From inside the black (w)hole, we chart the history, present, and futurity of “Black (W)holes,” and, by extension, the black diasporic feminist, lesbian, queer, and trans intellectual and political lifeworlds in its wake.
Shoniqua Roach, “Inside the Black (W)Hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective”
While reading Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones’s Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology, I recalled the famous exchange between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. On November 4, 1971, Baldwin and Giovanni met in London to record a conversation. As they went back and forth, they covered a wide swath of topics including gender, sexuality, art, Blackness, and politics. Almost halfway through the conversation they turned to religion. Baldwin, beginning to interrogate Christian conceptions of purity, grew characteristically upset. “Why does the son of God have to be born immaculately? Aren’t we all the sons of God? That’s the blasphemy.”
In Baldwin’s anger, I hear an insight amplified and clarified in Immaculate Misconceptions. Christian logics of purity characteristically mark certain desires and people as dirty and defiling. Specifically, Adkins-Jones invites us to resist the ways a commitment to purity in certain Marian traditions terrorize those labeled impure and disown Palestinian Jews, Black people, and queer people as children of God.
Immaculate Misconceptions is poetic, prophetic, and preacherly. While the antiblack violence and sexual terror the book details are ugly, the prose enacts the beauty of Black resistance. Adkins-Jones’s prophetic critique offers an unflinching unpacking of the racist logics undergirding common accounts of Eve and Mary. It tarries with the theological and aesthetic judgments behind Mary’s fabricated whiteness. Adkins-Jones accomplishes this through a careful and impressive interdisciplinary weaving of biblical interpretation, visual studies, historical theology, and Black study. This long and painful story will fill the reader with rage and sorrow. And still, the book is preacherly in its assurance “that another theology is, perhaps, possible” (171).
As a way of beginning a conversation with Adkins-Jones, I want to highlight three themes for consideration: blood, pleasure, and antiblackness. I hope developing these themes in dialogue with Adkins-Jones opens new theological horizons.
On Blood
If the old church song says, “It was the blood that made a difference,” we might ask, evoking Jacques Derrida, what différance does the blood make? I take it that like Derrida, Adkins-Jones wants to interrogate the structures of authority which reproduce hierarchical binaries and divisions, especially the binary of spirit and flesh. Immaculate Misconceptions offers a theology which breaks down these divisions. In doing so, it refuses to reduce holiness to a singular modality of white purity. It locates the trace of Mary’s blood in Jesus’s blood and shows how the later is dependent on the former. In this context, Mary’s blood not only makes a difference, but also takes on a different meaning.
The difference the blood makes emerges in the middle chapters of the book and the final chapter. Chapter three invites the reader to consider the theological and political consequences of the erasure of Mary’s Palestinian-Jewish identity. Adkins-Jones accomplishes this by carefully tracing the development of Mariology in Irenaeus and Cyril. On the one hand, they made important contributions to Mariology and even countered some misogynistic tendencies in their opponents. Yet on the other hand, they developed these contributions within a diseased anti-Jewish and patriarchal Christian imagination. As Sylvia Wynter argued in her classic essay “1492: A New World View,” the divisions between Christians and “infidels like the Muslims and Jews” anticipated the color line and forged a violent slot destined to contain the African. In other words, as Willie Jennings and J. Kameron Carter elaborate, Christian antisemitism legitimates hierarchies and divisions in the social order with devastating effects for Black people.
The erasure of Mary’s Palestinian-Jewishness has theological consequences as well, preventing the early church from developing a robust understanding of Mary’s flesh. We can appreciate the full force of this theological failure by locating the development of Mariology alongside Gnosticism. The Gnostics refused to affirm the goodness of creation and therefore denied the fleshly incarnation of Christ. Instead, they held a docetic Christology, believing that Christ only appeared to take on flesh.
Adkins-Jones helps us see a similar logic at play with Mary. While the church eventually affirmed the full humanity of Christ, there is a trace of anti-Jewish rhetoric and perhaps Gnosticism in certain traditions of Mariology. The denial of Mary’s Palestinian-Jewish flesh leads to something like a docetic Mary. Adkins-Jones implies this when she compares Jesus with Mary. “Hymns and sermons in the Christian tradition continuously refer to a Christ that still bears these marks, as well as to a Christ who retains the scars from crucifixion. Yet, the spotlessness of her body is still thought prerequisite to qualify the suffering of her son” (128). This spotlessness of the body makes Mary a fungible object of enjoyment—a disembodied tool for white theology.
At the risk of simplifying a complex analysis, one way theologians mark Mary’s purity is by rendering Mary’s birth spotless, a birth without any trace of indecency. Adkins-Jones boldly asks, “In all of this cleanliness, in the absence of the stuff that makes the body, in the absence of water and mucus and blood, what has Mary given to her Son?” (121). I take it this question invites us to recognize how an abstract birth threatens the incarnation and the full humanity of Christ—something Gregory of Nazianzus and Cyril rejected forcefully. Indeed, in the final chapter Adkins-Jones laments, “What Christian theology has not reckoned with is the full thought that it is Christ’s blood, Mary’s Palestinian, Jewish blood, this ritually unclean excrement, that is together shared in drink, and that the narrative of blood purity is displaced in the implications of institution, that ‘this is my blood, shed for you’” (181).
Adkins-Jones is certainly right to bring a theological critique to abstract Mariologies and their attendant antiblack logics of purity. She is also right to wrestle with the failure of many theologians to connect Mary’s blood to the Eucharist.
On these questions, Immaculate Misconceptions parallels and diverges from the blood theologies of Janet Soskice and Eugene Rogers. In her chapter “Blood and Defilement” collected in The Kindness of God, Soskice attends to the symbolism of blood in the New Testament. Similar to Adkins-Jones, she engages Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva to analyze the gendered descriptions of blood as abject, abominable, and defiling. Yet, Soskice also attends to the way the New Testament deconstructs these divisions. She offers a theological interpretation of Jesus’s interactions with the woman with the hemorrhage and the healing of Jairus’s daughter. Through touch by an “impure and infertile” woman and by risking “defilement by entering a house which contains a corpse and by touching the corpse/girl,” we see Jesus transgressing boundaries and disrupting hierarchies of purity.
Moreover, Soskice builds on the Nigerian scholar Teresea Okure to identify the formation of kinship ties in “being born of God” and partaking of Christ’s blood. Therefore, she concludes, “Leviticus prohibits the eating of blood, yet the central Christian rite involves drinking blood. In Leviticus childbirth is defiling, yet John’s gospel describes God as giving birth to the chosen. In Levitical terms a corpse radiates impurity, especially for priests, but in Christianity the central icon of holiness, the Great High Priest, is a dead man on a cross.” In other words, Jesus locates holiness in the things marked impure. How might Soskice’s account of disruption and transgression help us develop a fleshly and indecent incarnation?
We see a similar move in Rogers’s Blood Theology. Adkins-Jones only mentions Rogers one time in the main body of Immaculate Misconceptions. Her reference is brief and negative, arguing that Rogers reproduces certain problematic tendencies in Irenaeus. Yet, in light of Adkins-Jones’s final chapter, one wonders what such a quick dismissal forecloses. For example, Rogers parallels Adkins-Jones by affirming the importance of blood talk. Rogers holds, “The blood of Jesus is the menstrual blood of Mary,” and the humanity of Christ comes from the blood of Mary. At the same time, in the incarnation, the divinity of Christ takes Mary’s blood—rendered abject in her times—and makes it holy. “Mary’s blood needs no special pleading or filtering, because her purification is just the first of her son’s work. His conception purifies the waters of her womb just as his baptism purifies the waters of the Jordan: not because he needs purity, but because other humans do.” A dialogue Rogers, as with Soskice, pushes Adkins-Jones insights about blood in new and exciting directions.
One of the most exciting developments of Immaculate Misconceptions is the book’s theology of pleasure. My dissertation looks to develop a Christian asceticism which makes ourselves “infinitely more susceptible to pleasure.” Therefore, I carefully noted the narrative arc of pleasure throughout Immaculate Misconceptions. In Chapter Two, Adkins-Jones offers sustained attention to Eve’s pleasure, both its goodness and excess. Chapter Four briefly mentions Hildegard of Bingen’s attention to “the experiences of women’s pleasure” (118). Adkins-Jones turns to Black women’s pleasure through her engagement with Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy. Finally, Chapter Six gives us a Black Mary whose pleasures are sacred, thereby helping us see the sacredness of Black women’s pleasures.
In 1994, Evelyn Hammonds famously described Black women’s sexuality as a black hole and called for new “reading strategies that allow us to make visible the distorting and productive effects these sexualities produce in relation to more visible sexualities.” Immaculate Misconceptions gives us important theological tools for such a reading practice. On the one hand, its theology of Black women’s pleasures builds on Rowan Williams’s “The Body’s Grace.” On the other hand, it also echoes previous works in theology like Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic and works of Black feminists influenced by Hammonds including Jennifer Nash, Shoniqua Roach, Bettina Judd, and Mireille Miller Young. Unlike previous theologies of pleasure, these authors center the sexual pleasures of Black women. By bringing authors like Williams and Nash together in the same book, Immaculate Misconceptions opens a new conversation in Black theology and Christian sexual ethics. One where Black women’s sexual performances and moments of erotic pleasure exemplify the body’s grace. Indeed, Immaculate Misconceptions argues that the grace of sexual intimacy and erotic longing is a way into the Triune life of God. I am excited to see where the theology of pleasure developed in Immaculate Misconceptions can go. It will certainly influence the next generation of queer theologies.
On Antiblackness:
Adkins-Jones observes “What critical theories of social death and alienation and Afropessimism (while important analyses) lose in their assessments are the alternative modalities of existence that inherently resist oppression, and the witness to ancestors who carried rice and seeds, buried beneath cartographies of plaited hair, who insisted we sow, even if we have been scattered; for even among the abyss, we birth” (19). The desire to distance oneself from Afropessimism is understandable. Given what Jared Sexton calls the anxiety of antagonism, we live in a time where Afropessimism is readily critiqued and seldom read carefully.
Yet, Afropessimism comes in multiples forms with various contributions, innovations, and insights. Authors like Tiffany King, Patrice Douglass, Zakiyyah Jackson, and the late Selamawit D. Terrefe build on Afropessimism’s key insights in ways that grow out of their investments in Black feminism. Similar to Adkins-Jones, these authors put fungibility and sexual terror at the forefront of their analysis. In this respect, one wonders if Immaculate Misconceptions shares more with Afropessimism than appears on the surface.
For example, consider the discussion of Couwenbergh’s The Rape of the Negress in Chapter One. Adkins-Jones observes, “References to the painting have found … ways to avoid associating the picture as its early adopters did with the term rape, instead preferring various iterations of a more innocuous description” (28). This claim recalls Wilderson’s account of “unspeakable ethics” detailed in Red, White, and Black. Likewise, when Adkins-Jones adds, “Associating the image with any biblical justification is a nuanced attempt to sanitize its contents, a subtle inflection that the image of a naked Black women’s body, in the presence of stripped white men, can be redeemed if linked to a vision of purification no matter how cruel or senseless” (28), one hears harmony with Wilderson’s (and Saidiya Hartman’s) concern about how attempts to emplot the slave in the narrative progression “from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium (restored, renewed, or reorganized)” almost always leads to the obliteration of the slave.
To be clear, I am not suggesting Immaculate Misconceptions attempts to sneak Afropessimism into its analysis. I certainly do not believe Afropessimism fits neatly with most Christian theology, womanist or not. Rather, I am curious if these convergences imply the potential for a more careful and explicit engagement with Afropessimist feminism and aesthetics, one which does not abandon the necessity of theology but refuses to reject the insights Afropessimism offers about antiblackness and the afterlives of slavery.
Conclusion
I want to conclude my response with a personal reflection. I first heard Adkins-Jones lecture during March 2023. She delivered the Pauli Murray/Nannie Helen Burroghs Lecture at Duke Divinity School. This lecture enjoyed added prestige as it coincided with the 50th anniversary of Duke’s Office of Black Church Studies. During that semester, I was enrolled in Joseph Winters’s Black Marxism seminar, immersing myself in Black studies. We read Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Joy James, Sylvia Wynter, Denise Da Silva, and Kara Keeling. In reading these authors, I began to ask similar questions to those Monica Coleman describes in “Must I be a Womanist?” Is there enough space in Black theology, in womanist theology, to reflect on the captive maternal? To tarry with the beautiful experiments of wayward women like Eve and Pulcheria? To attend to the wounds inflicted by Western imperial man and to sit with ungendered Black flesh? To sit with the unthought sex trafficking of Sarah Baartman?
Immaculate Misconceptions responds with a brilliant and resounding yes!
This book breaks down the boundaries between recent work in Black studies and theology. It is a spirit-filled gathering—one which brings together a chorus of different voices to speak with one another in rich conversation. It invites theology and Black studies to dance together and join hands. It opens channels for new conversations to flow like living water. And it does so by building on the invaluable insights of womanist theology. It is my hope that we continue to draw from this book, not for extraction and possession but for the purpose of sharing, gathering, and engaging in Black study.
May we continually take ourselves to the water of this book, so we might continually encounter a Black Mary.
