Doing It. (Or Religious Masturbation): A Rhetorical Autoethnography of Identity Negotiation

I may have to repent after writing what some may consider a theological text. To talk about sex is to sin, both sexual and unpardonable, but the temptation is too strong to resist. Marcella Althaus-Reid (2001) asks us why do a theology of sexual stories, isn’t that an issue for the private realm? Her response: no, because sexuality permeates economic, political, and societal life. “Without a theology of sexual stories, the last moment of the hermeneutical circle, that is, the moment of appropriation and action, will always have a partiality and superficial approach to conflict resolution (Althaus-Reid, 2001, p. 131). “The Argentinian theologian, [then] would like to remove her underwear to write theology with feminist honesty, not forgetting what it is to be a woman dealing with the theological and political categories” (Althaus-Reid, 2001, p. 2). She would go on to call such a theologian, indecent, and her reflection, Indecent Theology (Althaus-Reid, 2001). While I may not have a desire to remove my underwear like the lemon vendors of Buenos Aires that Marcella Athuas-Ried so beautifully invokes, I am very aware of my vagina as I sit in this seat, hovering within intimate distance over the keyboard, talking about sacred acts of the body.

And just like those lemon vendors, I see this story as a space where “ideology, theology, and sexuality can be rewritten from the margins of society, the church and systematic theologies” (Althaus-Reid, 2001, p. 4). In this autopoetic narrative, I tell a story from a sexual past. A story that used to “remain at the bottom of the sexual [and theological] pyramid without a voice” (Althaus-Reid, 2001, p. 145) or body because it challenges the traditional ideals of Christian sexuality and what it means to become and perform Christianity. Using autoethnographic techniques offers a space to engage sexuality with the body present, helping tell the story, and offering a particular kind of complexity. Carolyn Ellis asserts “the goal is to practice an artful, poetic, and empathetic social science in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodes the complexities of concrete moments of lived experience” (Ellis, 2004, p. 30).

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