Abstract
Daniel Patterson's book is a theological reading of Judith Butler's gender theory. The foundation of Patterson's argument is an engagement with the prelapsarian ‘ideal’ of gender, which Patterson describes with a term he coins, ‘the law of Adam and Eve’ (p. 2). In some sense, Patterson's work is asking: what are we to do with this ‘beginning’, especially in light of some of the philosophical interjections of Judith Butler.
His argument is that Edenic Adam and Eve had ‘perfect bodies’, that these were created by God to be in relationship with one another (p. 64). Patterson argues that it is wrong to think, however, that we can or should return to this ideal. Patterson engages Butler's use of Freud. He describes an ‘originary event’ of the relationship of an infant forms with its mother and father and then maps that onto the ‘originary event’ of Adam and Eve. Both of these, he claims, are foundational events that form gender. He argues that Butler's work is about impacting society at its ‘foundation’, averring: ‘Her focus on the beginning reveals that gender violence is a mundane event but one that is grounded in the beginning or at the originary scene’ (p. 93). He states that her goal is to take ‘hold of the very substance that constitutes the foundation and reassigning it’ (p. 101).
Patterson uses or agrees with Butler's project insofar as he argues that we cannot return to or insist upon the ‘law of Adam and Eve’ as possible in our time and context. He writes: ‘We have been challenged to account for the view that Adam and Even are a beautiful vision of God's humanity, but one that is out of reach, that we cannot inhabit or access. The originary humanity functions in the present as a perfect image that highlights our loss and lack, and this our desire for completion. Adam and Eve reveal our desire-induced incoherence and need for life apart from them’ (p. 90, emphasis original).
To explore what life might mean beyond this ‘foundation’, I found Patterson's engagements with W.H. Auden on the poet's homosexual desire (chapter 2) and with Spinoza on conatus and God (chapter 5) to be provoking and well-done. There is also thorough engagement with the letters of Paul in the final chapters, which point to Christ as the body to which we should aspire in our vocation as gendered bodies. In these final chapters, Patterson engages with several other theologians who also work with Butler on gender and theology. He offers a smart analysis of their work and shows how he diverges from them in his analysis. He states that ‘The Beginning is not an unfortunate mixture of divine will and humanity to be transcended (Coakley), or the unjust beginning in need of reform (Cornwall), or the start that must be left to get to a better end (Tanner). I suggest we take the beginning as Butler does, as a literal, inaccessible, indispensable, and irrepressible foundation that conditions what it means to love in the world. God created man and woman in the image of God, and it is this image or vocation that continues to haunt humanity, even after it is expelled from Eden’ (p. 200). The ultimate thesis Patterson presents us with is that given that this ‘originary’, ‘foundation’ of Adam and Eve cannot be our vocation, but only informed by them, our gender vocation is to be ‘uniting with Jesus Christ by faith’ (p. 216). Nonetheless, if I am reading the book correctly, uniting with Jesus Christ by faith, and seeing gender as a vocation, still means that we should aim to be men and women in relationship with one another.
Overall, Patterson's engagement with Butler left me with a few thoughts and questions. The first is about the Adam and Eve story as a foundational expression of God's will for humanity. Of course, Adam and Eve are not literal people (if the author believes that it would be clarifying to say so). It would be helpful to this reader to know precisely what Patterson means when describing these bodies as ‘perfect’. Throughout Christian history, theologians have described prelapsarian Adam and Eve as perfect, but it is important from a Butlerian point of view that what people have meant by that ‘perfection’ in the garden has changed drastically throughout history and cultures. This has resulted today in the socially constructed complementary gender binary. If what Patterson is doing is projecting that twenty-first-century complementary binary back into the Hebrew scriptures—and I suspect that is what he is doing though he never says so specifically—that is anachronistic. When the author writes ‘A return to the time before the fall of humanity in the beginning is not possible, and the desire to return to the time before the fall of sex in the 1960s is a return to another era of fallen human embodiment’ (p. 139), this reader was left wondering exactly what characterizes men and women for the author. If this ideal is the foundation, what is it? What does being a perfect man or woman mean to him? It would be helpful for Patterson to attend to the long history of gender in Judaism and Christianity since his argument hinges on an interpretation of Genesis.
Similarly, for Butler, my understanding of their work is that gender does not happen in a concrete scene in infancy. Patterson describes Butler's reliance on Freud by stating: ‘gender is produced by being trained away from certain sexual possibilities in the originary scene’ (p. 39). For Freud, and importantly for Butler, the entire body in early childhood is erogenous, and the child desires in a multitude of unrepressed directions. For Freud, the Oedipus complex effects all children as their interaction with their genitalia is given signification by a series of taboos and desires, which not only shape gender and sexual orientation, but also break the psyche into foregrounded conscious desire, and repressed, unconscious desire.
I do not discern Butler's use of Freud—which is through the work of Jacques Lacan and other psychoanalysts—to be a literal appropriation of the Oedipus analysis as an ‘originary scene’. The point Butler draws out is that all people, not just women or LGBTQ people, are constituted in a body that desires broadly, and then is shaped by a sense of loss or brokenness into a set of conscious and unconscious desires. The break between ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ becomes a way of talking about the break in every human psyche between the conscious and unconscious self. When Patterson writes, ‘The legitimate woman Butler was fighting for was not the woman in the heterosexual matrix in the beginning who desired man. If Butler was ever going to have her own sexuality recognized, then the beginning needed to be reformed such that her desire was recognized by it’ (p. 16). Butler is not ‘fighting for’ lesbians and ‘not fighting for’ straight women in her use of Freud. I do not read Butler as attempting to reformulate the ‘foundation’ in order to have her own sexuality recognized. Butler's work is attempting to show that there is no foundation, just an ongoing discourse. Gender does not happen in a foundational, originary, or hinge event. There is no beginning. For Butler, gender is iterative, shaped over all time, over and again, always already there and always becoming. How then does that affect the analysis of Adam and Eve for our own vocation?
Another question I had was about the exploration of Jesus’ status as a eunuch (pp. 188–92). How does that relate to the affirmation that we are to unite with Christ, and that this is the fulfillment of the vocation of gender within the male/female binary? Was the author suggesting that there is something about Jesus’ rejection of marriage that can inform gender for us?
My final question was about violence. Patterson understands Butler's commitments toward creating a world that is more hospitable or life-affirming for people outside the gender binary. We can see this when he writes that Butler ‘enlarges the scope of who may be implicated in a discussion about gender and violence, gender and grief, gender and vulnerability, and therefore gender and the possibility of life’ (p. 153). The point of troubling gender, for Butler, is precisely to create conditions under which more lives, across a variety of gender expression, are livable. While Patterson shows a keen understanding of Butler's arguments, I left the book wondering what Patterson makes of Butler's political commitments. Patterson suggests that focusing on union with Christ is the vocation of gender. But that vocation, for him, is still to be men and women in relationship with one another, in a context in which the gender binary was created by God and same-sex unions ‘turn their back on’ that holy prescription (p. 216).
Certainly, Patterson does not need to share Butler's commitments. He is allowed to engage Butler as a conservative theologian. But insofar as his project aims to disagree with Butler about the social construction of gender and about the validity of non-heteronormative sex, I would have liked a more open conversation that generously represented Butler's political interests, and Patterson's own. Patterson smartly engages Butler and queer and intersex theologians, and he is able clearly to state their arguments. But I left Patterson's work wondering about the violence against Matthew Shepard, someone whose sexuality and body were so ‘upsetting’ to the gender binary that two young men brutalized and murdered him. Butler's work is an attempt to understand how the mere existence of a body can incite such violence, and an attempt to create a world in which all bodies are protected. How would Patterson suggest we protect such bodies? Does he see these bodies as failing a vocation? I was particularly concerned about the flip in Patterson's usage of the word trouble, as he begins to describe intersex and queer bodies as ‘troubled’, rather than as bodies that ‘trouble’ the norms. This seems to reiterate rather than reveal the exact problems Butler is attempting to address.
In other words, Patterson's project appears to be leveraging the language and argument of queer theory toward a thesis that is anti-queer. The reason Patterson states for his project is that while Butler's thought has become important, no conservative thinkers have offered a thoroughgoing way to engage it. To be sure, Patterson does not spend time in his book explicitly ‘tearing down’ Butler's queer politics. He is simply using their work toward his own end, which is antithetical to those politics. Creating a formulation of Butler's theory that is antithetical to their queer aims without acknowledging that dissonance makes me, the reader, long for a less restrained encounter between Patterson and Butler, which might foreground some of that dissonance. What does Patterson think the Christian tradition should do with LGBTQ bodies? What should their vocation be? I look forward to more work from this author that might engage these questions.