About two months ago, a commentary came out in the US online media publication, The Huffington
Post, written by a transgender activist by the name of Leslie McMurray.
The image that you see in the slide here had recently gone viral on, predominantly on Facebook.
And McMurray wanted to identify herself as what she called the girl in the picture.
So the piece from The Huffington Post is actually entitled The Girl in the Picture.
And Leslie McMurray wrote the piece, both to identify herself and to explain the story
behind what was going on in the picture.
So she writes, and this is a quote, being a transgender woman, the past few months have
been a nonstop barrage of laws designed to punish us for existing.
And this refers to some of the laws that have been passed recently in the United States,
banning transgender people from using the bathrooms appropriate to their gender and
forcing them to use bathrooms that match their birth sex instead.
So the past few months have been a nonstop barrage of laws designed to punish us for
existing, politicians attacking kids with evil legislation and their own brand of hate speech.
It's been emotionally exhausting being constantly asked what I think about some law or to comment
on the latest trans woman to be murdered.
Now, and then this is a reference to the shootings in Orlando at the Gay Night Club, now in one
horrific night, 49 beautiful souls were ripped away from us at a place that is supposed to
be a sanctuary.
Their whole lives were ahead of them.
It all became too much.
She sought out a permanent memorial that is important to the LGBTQ community in Dallas,
Texas, where she lives.
That memorial had become also a temporary memorial for the Orlando victims.
And she speaks of going to that memorial one day and just beginning to cry and not being
able to stop and sitting down.
After about 20 minutes, she writes, the other person in this image whose name is Sister
Lana Jockey.
This is a joke on the term Lawn Jockey, which has a complicated and racist history in the
United States.
They're small statues that are built with rings to hold your horse back when people got around
only by horseback, to hold your horse while you went in and did whatever you needed to
do at that particular establishment or that home.
So I don't know the story behind Sister Lana Jockey's name, but that is her name.
So Sister Lana Jockey showed up after about 20 minutes and just held McMurray saying over
and over again, I love you.
McMurray continues, and I'm quoting again here, it was my first emotional breakdown next
to a busy intersection.
And I was so unbelievably grateful for the compassion, strength, and love shown to me
that afternoon.
I had no idea someone had taken a picture, but I'm glad they did.
I didn't find out until I saw it on Facebook later that evening.
I've seen the sisters at a lot of events.
They seem to be everywhere.
The world needs more people like them.
Sister Lana saw someone who was upset and offered comfort and reassurance.
So simple.
Yet many of us, me included, might shy away from doing it ourselves.
So McMurray ends the piece.
I'm recovering from a cold, so I'm going to be doing this a lot to try to keep from coughing
in your ears.
She ends the piece by thanking Sister Lana, comparing her to an angel and writing, Dallas
is a better place because of you.
And I am going to end up coughing in your ears.
My apologies.
Sister Lana is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international order
of religiously unaffiliated people who call themselves queer nuns for the 21st century.
I want to talk today about who these queer nuns are and what the impact is of their claim
to actually be nuns.
Specifically, the question that I want to explore today is what are the consequences
of literally embodying, so being in the body of or bringing into one's body and inhabiting.
So I've hyphenated these words to stress the richness of meaning here, so living in, but
also I'm punning on being in habit, being in the habit of a nun.
I'll start with a little bit of background on the order.
They don't currently have a house in Norway, the closest to you is a kind of conglomerate
house of northern Germany.
They were founded in San Francisco in 1979 and described themselves in their 1980 constitution
as an order of gay male nuns.
This description was more literally descriptive than it was prescriptive.
They did not intend to establish themselves as exclusively an order of gay male nuns, but
rather described themselves at the time as being constituted solely of gay men.
Women began joining the order in the mid 1980s, cisgender women specifically at that point.
By the mid 1990s, the order had transgender members and heterosexual members as well.
It is still however predominantly cisgender gay men, it's also predominantly white and
there are interesting questions that I go into in much more depth in the book than I
will hear around the dynamics of race in the order.
The mission statement of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which they originally crafted in
the 1980s and which remains unchanged today, is the promulgation of universal joy and the
expiation of stigmatic guilt.
By 1981, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had houses, these are non-residential chapters,
but because they model themselves after nuns' orders, they call them houses.
They had houses in Sydney, Australia and in Toronto, Canada.
By the late 1980s, there were other houses in Australia and new houses as well in London
and in Seattle.
And by the early 1990s, there were houses in New Zealand as well as in Berlin and Paris.
Today the Sisters are active in ten countries on four different continents.
There are 84 houses currently open, an additional 31 have been open in the past but are now
closed and the order claims over 1600 total members across the course of its history.
Some of those members are now retired, some have passed away and because membership changes
so rapidly, the order does not, and because it's not very centralized, the order does
not keep track of current membership so I don't have those numbers to share with you.
Sisters take their vows for life.
Even if they retire, even if they take what they call a sabbatical, step back from their
work with the house, they are still beholden to their vows, they are still beholden to
that mission of the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt.
The only way in which one becomes no longer a member of the order is through excommunication,
which happens in cases of severe violation of the principles of the order, for instance
through appropriating the order's funds for one's own purposes rather than seeing them
used for community support.
This is an all volunteer order.
People do this in their off time.
Most sisters either have jobs, are students, or are looking for jobs, particularly when
I was doing this research in the aftermath of the recession of the late 2000s.
Many of them were looking for work rather than actively working, but this is not something
that one does full time.
The sisters are not paid.
None of the money that they raise goes into anything personal such as their makeup or
their habits, that all comes out of their own funds.
Every single amount of money that they raise goes back to their service to the community.
As far as religion goes, the sisters have never been religiously affiliated.
They also do not understand themselves as a religion.
I often joke that the story of the founding of the sisters could be told as a tasteless
joke, something like a Catholic, a Mennonite, and a Jew walk into a gayberhood.
None of them were practicing at the time, but the three people who essentially initially
started the sisters without knowing at the time that they were starting something, one
was a former Catholic, one was a former Mennonite, and one was a culturally Jewish and non-practicing
Jew.
On the other hand, just a few months after the sisters were founded, a neo-pegant movement
called the Radical Fairies was founded.
The Radical Fairies focus largely on gay men.
Some circles don't allow women, I believe either trans or cis, into their membership.
Others do.
It varies circle by circle.
So the Radical Fairies had, at the initial gathering of the Radical Fairies, there were
several people who became a part of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and therefore there's
been a strong influence between the sisters and the fairies all along.
Many members of the Order see their work with it as an expression of their spirituality,
and some have even told me that their spirituality or even their religion is the sisters.
So although the Order is not a religious order and they are not a religion, and some people
have also told me, if I thought this was a religion, I would have had nothing whatsoever
to do with it, at the same time some people find in the sisters a source of spirituality
or religion.
So I consider the work of the sisters to be a form of what I call serious parody.
To take the parody side first, which I think one must always do with the sisters, they
engage in what we might call camping or querying the figure of the nun with two functions or
two purposes.
The first being to critique the church.
So as you I think have been able to see already from the images that I've shown you, the camping
and critiquing of the figure of the nun is focused particularly on the figure of the Roman
Catholic nun.
And when we're talking about critique, we're also talking about critiquing Christianity
specifically and even more specifically often, not always, the Roman Catholic Church.
So to take a few examples of the kind of critique that the sisters are engaged in, back in
1987 they staged, and that's what this image is of here, a mass against papal bigotry.
This was in San Francisco on the occasion of the visit of Pope John Paul II to the city.
So this mass, and I have the text of the mass, this was an actual ceremony, it was an actual
ritual, it was not intended to be nor represented as a Roman Catholic mass, but it was nonetheless
for them a mass.
During this mass they enacted an exorcism of Pope John Paul II, exercising him of the
demons of homophobia.
And they also canonized, so made into a saint, slain, gay, and Jewish political leader Harvey
Milk.
So Harvey Milk is a saint of the sisters, he was not being made a Roman Catholic saint
by any stretch of the imagination.
A few days earlier, prior to this mass, one of the founding sisters going at that point
in time by the name Sister Vishis Power Hungry Bitch, she's still known today as Sister Vish,
but she's now switched her name to Sister Vishnu, and yes that is a Hindu reference.
A few days earlier Sister Vish and a few other sisters held a press conference at which they
held up a list of their concerns, their objections to the positions held by the Vatican, particularly
on issues such as homosexuality and safer sex, which has been a focus of the sisters'
work almost since their beginnings.
Having stated what their objections were to the gathered members of the media, she then
marched over to the main cathedral in San Francisco where the Pope would be visiting,
used a Lee Presson nail, a fake fingernail, and nailed her theses to the door of the
cathedral.
So there is no shortage of religious parody going on here in this group, which also you
might notice requires a significant amount of religious knowledge to engage in the kind
of parody that they're engaging in.
Now another example comes from Sydney, Australia.
Just a few years later in 1989, there was a politician at the time, also a very conservative
Protestant pastor by the name of Fred Nile, and here you see the Sydney sisters in Sydney's
1989 Mardi Gras Parade dancing around the head of Fred Nile, now I'm trying to say
John the Baptist and Fred Nile together, dancing around the head of Fred Nile on a platter
as sisterly Salamese.
A few contemporary examples include this, what I think is quite a stunning image.
This is Sister Destiny LeFemme of the Los Angeles House at a fundraiser that the sisters
have held regularly on the US West Coast for the past several years.
The fundraiser is called Project Nunway, that's a pun on the fashion runway, and in this event
the sisters are paired with fashion designers who design habits for the sisters and then
they parade them on the runway and it raises money for a variety of causes in queer communities.
In this case Sister Destiny's designer fell ill, she designed this herself.
If you look closely you will see that the bow on her hip is the leather cover of a Bible
and the entire habit is made of the pages.
So again the kind of very pointed religious parody and critique that goes on in the sisters
is very much still there today.
At the 30th anniversary of the sisters in San Francisco in 2009 there was a protest against
the Vatican policies under Pope Benedict, an effigy of the pope was created and small
slips of paper containing direct quotes from Vatican statements were pushed out the mouth
of the effigy and read and each time they would, the sisters that were gathered would
fall down on the ground.
So this is a die-in very much in the mode of earlier protests particularly in queer communities,
we know die-ins from the work of ACT UP.
So they would all fall down quote unquote dead and say words kill and this words kill
die-in protest has also been used by other houses of the sisters to protest as counter-protest
against conservative religious protests of for instance gay pride parades.
So the second piece then of the purpose or the function of the sisters parody is part
of the expiation of stigmatic guilt that's in their mission statement.
So here you see and I'll read this for you because it'll be difficult for most of you
to read.
This is a portion of the sisters play fair pamphlet which is the first sex positive
safer sex pamphlet for gay men ever to be produced to my knowledge.
It was produced initially in 1982.
There's some very haunting references to HIV and AIDS which have not yet been named
the symptoms are starting to be known but no one knows what they are yet and you can
see that in the larger document.
But here this is a list of sexually transmitted infections and they have guilt listed here.
So I'll read you the text.
It says this STD is subject to home remedies.
Sister Roserection recommends putting your guilt in a blender set at annihilate for about
five minutes then flushing whatever's left down the toilet.
Another recipe is to bake a large dose of care into a cake having a big piece for yourself
and sharing the rest with people around you or you can mail your guilt in a plain brown
wrapper to the sisters of perpetual indulgence and we'll get rid of it for you.
Symptoms feeling bad after a trip to the baths, bushes or tea rooms these are places for public
sex.
Low self esteem seldom asymptomatic.
Symptoms appear from two to three years of age and can persist in many cases throughout
one's life.
If untreated can result in loss of ability to be happy, loss of spontaneity, impotence,
sexual dysfunction just so that you get the point, epidemics of sexually transmitted disease.
How you get it?
Judeo-Christian tradition of morality, Catholic schools, three to four hours of TV a day when
young, cure, respect and love yourself and others and the cartoon which by the way these
cartoons were drawn by a well-known gay artist in Toronto.
The caption of the cartoon, mother superior wants all sisters to report for guilt disposal
duty on the double.
So I asked, let's see let me switch the slide here.
So precisely because of this parodic approach the sisters are often accused of mocking Roman
Catholic nuns.
And this is a common enough accusation that the Abbey of St. Joan in Seattle addresses
it directly on their website.
So the question that they have posted on the website says something like, what do you say
to people who say that you're mocking Roman Catholic nuns, aren't you mocking nuns?
And they say, well no, we are nuns, silly.
So on the one hand this is a joke, on the other hand nearly to a person, if you ask
a sister do you consider yourself a nun, she will answer yes, absolutely.
So in interviews I asked why.
Four answers came to the foreground.
One, again we might, those of us who are more familiar with Christian theology might see
a very interesting works over faith argument here where in essence they say we do exactly
what Roman Catholic nuns do, we do the work, so we're nuns.
But we're better and we're more fun.
There are a lot of claims to the moral high ground.
So sisters may say Roman Catholic nuns are wonderful but they are so oppressed by the
Roman Catholic hierarchy we treat women better.
We treat gay people better, we treat queer people better, trans people.
So there is also this claim to be doing the exact same work but to be doing it better.
And this will become relevant as I talk more about serious parody.
They also say the work of a nun regardless of what religion that nun is a part of, so
these are sisters who are now saying, well Roman Catholics aren't the only kind of nuns,
they're Buddhist nuns for instance.
The work of a nun is spiritual work, our work is spiritual work.
And as you might imagine based on that third point, a fourth point that they often make
is that the Roman Catholic Church has no monopoly on the role of nun.
There are Catholic nuns, there are Buddhist nuns, there are queer nuns, they're just another
in this larger genre of female or feminine vowed religious and we'll get to that gender
piece as well.
So based on these arguments that the sisters make and based on what I've seen the sisters
engaged in, I suggest the following definition for serious parody.
Serious parody I've argued in other writings is a form of cultural protest in which a disempowered
group parodies an oppressive cultural institution while, and here's the serious part and this
is what makes them different from other queer parodic activism, while simultaneously claiming
for itself what it believes to be an equally good or superior enactment of one or more
culturally respected aspects of that same institution.
So this is, we do the same thing that nuns do but we're better and we're more fun.
Creating a 21st century queer nun means creating an image that's legible as both queer and
as nun or at least the sort of culturally respected positive aspects of the nun at a
glance.
So shorthand, drag queen, recognizable as queer and this is the eminent divine, plus
Roman Catholic nun but notice that I've used a popular image, this is Julie Andrews in
the sound of music, not an actual Roman Catholic nun, that's part of the point, it's the image.
So drag queen plus popular image of Roman Catholic nun equals sister of perpetual indulgence,
this is sister Vixen spelled with three X's from the Abbey of St. Joan in Seattle.
So then to return to my question, what is the import of the sisters embodying or inhabiting
the figure of the nun?
Let's return to the nun in the popular imaginary, at least in many cultures where the sisters
are active.
Notice that we're back to the nun meaning Roman Catholic or in certain cases attributing
qualities that are already a part of the popular image of the Roman Catholic nun to nuns within
other religions.
For instance in cultures where the sisters are active, when you ask people what is a
nun like, they will usually default to the Roman Catholic nun and then when they want
to tell you what, again for instance a Buddhist nun is like, they will attribute some of the
same qualities that they attribute to Roman Catholic nuns.
So the Roman Catholic nun is at the heart of this image.
I would argue that there are three key pieces here, particularly key for understanding the
sisters.
Nuns are female and here I'm working specifically with the biological sex category.
I'll shift to the gender category in a minute.
They're understood as pure.
They're understood as sacred.
Notice that in order to get from female to sacred, you have to have the purity piece.
Notice also, if I go back, notice also that in the popular imaginary, the drag queen is
exactly the opposite.
Again, I want to say this carefully.
I'm not making any arguments that drag queens are not at times female, pure, and or sacred,
but rather that in the popular imaginary they're not.
So part of what the sisters are doing is combining two images that are cast in the popular imaginary
as polar opposites.
There are also consequences to these images of the drag queen not being seen precisely
as the opposite, not female, far from pure, and therefore also not sacred and even sacrilegious.
This is precisely what the sisters are often accused of being.
So the default to the drag queen and not seeing the nun or refusing to see the nun in the
image is a part of public response to the sisters.
Let's look a little more closely.
Back to images of the nun.
Female but ambivalently feminine, particularly in contemporary imagery.
And this is for two key reasons, I think.
First of all, that sexuality is a requisite part of contemporary femininity.
As a case in point, to illustrate celibacy or asexuality in the ways in which it clashes
with traditional images of femininity among Roman Catholic nuns, I had to use a picture
of a real nun.
This is Sister Janine Gramick, the co-founder of New Ways Ministry, which is a cautiously
LGBT positive ministry within the Roman Catholic Church.
Popular images of nuns, if you for instance just go on Google Images and search nun.
All of the popular images are sexualized or at least are made conventionally highly beautiful.
Second, the association of nuns with authority, again I'm using popular imagery here on purpose,
clashes with the association of traditional femininity with obedience or subservience.
So thus the ambivalence around femininity in popular images of the nun.
So interestingly this ambivalence has also led to queer associations in the past as in
this 1978 nunsploitation film.
I only recently learned that that's a genre.
So in this case we have the masculinity of the attribution of authority to the nun, combined
with the lack of sexuality, which then means, comes to mean lack of heterosexuality, combined
with the homo-sociality in convents, then leads to these attributions of homoeroticism.
But still in mainstream cultures that do have some Catholic influence, the image of the
nun remains one of purity, particularly one of sexual purity.
This purity is currently more associated with heterosexual and cisgender women than it is
with men.
It's perceived as an unattainable ideal for most women, even those who are heterosexual
and cisgender, and it's perceived or represented as particularly unattainable for women of
color because of how racism turns on gendered and sexualized stereotyping.
If you, again, if you Google nun under Google images, almost all of the images are white
and almost all of the images are referencing Roman Catholic nuns, even if you just Google
the word nun.
All cisgender heterosexual women are held to this ideal of purity, but it's also expected
that few will succeed.
But if this is an unattainable ideal for most women, it's an unapproachable ideal for men
of all sexualities and queer and trans folks of all genders.
We're not held to it, and it's considered in many ways ridiculous for us to try.
So purity is automatically female.
This is requisite for purity in this model, but femaleness does not automatically lead
to purity because the link between femaleness and purity runs through a specific kind of
femininity.
It runs through gender.
So it requires sex, biological sex, but it runs through gender.
So femininity, not female embodiment per se, and therefore this purity is often accomplished
through disembodiment.
This is it is for the Virgin Mary in much of Christian imagery, particularly contemporary
imagery.
This is different when we're back, for instance, in the medieval period.
And just by way of very brief example, which I won't stop on for long since I'm a little
behind schedule, there's a Latina essayist named Sandra Cisneros who comments in one
of her essays on the ways in which the Virgin Mary is held up.
Particularly for Chicana and Latina women as a model, and yet most images of her, particularly
the Virgin of Guadalupe, have no body.
Just have this big triangular form.
And so Cisneros asks, how am I supposed to connect with you?
How are you supposed to be a role model for me if you have no body?
One of my favorite artists, the digital artist Alma Lopez, reflected on that and said, what
would happen if we gave the Virgin of Guadalupe a body?
And this is unfortunately a rather low resolution image of what she produced.
Now this was extraordinarily controversial when it was first displayed at a museum in
the state of Arizona.
There were protests, there were threats to pull all of the funding from the museum to
shut the museum down.
And there's a whole other talk to be had about why that might be the case.
Why is it that giving her a body, complete with a bikini of roses and roses and are an
important part of the imagery of the Virgin of Guadalupe, why does giving her a body produce
that kind of reaction of sacrilege?
And I won't give that talk today, but I think it's an interesting question to pose and it
relates again, I think very closely to some of the public reactions to the sisters.
So to return to the third piece, and here just by way of example, a saint who's been
much in my life recently, Santa Rosa de Lima.
As reactions to Lopez's work then I think make clear, saints' bodies may become sacred
in Christian tradition, but most human bodies are not treated in this way.
All purity and sacredness do travel together in the image of the nun, and Santa Rosa is
a bit of an extended example because she was a tertiary.
Her father did not allow her to join the convent, so she joined the Dominican essentially lay
renunciant women.
Most bodies, most human bodies are not treated in this way, and again notice she really doesn't
have a body.
So what does it mean then for the sisters to literally embody the image of the nun?
And again I want to return to this set of three things, female, pure, and sacred, but
now read them through the lens of serious parody.
The sisters' serious parody disarticulates gender from sex, feminine from female, and
articulates the nun as feminine, traditionally understood, but not necessarily as female.
So the sisters speak about nuns being nurturing, loving, gentle, kind, generous, engaging in
education, serving the community, all very traditionally feminine traits.
They envision both Roman Catholic nuns, and in fact all religious nuns doing this, they
envision themselves as following in these same footsteps.
Now again I think we see the influence of the radical fairies, and they're one of their
founders by the name of Harry Hay, who argue that such characteristics are innate qualities
of gay men, and make gay men particularly appropriate as spiritual leaders.
This kind of an argument which turns a sensualist very quickly can re-inscribe a new definition
of femininity that excludes trans folks of all genders and women of all gender histories.
So there is a kind of danger when that argument about who the nun is turns a sensualist.
In inhabiting or embodying and embodying perhaps femaleness, the sisters engage in what queer
theorists have long called gender fuck.
So presenting aspects traditionally associated with both genders, the beard and the dress,
or the high soprano voice and the suit, just to give an example.
The sisters engage in this kind of gender fuck as part of their presentation of the
nun.
But again this essentialism that they get from the radical fairies creeps back in, and
so this can produce an illegibility of female identified sisters.
Every female bodied sister that I have interviewed has told stories about people doing things
like grabbing their breasts and saying, these are great, and then going, those are real,
I am so sorry.
So people assume that the sisters are all men.
And again this has all kinds of consequences both inside and outside of queer communities,
but it also makes female identified sisters illegible and often invisible.
In addition, this association of nuns with femininity causes a kind of resistance to
transmasculinity and sometimes masculinity more broadly in the order.
Sometimes simply through not understanding.
So trans men for instance who are joining the order tell stories of older members of
the sisters saying to them, well, but you are finally transitioning, you are finally
finding your masculine identity, why would you want to dress as a woman, wouldn't you
rather take on a different role within the order.
So again the problems that come up with this strict association, they have unlinked nunliness
from female embodiment, but they have left it linked to femininity in a very traditional
sense and that can have repercussions.
The purity piece.
So we can talk about the sisters camping purity, challenging the expectation of purity, perhaps
even challenging the value itself of purity.
Some of this comes through in the names of the sisters.
One of the founders took the name sister missionary position, referring to a very standard sexual
position.
Another sister that I know her first name is Sonata, but her full name is Sonata Innocent.
And the sisters standard blessing if someone approaches a sister and says, sister please
bless me, they have many blessings, but the one that you are most likely to hear, there
will be glitter involved.
Often it ends up on your forehead like on Ash Wednesday, but it's not ashes.
And they will say go forth and sin some more.
So the punning on purity and the camping of the expectation of purity is very much a part
of what they are doing, but this is serious parity and so where is the serious piece?
Redefining and claiming purity for queer communities, particularly in the face of ongoing homophobia
within Christianity, again to return to the names.
There's a sister in Seattle by the name of sister pure heart.
So really literally evoking the purity and saying in this case seriously, we are pure.
There is purity here in the work that the sisters are doing.
Many sisters refer to the golden rule, do unto others as you would have others do unto
you, as the heart of the work that they do.
So here there's a reference I think to a purity of heart, purity of soul, purity of spirit,
purity of intention.
They're focused on safer sex and again there's more to do here that I don't have time to
do, but I think may also be a kind of redefinition of purity.
Now the sisters would never argue and I don't intend to argue that they're doing this.
The sisters would never argue that they're working towards a kind of sexual purity, a
new form of sexual purity and safer sex.
They focus on a harm reduction approach and yet they are very focused on safer sex.
There are struggles within individual houses over the appropriateness of sexual activity
while in habit and where the line is.
So there's general agreement that having sex in habit is not appropriate.
This is interesting, right?
For a highly sexualized order that is focusing on safer sex and that would never, that makes
jokes about not being celibate, how are we like Roman Catholic nuns?
Roman Catholic nuns raise money for the community.
We raise money for the community.
Roman Catholic nuns help people when they're sick.
We help people when they're sick.
Roman Catholic nuns take a vow of celibacy.
We raise money for the community.
But at the same time there are some interesting questions I think to ask here about struggles
over sexual activity and habit.
There's a lot of thinking that the sisters go through over what their own personal approach
should be as members of the order who are members regardless of whether they're in habit
at any given time or not, what their approach should be to barebacking.
So to unprotected anal sex between men, is it okay for a sister to bareback ever or is
it never okay?
I think the fact that those questions come up may indicate that there's a kind of dynamic
of sexual purity going on through the sister's safer sex narrative.
So inhabiting and embodying purity in the sisters, I would argue reinscribes queer and
trans bodies as pure, redefines queer sex as pure, complete with some of the complications
that that brings up, and remakes queer communities as pure.
And therefore there's also a sacred element to serious parity.
Camping and parodying the sacred I've already spoken about in terms of the protests that
the sisters engage in and sister destiny LaFemme's Bible habit.
The sisters engage in serious parity of the sacred by providing serious religious rituals
or ceremonies.
For instance again I think like that mass against papal bigotry in campy or parodic
form.
And here on the slide I've given you another example.
The condom savior mass which was held in the early 1990s followed very much the same
themes and processes as a traditional Roman Catholic mass using a condom as the host.
So on the one hand some people hear about this and immediately go serious sacrilege.
On the other hand don't miss the serious part right?
Which savior are you going to believe if everyone around you is dying of AIDS?
The promises of Christ or the promises of safer sex?
There's a really really interesting point here I think.
The condom savior vow is the vow that people took as a part of this mass which was typically
held in gay bars and again I'll read this briefly.
We have gathered today, this was written by the way in 1991 by sister X who shortly thereafter
died herself from complications of AIDS.
We have gathered today to consecrate and receive the holy communion condom.
As I take it onto myself so shall I keep its ritual sacred.
The condom is part of my life, part of my responsibility now and those of you who do
queer theory if you're hearing biopolitics here, yes really interesting stuff there.
If I desire to live and let my sex partners live I must sanctify my vow to hold the condom
savior sacred.
My seed is under siege by a horrific virus.
Remember this is 91.
Let me not become horrific as well with careless disregard for my life and the lives of those
with whom I share the divine gift of love.
I vow to look into my heart and further into my soul where I know that my humanity and
salvation depend on how sacred I hold the condom vow.
Latex equals lust, latex equals life, latex equals love.
The sisters today although the condom savior mass is no longer practiced the sisters today
frequently engage in what they call confession, they may have a confession booth at a gay
bar, they may simply engage one on one.
Sometimes people are joking, sometimes people are partly joking and sometimes people come
to them as spiritual advisors.
The sisters absolutely serve as spiritual advisors to their communities at times.
So again inhabiting and embodying the sacred as sisters makes queer and trans bodies both
the ones in habit and the ones that they serve sacred or reinforces their existing sacredness.
So briefly then and in conclusion I want to ask whether queer serious parody of other
religions is possible.
Is this idea of serious parody just something that the sisters are doing or is this a useful
concept more broadly?
This parody seems to be the most effective when it's done from within the religion itself
or from within surrounding cultures.
So many of the early sisters were themselves former Roman Catholics or have been raised
within other branches of Christianity.
Others were not and I think what makes the sisters effective within the communities where
they're present today is the centrality of Christianity to those cultures rather than
individual members specifically being Christian or more often formerly Christian.
There are by the way members of the sisters who are currently practicing Christians including
Catholics.
So this point may be for example, no let me add to that sorry, serious parody also seems
to be most effective among cultures or subcultures that are willing to see the religion question
and challenged particularly on queer issues.
So and there's my timer saying I'm done.
So this may be why the order is just getting going in the Republic of Ireland for instance
and why it has no foothold in Spain, Portugal or Italy despite those cultures all having
a long history of gestures and clowning relatives I think of the sisters as forms of social
and political critique.
This may also be why among Latin American countries the sisters have been most successful
in Uruguay which has separation of church and state legally but also at least according
to the sisters who are there is less religiously devout as a culture than other Latin American
countries.
So then where else does serious parody seem to be working?
I want to suggest two examples.
Recall that my definition of serious parody has four elements at its heart.
First parody, second the serious element which is simultaneous claiming both parody and claiming
of third an oppressive cultural institution by fourth a disempowered group.
I think this can work outside queer communities as well but I want to look at two examples
that are specifically queer.
So the fourth element the disempowered group in each of these examples is queer members
of the religion in question.
This is people critiquing from within their religion.
The first image comes from the 2016 Sydney Mardi Gras.
This is an organization called Muslims Against Homophobia and here we have the founder of
the organization with someone unidentified wearing a sequined burka with rhinestone cat-eyed
glasses.
So again I think if we look at these elements certainly the parody is there.
On the other hand this is a group called Muslims Against Homophobia.
This is a group that is trying to push on the more homophobic, more socially conservative
elements within Islam and again to reinforce that is not all of Islam but trying to push
on the more socially conservative elements within Islam to say make space for us.
So what does it mean then to be using a sequined burka bright red with cat-eye sunglasses as
a part of this kind of commentary?
I think there's a lot more to do here but I just want to point to this to raise some
questions maybe serious parody works in this context as well maybe that's what's going
on here.
A second example and something that's probably going to be a significant part of my next
book because I'm really really fascinated by it is the Orthodox calendar.
This is the cover of the 2016 calendar.
If you've not seen this and you're interested in these intersections of queerness and religion
definitely look this up.
You can get a slideshow of each calendar through the Huffington Post.
So this is a project that's been going on for four years now.
It's run primarily by members of a variety of different Eastern Orthodox churches.
It began in Romania and the first calendar was produced entirely by Romanian Orthodox
artists and models.
Today the calendar comes with a disclaimer saying the men in these images, some of the
men in these images are dressed as priests.
They may or may not actually be priests.
We don't think it really matters ultimately who they are.
Just like with Pussy Riot the conversation is what's important not the identity.
So I think that entire discourse is really interesting.
The 2016 calendar focuses on Russian Orthodoxy and therefore you have this image that is
purporting to be Putin and the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill I.
In states of undress that one might not generally expect to find them in.
So again I think we have here those elements.
The parody is obvious.
It's a camping.
It's a queer sexualized parody.
But there is also a simultaneous claiming.
This calendar says very clearly we are members of the Orthodox Church.
We are pushing for greater queer inclusion.
They are claiming Orthodoxy for themselves.
Remember that Orthodox priests in general do not take a vow of celibacy.
So this is not about sexualizing celibacy in this case.
This is about saying if you're sexually active some of you are going to be sexually active
with men and that shouldn't be a problem.
And this particular calendar I should add is also about valuing a variety.
So you can see if you can read this far up that the title of this calendar is Sancta
Peraphilia.
So this is valuing all kinds of sexual practices and all kinds of bodies.
And I think I will stop there.
I understand we're just going to lunch and not taking questions but I had to show you
my question slide anyway.
These are all condom packs produced by the sisters.
And I'll stop there.
Thank you.