 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

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.
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. 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 wholenessby 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 livespain, difficulty, disease, transience, aging, error, and corporeal
limit, if even also the epiphanies and critical insights that come with illness, as
Virginia Woolf insists.

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 womens humanity, feminismat-
tempting to shrug off the note of degeneracy that woman had carried in
philosophical discourse since Aristotles timeunwittingly thereby also ac-


Yvonne Sherwood, Passion-Binding-Passion, in Toward a Theology of Eros, ed. Vir-
ginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 16993. While
Sherwoods 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.

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): 99134.

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, introduction by Hermione Lee (Paris: Paris Press, 2002).

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 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 rejectsin terms of race and ethnicity
as well as genderaspired 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 degenerationa 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 formeven as it might secretly
enjoy its pathological disorders. 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. Frankly, lest
normative culture use disabled persons toward its own mythological endsas,
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 Eieslands 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 ones impairment remains the primary identifiable attribute of
a person do we end up with a category of the disabled, Eiesland asserted.
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 globalin
its search for an ever-cheaper labor supply, this insight from disability studies
needs to become more analytically central, lest this biasveiled by our ana-
lytics of individual pathology and consequent pitygo unanalyzed. The U.S.
State Department under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hill-
ary Clinton has formulated an agenda focused on womens well-being. Whether


Ibid., 100.

See, for example, the satirical video clip The Disabled Girl, www.youtube.com/watch
?v=tSBxE9haiQ+NR=1.

Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nash-
ville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 22.

Ibid., 26.

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110 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

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 Eieslands sociological
insights, I suggest also that disability refers us to a deep anxiety inherent in
humanisms relation to the flesha 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 consciousnesswith, for example, womens loathing of
our own fleshand thus with grueling regimes of self-surveillance on behalf of
patriarchy. 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 forcesnamely, 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 totalizationin 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-femininitiesout
of both conforming pleasure and the fear of defect. Consequently, it seems to
me, that this terrain of the fleshwhere dread and disgust and humiliation get
played out, in economic, cultural, and political, if also deeply personal regis-
tersmarks 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.


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

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 Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 111

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 Im most familiar)
too remain within the scope of a totalizing forceof 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 fleshsurely, 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, Id like to propose two theological options
for cultivating religious practice in relation to the fleshthe 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 45, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 25262, quotation on 253.
12
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004),
29.
13
Eiesland, Disabled God, 92.

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112 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

that formation of sentient consciousness caught on the cusp of always already

offering up judgment about fleshy mattersas 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 bodyin romantic
reliefa primary preoccupationoften 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.15 A person religious hears in Butlers 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-
lers insight with those of Buddhist meditative philosophy to renovate Christian
theologys own historical commitment to the fleshwhich 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
sympatheticallyin 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, 7475, 9293.
15
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005),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 5, no. 4 (2001): 536, cited on 9.

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 Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 113

use of disablement as a political technology to humiliate the flesh, for example,

acid scarring or mutilation in Sierra Leone as in the Talibans 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 Burruss
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 rejecteda way to
metabolize pain. In a culture that read Sigmund Freuds 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 bodyas spiritual gurus like
Eckhardt Tolle advise19nor 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 Farleys 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
Lifes Purpose (New York: Penguin, 2005), 183.
20
Wendy Farley, The Pain-Dispelling Draft: Compassion as a Practical Theology, Journal
of the NABPR 26, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 291302.
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).

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114 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

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 Cooperbut 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 fleshof 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 Yorks 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 ones difference,
an ownership that is visible and indisputable.22 Lady Gagas 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 essayMichel de
Montaignes Of a Monstrous Child. And in one of her most recent music video
operasnamely, Paparazzi, Lady Gaga herself can be seen in wheelchair
and on crutches. If some disability theorists find her not at all representative,
Im less worried about disability realism than I am excited to see the audience
invited to metabolizewith and through her performance arta 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 Rushdies Midnights Chil-
dren to Anosh Iranis The Cripple and His Talismans as well as Barbara King-
solvers 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, Aint (Arnt) 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, signifyingin ambiguity, contradiction, stolen symbolism,
and unending chains of noninnocent translationa 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, R5.
23
Donna Haraway, Ecce Homo, Aint (Arnt) 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.

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 Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 115

of persons with disabilities resides therein. The interests of capitalismthat

is, our interests in capitalismcould well overrun the possible reach of these
discourses to think flesh ... and therefore bodies ... differently.
In certain ways, postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivaks anthropological
turnher 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 loveseems 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 disabilitiesat 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.25 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 Riveras 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 theologiesas proposed, for example, by John Caputo,

24
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Righting Wrongs, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3
(2004): 52381, quotation on 545.
25
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): 90533, quotation
on927.

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116 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

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 Eieslands imagistic offering, but rather find grace through a
broken body.31 Eieslands image echoes Dietrich Bonhoeffers evocation of a
suffering God32 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
DIsanto (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-
chaelB. 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 (1953; reprint, London: SCM Press,
2002), 134.

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 Roundtable: Honoring the Work of Nancy Eiesland 117

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-
imagein the capitalist, romantic aesthetics of how we present ourselves one
to another, reducing solidarityin this age of spectacleto 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 research34as 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 disabledthat 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.35 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 mightas Lady Gaga has also surmisedwork as something like social
acupuncture.37 Spiritualityin 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).
35
Eiesland, Disabled God, 31.
36
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers,
1990),45.
37
Darren ODonnell, in Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance, and Utopia
(Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006), defines social acupuncture as deploying the techniques of

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118 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2

what urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the street balletmight 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 holea 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 Ive 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 fleshnamely, 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 Eieslands 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 spiritualityaway 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 (65). On mendicancy of attitude, see
StephenR. Munzer, Beggars of God: The Christian Ideal of Mendicancy, Journal of Religious
Ethics 27, no.2 (Summer 1999): 30530, quotations on 32728, 309.
39
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity 2000), 11920.
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): 11417, quotation on116.

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