Queering the Virgin

Queer activists in Spain launched a calendar where transgender persons play the Virgin Mary. This personal discovery of the Spanish calendar comes after a long discussion with my PhD supervisor on religion, about how Orthodoxists claim Tarkovsky, about the easy way out of religion (the claim: “I am an atheist”), about the creepiness of the Christian right and a final agreement on the finest pose of Catholicism that we both enjoy (Father Ted).

Carla Antonelli explains the idea of this calendar:

“I posed myself the following scenario: Why is it that a transsexual woman can’t represent a religious icon given life by so many other actors and actresses throughout history? To not do it would be akin to internalizing the same discriminatory principles that people want to throw against us.”

Because telling who is allowed to act what role denies/recognizes the body of the performer. Transgender people’s bodies are constantly denied, ignored, non-recognized as “real bodies”. Because only ciswomen can play women, right? Otherwise we are looking for the comic effect.

Carla Antonelli’s comment made my day. I remembered my old time fascination with Marcela Althaus-Reid’s books indecent theology of qeering God. I discovered the queer Catholicism when I was in the Netherlands years ago and there was this image stuck in my mind: Jesus in a black latex Batman suit suffering on the cross. Besides the inherent iconoclasm of the calendar to Vatican I style Catholicism (still strong in Catholic countries and also in Greek Catholic communities as I remember from my years in Transylvania), we should not forget t

hat there are also “those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms”. We are not talking only about the Marxist criticism on religion.

Back to the Virgin, I am impressed by the materiality of belief in these images, where the missing body of the Virgin returns. And this is a strong visual/conceptual statement. As Marcela Althaus-Reid wrote

“If theology has its own cowardice and fears, the horror of uncontrolled bodies and especially of the orgy made up of unrestricted bodies may be the stronger. There are bodies whose fluids overflow the metaphorical discourse of theology, but they have lost materiality and sensuousness. Theology can see blood in wine but not blood in blood. The Vatican can see tears in the eyes of the statues of the Virgin Mary, or sweat on her robes when considering the legitimacy of a claimed apparition, but cannot see a trace of semen on her skirts.”

The criticism of this calendar based on explicit sexuality is shallow: it is only your cissexism and transphobia speaks. You need a better argument than “trans women’s bodies are not fit to represent the Virgen”.

What I see as a valid critique on this project is Prof Susurro’s point of view that

“there is only one trans woman of color in the calendar. Modern day Spain is an international country with Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin@s living within its borders as new comers or third and fourth generation Spaniards. It would have been fairly easy to include trans women of color under these circumstances. Neither the mainstream queer community nor the religious community imagines people of color as part of the Body. Even when correcting the transmisogyny of traditional Christian images, queer activists continue to make these dual exclusions, except for the month of April.”

What about the other months of the year?