Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones—Black woman, mother, theologian, poet, and teacher, at least—provides a masterful womanist Mariology in Immaculate Misconceptions, threading the academic, the affective, and the artistic in Mary’s story. As all of us junior scholars do, she stands on the shoulders of previous scholarship, not only womanist theologians but also Black scholars and artists like Hortense Spillers and Audre Lorde, and everyday Black women such as Saartjie Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”) and Aereile Jackson (the “former mother” from the documentary The Forgotten Space). I especially appreciate the references to Ivone Gebara and María Clara Bingemer, Brazilian liberation feminist theologians. Immaculate Misconceptions is superbly argued and wonderfully written. Without a doubt, it is a labor of love.
N.B.: undoubtedly, my anatomical sex and gender curtail my full understanding of being woman. I can never know what it means to carry a baby in the womb, to give birth, or to lactate. There are sections of this book (e.g., much of Chapters 3 and 4) which I admired merely as a spectator, just like I did during the births of my four children. Yet I do understand, for example, the intensity of labor, my wife’s disappointment at being forced to give birth via Caesarean section, and the pleasure and pain of rearing children. I also cringe at Mary’s age at pregnancy. In any case, much of the book resonates personally, not just at a scholarly level.
Adkins-Jones asks: How is Mary Black? (Not whether Mary is Black.) Maryis not only Palestinian but also Black… and Latina (and Latine)… and Latin/Luso American, Native American, Pacific Islander, African, and any other ethnés that have been marginalized by Eurocentrism. Relatedly, Mary is not only Jew but also Christian, Hindu, santera, vodouisant… For Adkins-Jones, “to think against sacred Blackness is an immaculate misconception.” (15) In other words, considering Mary’s flesh and experiences as other than Black misses conceiving her, i.e., bringing her forth…, and misconceives other black bodies as well.
Writing about Mary is never easy. She is both complex (e.g., obedient yet a leader, a warrior yet a peacebuilder) and approachable (as Marian advocations attest). Her life is theologically primary (she is the Mother of God!) yet also deeply familiar, especially for women that manage a marginalized cotidiano. On one hand, her being is so essential to the sensus fidei that Christianity has wrestled with her dogmatic consequences from the fourth century (at least) to the present (see the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith’s recent Mater Populi Fidelis); on the other hand, that last document also testifies to the immense power she carries within the sensus fidelium, where she reigns as the Mother of all Believers. As Adkins-Jones writes, Mary, both as “idea and ideal,” blurs the boundary between “the personal and the political” in a variety of ways.
Faced with these conundrums, Adkins-Jones gets “real(est).” By grounding herself in black life, especially the life of Black women/females/femmes, she deftly explores the materialities (e.g., the relationality and agency) of Mary as Black Madonna: mother pregnant with God’s child, body colonized through the Eurocentric (white/Christian/ male) gaze, being iconized and commoditized. Of course, Blackness is itself hard to pin down conceptually, just like latinidad is. But by unpacking Mary’s motherhood, body, and self, Adkins-Jones unpacks Blackness for the reader, especially a womanly Blackness that, while “fugitive,” is a site of poiesis, joy, and liberation. Among the richness and robustness of Adkins-Jones’s argument, there are a few points I want to highlight.
Adkins-Jones states that her intention is not “simply adding race to the recipes of doctrine and dogma” (15-16) but to question what does being Black—an ontological condition that transcends skin color—means for the body where God was conceived and, in light of that, for the Black bodies that share that body’s limits and possibilities and currently walk the earth. And I agree, but with a clarification: she is adding race (alongside gender, class, history, alternative epistemologies, aesthetics, and many others), although not by reworking the ”recipes” with new ingredients but rather by making the reader see the ingredients differently – by shifting the gaze. As Adkins-Jones claims, Mary has always been black; she was just whitewashed. Additionally, Mary is the new Eve not only because she re-inaugurates creation by birthing Jesus but also because she is a curious, critical thinker reduced and marginalized by both supporters and opponents. Mary is mother, virgin, immaculate, queen…and Black (and Latina/e, and…).
This shifted gaze opens the carnality of Mary to scrutiny. Adkins-Jones does not hold back in theologizing around Mary’s genitalia, particularly in relation to the objectifying queerness of Eve’s life story and the paintings The Rape of the Negress and Eve and Lillith. Moreover, Mary feels (and eats and has sex) as all humans do, and that means pain, pleasure, and everything in between. Traditional Mariology is meager in this regard, perhaps due to the ever-present fear of humanizing Christ too much coupled with what Adkins-Jones calls the “homocitational”—that is, the hermeneutically flattening, institutional-/male-gaze driven—nature of both Eve’s and Mary’s stories. I consider this section one of the deepest contributions of Immaculate Misconceptions: it displays the fully human Mary and her “Black girl magic” (53), that is, her skill to question, transgress, and even dissolve boundaries while othered, while Black. Adkins-Jones writes: “What if we imagine such freedom as sacred, and return to Eve [and by consequence, Mary] her ability to ask for herself…to be able to differently discern knowledge and evil, rather than to heap the coals of humanity upon her head?” (66) This ”queering” carnality produces a Mary that is near: Mary is again and forever woman.
The carnality of Mary necessitates a deeper exploration of the womb as a site of power and privilege, or lack thereof. As Adkins-Jones writes, the Catholic Church has always been obsessed with “protecting” Mary’s womb but that also means “securing and policing” not only Mary’s womb but all women’s wombs. As it relates to Jesus, Mary’s womb is a problem not easily solved—how much “exception after exception” (123) does Mary need! The result is a decontextualized, atemporal, quasi-divine Mary with which the Church continuously wrestles. However, for Adkins-Jones, it is precisely Mary’s fluidity (and fluids) that marks her exceptionality: “[She] epitomizes a valuable hybridity within her very body, the liminal space of interstitial reality, an internalization of the borderland” (126), and her womb is “a site of theological resistance” (132). In this sense, Mary is a true medium and the womb a middle ground. Mary is anti-polarizing and liberative while not collapsing difference or homogenizing identity. Latine theology has a word for that: mestizo/a/e, an incarnated ethné characterized by unity-in-difference. Mary is mestiza.
Mary’s subjectivity includes both subjectivation (i.e., becoming free) and subjection (i.e., becoming bound). Saartjie Baartman’s life is a near-perfect analogy, with her oppression under the Eurocentric gaze and her self-liberation. Adkins-Jones narrates the Hottentot Venus’s life romantically but does not romanticize. In fact, the latter’s body becomes the former’s (and all Black women’s) spirit expressed in imagery, and as such, parallels the curious case of Mary: she is coopted by the institutions that also gatekeep her and is adored by the devotees who also reduce her to an instrument. This is the essence of Mary’s fugitive agency: “We must not cede the strength required to sustain the consequences of transgression, even as they manifest a kind of freedom” (155). I am reminded of the day-to-day struggle of living while undocumented, a struggle marked by large, soul-sucking risks and small yet life-giving victories. In a sense, the Baartman images function as green cards, lasting symbols of both precarity and triumph. Mary’s self documents herself.
Finally, the “wombness” of Mary’s womb (cf. Heidegger’s ”thingness” of things), that is, her ‘womb-emplaced’ dissolution of boundaries (for one, the divine mingled with the human) while maintaining difference (re: divine and human) provides present yet future-facing purpose ‘in the flesh, via fleshiness. According to Adkins-Jones, Mary dares us “to reimagine what might be yet possible in the liminal space of the now but not yet…to think what sacred persists and remains, what is able to speak life amid a world committed to death” (170). From Eve to Mary (to Jesus) to Black women (and the rest of creation), hope for a Spirit-filled life perseveres, not in spite of but because of the fleshly (as represented in Marian icons such as Our Lady of Ferguson). ”Now but not yet” thrives in blood, feces, amniotic fluid, urine, colostrum, bile, breast milk and vaginal discharge—the fleshly ”stuff” of (woman-driven) life. The iconicity of this fleshiness resides in its capacity for making all of us realize where we were, are (or should be), and are going: a life intended toward freedom yet marching within/toward death…and, hopefully, renewed in life everlasting, just like the womb does every menstrual cycle. Mary, the fluid icon.
Mamá Mary, we see you…love us always.
