The Queerness of Nuns

At first, “queer nun” may seem a paradoxical juxtaposition.  What, after all, could be “straighter” than a nun?  Our stereotypes of nuns generally run to the repressed, the rigid, the frigid.  Upholding decency to the point where it becomes almost a parody of itself - the stereotype of the nun seems the opposite of everything queer.  Thus the delight of so many when they see pictures of “nuns having fun,” of nuns acting like - human beings.  

While monks have also been used for comedic purposes, they are not so clearly defined by this (f)rigidity.  Monks’ seriousness aligns more closely with masculinity, deserving a sort of respect or admiration.  Perhaps as a result, many women who live “monastic” lives identify as monks rather than nuns.  “Monk” is both masculine and (sometimes) generic; “nun” is clearly only feminine.

It’s partly for this reason that I insist on using the term “nun.”  In the canonical language of the Roman Catholic Church, which is widely used in other circles, a “nun” is a member of an enclosed community who has made “solemn vows.”  A “sister” is a member of an active, apostolic community, who makes “promises.”  I won’t take you through the hard history of this distinction.  I just want to say that I’m not using “nun” canonically.  “We” all “know” what “nun” means - it means a whole package of archetype and stereotype that is bigger than canon law.

Nuns, like monks, are seeking something that is not widely available in modern Western culture.  As Beverly Lanzetta describes it, “each monastic expression is focused on one thing: seeking truth, the ultimate.  The monk is a person who has committed his or her life to a search for the holy, to encounter reality directly.”  This entails a “commitment to silence and solitude, finding that the tools for transformation exist within each person’s depth.”  This is not a plan, not an idea, but a pull at one’s soul: “the aspiration to be a monk is the result of some prior mystical experience that convinces the person of a vision of wholeness and human possibility.”  This experience, and this aspiration, sets people at odds with the everyday values and projects of society.  And not just modern capitalistic societies; people are led to leave their families, their villages, their fields, as much as offices and factories.  Throughout history some people have taken this path that looks distinctly queer.

I don’t mean that every person who is now in a religious order fits this description.  Over time, as orders became institutionalized and colonized by their parent churches, people joined for many reasons.  Women joined to escape forced marriages and find meaningful work; to give themselves to service; to grow in many ways that may not have been mystically inspired.  But the core inspiration of monasticism is this quest.  And as the traditional orders decline, that core is becoming more visible, and taking form in new ways.  Our community is one of thousands.  But even as people join these communities, the communities remain “queer,” on the margins of their locations.  Even as some community members become popular lecturers and writers, they are noteworthy for their queerness.

So rather than being paradoxical, “queer nun” may actually be redundant!  What could be queerer than dropping everything to find God?  What could be queerer than doing this as a woman in a patriarchal culture?  

As I share my journey with you, I hope that you too will discover reservoirs of queerness running through your history and your possibility.  These are the sparks of God lighting your path, singing in your veins; listen to them.

A Bit About Queer

When I told my novice director that I was a big queer, I actually wasn’t referring to my physical size at all.  It’s true that I’m tall, and for many years I was overweight.   I take up space.  But that’s not what makes me a big queer.

No, when I said I was a big queer, I meant that I was a highly public queer person.  I was not contrasting myself to a smaller lesbian, but to the many people who live their lives quietly, in varying degrees of freedom and peace.  I made a career out of being queer, at a time when not so many did.  I wasn’t as public as other academic queers, but then political theory was not a sexy field.  And I may have been a big queer, but I was not, am not, a particularly sexy one.  So I was sort of a mid-level big queer.

I didn’t set out to be a big queer.  I actually didn’t set out to be queer at all.  But there are so many ways to be queer, I couldn’t help myself.

There’s sex, of course.  “Queer” has often been used to refer to lesbians and gays, and later bisexuals and (sometimes) transgendered, sometimes intersexed people.  “Queer” was an epithet, a one-syllable word for “abomination.”  But a funny thing happened to queer.  A queer thing happened, and happens over and over.

All sorts of things have been called queer over time, and more would be now if the word didn’t have sexual overtones for us.  Anything unusual, eerie, strange, “off,” can be queer.  Anything that deviates from norms can be queer.  

“Queer” seems to derive from the Old German for “off-center,” “oblique.”  It can be an adjective – “that seems queer” – or it can be a verb – “that queers things for us” – as well as a noun – “you queer!”  In every usage, it seems to refer not to itself, but to something else that it decenters, destabilizes, problematizes, unhinges – you get the idea.  Queer is not a location, but a deviation.  Queer is never the center, but acts on the center or addresses the center.  Queer mucks up the ordinary, the central, the way things should be.

Now, if you try to make this mucking-up thing the center, it turns out to just keep moving around.  We tried this a lot, gays and lesbians: we celebrated gay culture, lesbian feminism,  “women’s community,” all kinds of things.  But it seemed that the energy in the thing was so often in what it wasn’t, rather than in what it was.  As soon as we decided that something was this way – that women were egalitarian and loving, or that gay men were free and non-patriarchal, or pretty much anything – as soon as we decided that, counterexamples would mushroom among us and within us.   So it turns out that it’s even possible to be a queer lesbian!  

Queer just keeps multiplying.  For every norm, there’s a queering.

Now, I may not be particularly big anymore, and I may not be too queer sexually, but when you throw in the nun part: that’s queer.   It doesn’t take much to be queer when you’re a nun.  Being a nun sort of lowers the bar, because the social norms around nuns are so tight.   It doesn’t take much to surprise people: all we have to do is act like human beings, and we “queer” being nun.

In the end, it’s about wholeness.  Being all of me, you being all of you, us belonging together in our queernesses.  That’s the journey we’re on.  Ready?

Where This Title Came From

“This is crazy.”

I’m standing in the doorway of my novice director’s office.  It’s a small room filled with books and her big desk.  The brick-red Italian tile floor, the old iron-framed windows, lend it a medieval air.  And my novice director, Sr. Deborah Franicis, all 4’11” of her, fits with the room.  Her habit and veil might have come, if not from the 15th century, at least the 19th.  

She leans back in her chair and looks at me.  “What’s crazy?”  She asks.

I show her the first copy of the latest book I’ve written, entitled Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship.  It is my fifth book on lesbian/gay/queer politics.  Recently a friend had called me “the lesbian politics maven” in inviting me to give the keynote address to the National Women’s Studies Association annual convention.  I also edit a book series on queer politics and theory; I have chaired the American Political Science Association’s Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession, and the Gay and Lesbian Caucus.  I’m not just queer: I’ve made a career out of queer.

I say: “I’m this big queer, and now I’m going to be a nun?”  

Without blinking an eye she responds: “So you’ll be a big queer nun.”

And I think to myself: That sounds like a book title.

OK, here we go!

 I have struggled for years with writing this memoir.  I got the idea in 2001, but wasn't interested.  Then I started in 2013, but again . . . 

This past February I began, but I thought my focus would be on my whole life journey, as I tell it in 12-Step retreats.  I wrote for eight months before I got that the story that moved people, the story I need to tell for myself, is about the pivot from being a professor writing on queer politics to becoming a nun, and a priest, and then forming a new community where all of these parts of me can come together.  So here I go.  I've begun writing parts of this, but they were buried in a lot of other writing.

This past week I found another writing group and a coach to work with.  I'm afraid, but not overcome.  I hope you all will find something in what I write, and tell others if you find it helpful.  And tell me!

Susu (My grandmother): first draft!

“Mom, where is Susu from?”

I don’t mean where does she live.  I mean, where did she learn that other language?

This question about Susu arises when I’m sick.  I’ve had the usual childhood diseases, but this time is different, more serious somehow.  I’m alone in my parents’ room, flat on my back.  Susu is worried about me, enough to come to see me.  She talks over me in a language I don’t know.  I never hear her speak that language any other time, and I don’t hear anyone else use it.  So I wonder, where did she learn that?

My mother hedges.  “Sort of Germany, sort of Russia,” she says.  Later, after we left Bay Village, I would learn about Latvia and the Jewish Pale of Settlement.  But my mother knew that this knowledge was not safe in Bay Village.  She lived in fear that Susu would visit and be seen: this woman was so obviously Jewish, that would be the end of my family’s welcome in Bay Village.

So now, she does not want to go there.   Later I learn that Susu used to go to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the huge Episcopal cathedral in New York, and pray her Hebrew prayers.  She lived a limbo faith, an underground faith, as I did for so long.

Later no one remembers that Susu came to see me.  There’s no record or memory of my being so sick (though I did spend two weeks flat on my back after hitting my eye with an elastic exercise rope).  I wonder, did I make it up?  But no.  Susu may not have flown out on a plane and entered my room, but she definitely came, and she prayed, and I learned about prayer and about Susu and eventually about Judaism and Jewish history and the Holocaust.  I will struggle with feelings of loyalty when I work to find a faith that works for me.  Through Susu my world got big, and complicated.

In Bay Village, all I know is that Susu loves me, and she speaks in tongues of power.  I love her back, fiercely.  Susu will die in 1966, but I will hear her and feel her presence for years.  She will keep me safe and encourage me until I can find my way.  Susu, I barely knew you, but your love kept me alive.  Your domineering nature, your steely will, your prayer, spoke to me and lived in me when I needed you.  Thank you.

Memoir and Amnesia - and Self-Doubt

These days I'm writing about my earliest memories, my family and life in Bay Village Ohio.  I just decided to begin at the beginning, after a bit of preparatory jumping around.  It's hard, but even as I write this I'm not sure why.  Let me try some explanations.

I have very few clear memories before the age of ten.  I have snapshots, occasional remarks.  I have my baby book and a record of my school performance, so I have some jogs for my memory, but I don't have detailed visual memories.  And the memoir books and teachers tell me I need them.  So I'm trying to call them up, knowing that sometimes I'm likely making things up (they say that's OK, memory is unreliable anyway, just don't manufacture stories and lie), but mostly I hit these walls.  For example, I want to tell you about my older brother Dal.  Dal is - was? - almost eleven years older than me.  He left home when I was seven, and only visited occasionally after that.  I don't have a lot of memories of Dal.  But Dal is important, to me and to my story.  So how do I write about Dal?  How do I tell you what matters?

So the first voice says:  other people remember their childhoods.  Have you blanked out all those years in response to the incest and other trauma of those years?  If so, how can you write about this?  You're a mess.  You need to remember.

Here's where the other voice kicks in.  The problem is not that I can't remember, this voice says.  The problem is with my expectation that I need to, and that there's one sort of memoir - full of details - that others want to read.

So my memory issue is actually related to the question of what kind of writer I am.  I keep trying to measure up, to have lots of details and conversations, when really I'm more an idea and impression kind of person.  I'm an essayist trying to be a memoirist.  I used to be an academic writer who wanted to write essays.  Now I can write anything I want, and I'm making rules to make things hard on myself!

I have lots of ideas.  I live in ideas.  You know that, if you've been reading my other posts for a while.  I love ideas.  But I do want to convey the texture of my life as well as my reflections on it.  So: I think I'll listen to the second voice.

I promise this week to post some of what I've written.  I have a lot about Bay Village, where we lived from 1955 to 1966.  I'll figure out how to share some of that.  Thanks for checking in here.  Back in a bit!

Identities - a Preface

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently. than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is. absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting.  - Michel Foucault

Send me out into another life

lord because this one is growing faint

I do not think it goes all the way - W. S. Merwin

I change identities the way other people change clothes.

No, more than that; my identities each come with a set of clothes, a habit if you will.  If the clothes make the man, I’ve found that the clothes can also make the nun, the lesbian, the professor, the priest.  Of course it’s not that simple: sometimes the identity makes the clothes, prescribes presentation.  It’s not always the same causal pathway, and it’s not a perfect correspondence: there’s more than one way to wear each identity or each set of clothes.

Still, you get my point.

I have anguished over this lability in my identity.  After I left the convent, I was especially tortured.  I had made my life vows only three years before I left.  I still felt called to religious life, but not in the community in which I made my vows.  I confessed my sense of instability and fickleness to my spiritual director.

“You’re like water.  If you dam it up and let it sit for too long, it starts to stink.”

Then I started leading recovery retreats.  Each time I told my story, people responded not with concern but with admiration.  That’s where I first heard I should write a memoir.  It seemed that there was something else going on besides simple chameleon behavior.

Now I see, the problem is not shifting identities.  If there is a problem, the problem is with identity itself.  Each of the changes in my life has been a drive to reclaim something denied or excluded: anger, autonomy, sexuality, spirituality, love.  Each began as a project - not a class assignment, but a creation and exploration.  Each began as an adventure of some sort, a growth of a new aspect of myself.  And, too often, over time each became hardened into an identity.  I became “the rebel,” “the alcoholic,” “the  . . . “  And the identity-ness of each of these trapped me, and I began to stink.

So now, I claim my life as bigger than any one identity.  They’re all true, they’re all alive in me: the good girl, the juvenile delinquent, the nun, the clown.  And, these days, I think I have a context in which to live that keeps from hardening into an identity.  The name I use now is vague and capacious, shared by others who live very different lives from mine.  I pull out other names as needed.  I sometimes let others hang names on me that don’t really fit, out of charity really.  No need to argue.  But just because you call me that doesn’t mean I have to answer.

So this isn’t really a story about shifting identities or clothes, though I’m sure I’m going to write sometimes as though they are.  This story, the way I tell it now, is about a journey to wholeness, integration, and joy.

So there.