The following is the last of a three-part series.The first can be found here, the second here.
Essentialist and social constructionist discourses on sexuality lose their coherence precisely inasmuch as they seek to debate what one should be allowed to do with her body, while seeking to thoroughly circumvent the erotic. This amounts to a misapprehension of what the body is and what the body does. Discourses that operate under this misapprehension are, in a manner of speaking, a waste of breath. Raschke calls for a transition from a regulatory discourse oriented around the body politic, to a transcendental somatics oriented around the body erotic, which simply recognizes the(living) body as a finite entity which seeks to transcend itself. This drive towards self-transcendence is what we call desire, and one of the crucial things which bodies desire is connection to other bodies.
This is emphatically true of humans, that most social of animal. It is such that discourses on sexuality are always discourses about the connectivity of bodies and always implicated in desire. Transcendental somatics offers the conceptual groundwork adequate to an interrogation of desire. As such, the interrogation of desire is not a lapse into trivial hedonism, because this transcendental framework for somatics recognizes that desire is not merely the wish for pleasure. The body does not seek only stimulation. The body seeks to transcend itself. An indispensable aspect of that self-transcendence is the connectivity of bodies.
How to Talk About Sex: A Beginner’s Guide
I am suggesting that we start over, that we shift the cultural conversation around sexuality onto an entirely different axis. We have demonstrated that the conventional 20th century paradigms of essentialism and social constructivism are inadequate to meaningful discussions about sexuality because they seek, in their very methodological foundations, to circumvent and avoid any engagement with the question of desire. This paper has sought to recover the all-too-often overlooked contributions of John Boswell to Christian theological debates around sexuality and LGBTQ+ issues.
These are somewhat dated studies in church history; multiple individual findings have of course been contested and/or updated. All the same, Boswell’s contribution is hard to understate, as his very approach to this kind of history continues to provide a challenging and important resource for Christian theological reflection on questions of human sexuality and sexual ethics. The influence of Michel Foucault’s historiographical sensibilities helped Boswell to destabilize Christian theological essentialisms “from the inside out”—that is to say, by working within the tradition itself.
When Foucault graspingly described the desire to “stray a field of oneself” as motivation for his life’s work, he indicated a desire to lay bare the harmful and indeed arbitrary nature of the interdiction essentialist discourses around sexuality effect. While Boswell and Foucault’s historical interventions provide a necessary and liberating ideological displacement, a transcendental somatics can build upon this contribution with a subsequent and equally necessary subjective re-orientation.
The familiar critique of social constructivism is, of course, the accusation of relativism. Social constructivist interventions are famously adept in calling cultural assumptions into critical question. However, after effecting disillusionment with what Foucault terms “discourses of power”, the curtain drops. This post-critical reticence is indeed the cause of the familiar critique of social constructivism as relativistic.[1] Ideological displacement is not liberating on its own; it hardens into cynicism and hopelessness if a re-orientation cannot be achieved in its aftermath. To follow Foucault’s metaphor, “straying afield of oneself” may be exciting for a time, but if one strays too far into the woods and never succeeds in orienting herself, the euphoria will eventually wear off. As the sun begins to set, one eventually needs to have an answer to the question, “Where do I go next?”
Transcendental somatics can provide a sound basis for a reorientation of Christian theological discourse on sexuality. The philosophical and methodological sensibilities of transcendental somatics prevent it from hardening into yet another ideology or essentialism. These same sensibilities make it conversant with secular discourses. Indeed, one need not embrace Christianity at all to affirm the philosophical entry point of transcendental somatics. It recognizes the person as fundamentally embodied and finite. Simultaneously, it recognizes that these finite bodies seek, always, to transcend themselves.
The very anatomical structure of the human animal indicates its orientation beyond itself. The most basic functions of our bodies –our eyes ears and other sensory organs, hunger and digestion, procreative impulses and desires, our sociality—indicate both our finitude and our drive to transcendence (to engage beyond ourselves). The human animal’s extremely advanced capacity for signification sets it somewhat apart from other animals, with whom we share so many other basic attributes. Sexuality signifies the connectivity of bodies, signification the connectivity of persons. In an important respect, the mind/body dichotomy is a function of a human’s simultaneous participation in potentiality and actuality. The complexity of desire can be attributed to its participation in both corporality (actuality, finitude) and signification (potentiality, transcendence).
These are a set of deceptively simple axioms, anthropological reminders that can radically re-center discussions of sexuality. Transcendental somatics can provide for both precision and nuance; combine ethical seriousness with appropriate respect for human freedom. Such a basis contrasts with discourses on matters of sexuality in the body politic to which we are accustomed, which so frequently take questions of interdiction, obligation, coercion, and hierarchical or regulatory power as their point of departure. The suggestion of a move from the body politic to the body erotic is to suggest a fundamental change in orientation in public discourse, in which we regard ourselves and our interlocutors not as regulatory objects, but as desiring subjects.
Transcendental somatics is a background that can help us to account for a set of fairly universal concerns that are implicated in any manner of “sex-talk”, these can be articulated as concerns around a) Pleasure, b) Procreation, c) Precarity, and d) (in some cases) Piety. Under no circumstances should these four concerns be understood to be imperatives, but rather more as a heuristic set of issues in which human sexuality is necessarily implicated. They are particularly relevant for Eurochristian and post-Christian cultures but might certainly also find resonance in cultural contexts where the role of Christianity is less central.
Attention to these four features is beneficial in that it makes clearer some of the main issues of contestation in culture war debates about human sexuality while serving as a stopgap against the impulse of identarian posturing. Pleasure, Procreation, Precarity and Piety are concerns that are simultaneously extremely general and extremely personal. Naming them as issues allows us to name desire in a way that can de-venomize cultural debates on sexuality and gender. I close with a short reflection on each of them, which might serve as an opening and model for the kind of public discourse in which a landmark works like those of John Boswell might be adequately received and reflected upon.
Pleasure
The Sexual Revolution represented a major turning point in Western or Eurochristian culture, and even 50 years later, Christianity continues to flounder in its response to these developments. Hormonal contraception, which was first became available in the 1960s, brought about major changes in family planning. For the first time, it became possible for women and heterosexual partners to completely and reliably separate questions of sexual procreation from matters of sexual pleasure. The affirmation of pleasure as a relevant and legitimate aspect of sexuality was an important and transformative achievement of the sexual revolution.
However, the drift into the extremes of hedonism is a critique often leveled against it. Even as it engendered a cultural climate which afforded greater respect for individual freedom, choice, and autonomy in which movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights began to flourish, it did not spell the end of patriarchy. When sexuality is reduced only to the question of pleasure, stimulation, or physical relief, we have often seen a premium placed on satisfaction and drives of (cis)hetero white men, at the expense of the autonomy, dignity, and safety of other people. The rapid growth of a globalized sex industry in the past fifty years, indelibly marked by sex trafficking, coercion, and abuse, is a dark testament to this reality.[2]
Sex is never only about pleasure simply because pleasure is never only about pleasure. Psychoanalytic discourses provide us significant but undervalued insights into the ambivalences and sorrows inherent to human sexuality which resists a reductivism which would only have sex be a matter of stimulation or biological imperative. Even while this is the case, the affirmation of pleasure, delight, and joy in sexuality is in an important sense, indispensable. In understanding pleasure or erotics in the broader sense on offer through transcendental somatics— as participation in one’s lifeworld and embodied connection to community— it is possible to even speak of a person’s right to pleasure.
This also has background in discourses of natural and human rights, following the language of the “pursuit of happiness” or the provisions for things like leisure, family, private, and community life provided for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[3] The development of a coherent sexual ethics cannot dispense of the question of pleasure. This may be why traditional Christian sexual ethics, in their frequently exceptional degrees of prudishness, have been so inadequate in their response to the Sexual Revolution. To speak of pleasure and each person’s right to pleasure in the body erotic (that alternative modality of the body politic) is to raise a radically humane concern which is so often lost in our obsession with utilitarian and profit motives.
The question of pleasure challenges us to name desire in so many crucial ways. We might ask critical questions about whose desires are indulged in our societies and at what cost? Who and what are exploited in our microcultures of hedonistic excess? We might ask what role pleasure plays in our personal lives? If it takes a back seat to other concerns, why? We might ask why it has it been so socially important, for so long, to deny the legitimate desire for pleasure and companionship of LGBTQ+ persons?
Procreation
One of realities of the Western, post-Industrial, and post-Sexual Revolution societies is the reality of declining birthrates. More family planning options have resulted in more women starting families later in life and having fewer children overall. Further, cultural, economic, and political developments have made the idea of foregoing marriage, childbearing and childrearing altogether attractive for an increasing number of people. While these developments, in many respects, are either positive or neutral, they do point to a demographic paradox: if people in all countries were having children well below the replacement rate, which is the case in much of the rich post-industrial world[4], humanity would have some serious demographic issues.
These include strained systems of elder care, destabilized economies, and in the most extreme and hypothetical case, questions about the future of humanity. While European and North American are broadly aging populations, birthrates in the Global South are not slowing at all. According to the UN, 70% of people in sub-Saharan Africa are under the age of 30[5] and World Bank data indicates many countries in this region have a birth rate of over double the replacement rate. Growing populations also face social and economic challenges, and these demographic questions are compounded by the climate crisis. We face serious issues regarding the Earth’s carrying capacity compounded by the massive biodiversity loss currently taking place.[6] Climate collapse is a real possibility, and even if it is avoided, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) projects that 1.2 million people will become climate refugees before 2050.[7]
The point is that sex and sexuality cannot only be reduced to matters of individual pleasure, it is also crucially linked to questions of procreation, and these are of social and political relevance. This is not to suggest that individual choice in matters of reproduction is negotiable. Reproductive and medical decisions always belong to a mother or childbearing person; sexual ethics based in transcendental somatics has no real option but to affirm the basic principles of human rights as a bare minimum for the body erotic (politic). If there is a critique to be made, it is of the tendency in post-Sexual Revolution cultures to refuse to see reproductive questions through anything but the lens of hyper-individualism.
The hyper-individualist zeitgeist involves a denial of intergenerational responsibility, which is perhaps most painfully apparent in the climate crisis.[8] If we understand sexuality to be a matter of the connectivity of bodies, then the task of naming desire must come to terms with the question of procreation, the intergenerational connectivity of bodies. Both biological and theological essentialisms surveyed in this paper would reduce sex to only questions of reproduction, as exemplified by the Vatican II position in Humane Vitae.[9] By contrast, more hedonistic and hyper-individualistic tendencies in post-sexual revolution cultures would reduce sex to pleasure. The former extreme leads to coercive and oppressive societies, which deny particularly the dignity and humanity of women and LGBTQ+ persons.
The latter extreme leads to utterly dysfunctional societies with no orientation towards the future. An ethically responsible transcendentally somatic public discourse on sexuality cannot afford to ignore the reproductive aspect of human sexuality. This need not mean a biological essentialism which reduces every person to their reproductive capacities or denies the value of persons who are unable or unwilling to reproduce. It would, however, call upon persons—especially those living in post-Sexual Revolution, post-industrial, wealthy, and polluting cultures— to seriously interrogate their responsibility to future generations. We are indelibly connected and bear responsibility for the world we leave to these generations, whether we choose to bear children or not.
Precarity
The previous section addressed the issue intergenerational precarity, which is related to human sexuality in ways that are not so obviously apparent. But there is also another of precarity in sexuality and eroticism which is worthy of attention. A mark of post-Sexual Revolution cultures is an undeniable crisis of meaning on matters of sex, eroticism, marriage, partnership, family, and belonging. A significant problem with a hedonistic approach to sexuality is the emotional trivialization of sex.
Sex is indeed about pleasure, but it is not only about pleasure and indeed pleasure is not always straightforward. Sex is also related to the desire for affirmation, emotional intensity, companionship, and belonging. Casual sex indicates the kind of sexual relationship which disavails of these emotional elements. It is a mainstay of post-Sexual Revolution cultures, even when there is tremendous ambivalence around it displayed within these cultures. Cultural conservatives or religious traditionalists might condemn it outright as sinful or unnatural and thus forbidden.
On the other hand, those with a simplistically hedonistic or biologically reductive understanding of sexuality might reject any desire for emotional or spiritual fulfillment through sexual relationships as sentimentality or esoteric superstition. These attitudes towards the issue, which appear to be so incompatible, share one important feature: none allow any place for the emotional risks of sexual relationships.
While sex can be casual and relatively devoid of emotional investment, rare is the person who neverseeks emotional fulfillment in sexual relationships. The desire for affirmation and emotional connection, the risk of it not being reciprocated, and the risk of losing an established emotional connection to apathy or habit, abandonment or neglect, make up much of the drama of amorous relationships. When these needs for companionship, belonging, and affirmation go unmet met—for whatever reason—people suffer great emotional pain. In his Symposium, the philosopher Plato offers a mythological genealogy of the god Eros as the child of Poverty (penia) and Expediency (poros),[10] a brilliant indication of the kind of existential desperation present in erotic pursuits.
A strange sort of interdiction is at play in the denial of the precarity of sexuality, a cultural pressure to repress or deny one’s emotional experience. A transcendentally somatic intervention into the issue would, of course, encourage the naming of desire. If sexuality is about the connectivity of bodies, then questions of companionship, affirmation, belonging, and emotional affect are of course relevant to it. Emotional resonance and fulfillment can be found in all kinds of human relationships, it is not limited to merely (hetero)sexual unions. Understood from the broader perspective of transcendental somatics, erotics implies the desire for many other kinds of human companionship and friendship. Affirmation of and respect for the emotional needs of all persons for companionship and belonging would be a refreshing improvement to public discourse on the politics of sexuality, family, and community.
(Piety) –
Christianity currently finds itself in the middle of a massive sexual identity crisis. Uncompromisingly stringent and essentialist interpretations of Biblical mandates have allowed the Church[11] to a) systematically exclude LGBTQ+ persons from Christian fellowship and to b) impose a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on women and sexual minorities who remain in church—demanding a dehumanizing silence as the price of acceptance in the ekklesia.
All the while, the exposure of countless internal sexual abuse scandals and their cover ups have severely damaged the credibility of the Church in this area. It is unavoidably clear that what is marketed as the “Historic Witness of the Church” or even the “Divine Will of God” in matters of gender and sexuality is in most cases the corrupt, idiosyncratic, and internally conflicted will of men. If the Church is to recover any credibility in this area, if the church is to flourish and survive in the future, it will need to find a new way to engage in the public sphere on gender and sexuality issues.
Transcendental somatics offers an orientation to sexuality equipped to affirm the finitude, precarity, and dignity of the human person. It also recognizes her desire for transcendence. This transcendence need not be understood on some mystical or religious register. It is rather closer to what Foucault expressed as, “the desire to stray afield of oneself”. Transcendence can be located, quite simply and empirically, in a human person’s fundamental orientation outside of and beyond himself; it is indicated in our very anatomy, by the structure and function of our systems of signification, in our being subject to a future, which is by definition beyond and unknown.
This somatic a priori does not require any ‘leap of faith’ to affirm. Neither does it conflict with any serious Christian theological teaching. It provides a common ground for believers and non-believers to engage in humane dialogue about sexuality and the socio-political matters related to it. It serves as a corrective to the reductive, essentialist, hyper-individualistic, misanthropic and solipsistic distortions present in Eurochristian cultures after the Sexual Revolution. This transcendental somatic approach also humanizes—it affords a dignity to the needs, desires, pleasures, and joys of the human animal which has been sorely lacking in mainstream Christian discourses on the issue, but which is fully in line with Christian theological teachings about the orientation and concerns of God.
John Boswell’s historical scholarship revealed that the historic witness of the church on issues of sexuality is anything but univocal. He was himself a person of faith and his understanding of the Christian theological tradition greatly outpaced that of those contemporaries who sought to intimidate and silence him in the name of Christian piety. The word piety shares a common origin with the word pity in the Old French (12-14th century) piete, which indicates mercy, tenderness, or compassion. This itself stems from the Latin words pietatem and pius, whose range of meaning include dutiful conduct, kindness, respect, religiousness, gentleness, mercifulness, and faithfulness to communal ties.
What counts as piety in many Christian circles on LGBTQ+ issues strays far from this understanding. If we are to speak of a Christian approach to these issues, the question of faithfulness must be reoriented away from the question, “What does the text forbid”, and towards a theology which takes seriously God’s desire for the flourishing of the Creation, of His People or Body, of our bodies. Flourishing is not a punitive concept, nor is it linear or mass producible. It requires the reflective participation of the believer, the embodied person. Here we are invited to pose the question— “What do I desire?”—without fear but with an eye to our responsibility to the flourishing of others.
God ends each day of the Creation narrative in much the rhythm. From day one to day six, God appreciates and affirms the Creation, He saw that it was Good. Starting on fifth day, God begins to bless the Creation. The blessing is a send-off, a promise of goodwill, an affirmation of the goodness of all living creatures. This send-off urges animals and humans to go forth and inhabit the Earth, to be fruitful and multiply.[12] To be pious must mean to live in this affirmation, and to strive to extend it to others. This is the mystery of our participation in human flourishing. Might we follow the lead of the Beloved in the Song of Songs, when she suggests: Let us go out early to the vineyards/and see whether the vines flourish, /whether the grape blossoms have opened/and the pomegranates are in bloom. /There I will give you my love.[13]
May it be so.
Kieryn Wurts is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Bonn, Germany.
[1] Indeed, some of the confusion around the structure and function of language in social constructionist theory examined in this paper indicates that the accusations of relativism are not completely unfounded.
[2] A dated but well-respected inquiry into this global problem is from Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky. Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide, New York, 2009. See also the latest of annual reports from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2022, (United Nations publication, Sales no.: E.23.IV.1.)
[3] See Article 12, Article 16, Article 24, and Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR).
[4] See the data on birth rate per country made available by the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
[5] See the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2022). World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results. UN DESA/POP/2022/TR/NO.3.
[6] See “Summary for Policy Makers in: S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Dias and H.T. Ngo (editors), Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecocsystem services of the Intergovernmetnal Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES Secretariat, Bonn, Germany .
[7] See Institute for Economics & Peace. Ecological Threat Report 2022: Analysing Ecological Threats, Resliience & Peace, Sydney, October 2022. DOI = http://visionofhumanity.org/resoruces (Accessed 10. May 10, 2023).
[8] The criminal negligence on the climate issue is not just to be leveled against Eurochristian cultures, complicity in this negligence that sadly holds across cultures, continents, and economic classes.
[9] See Humane Vitae. Encyclical Letter of the Pope Paul VI, July 1968. DOI = https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html
[10] See Plato, Symposium, 203d-e.
[11] I speak of the Church in the most broadly ecumenical sense, including the Latin, Orthodox and Protestant traditions as well as less well-known confessional orientations.
[12] Genesis 1: 3-33.
[13] Song of Songs 7:12.
