Introduction: Coming in and finding ground: Genders,sexualities,and theopastoral imaginations in Southeast Asia

My words declare the uprightness of my heart, and what my lips know they speak sincerely. The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life (Job 33: 3-4)

In the last several years, international consultations have been held in Southeast Asia to: (i) address the effects of religious and customary laws on women (Jurists, I. C. of, & Catholic Organization for Relief and Development Aid 2019); and (ii) examine the legal status of women and LGBTQ+ persons in light of the principle of Freedom of Religion and Belief (Jurists, I. C. of, & United Nations Human Rights Commission 2019). Rapporteurs, activists, religious actors, and academics scrutinized cultural practices that employed religious discourse in undermining civil protections. They acknowledged the correlation of religion and/with cultural norms while cautioning that:

1. Conflating religion with culture—particularly in Asia’s postcolonial contexts—diminishes its potency to become a critical actor in protecting human rights; and that

2. Identifying “religion” too closely with institutional structures overlooks its complicity in propagating gender biases that shape legislation. (Campos 2019)

Recognizing the significance of such concerns, we—Joseph N. Goh of the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, in collaboration with Michael Sepidoza Campos of the Department of Theology and Religious Education, De La Salle University Manila—invited early career researchers ¹ to participate in a two-day International Workshop on Genders, Sexualities, and Theopastoral Imaginations in Southeast Asia from November 18–19, 2021. ² We were acutely aware of a need for more academic discourses in transgressive and radical theologies, religious studies, biblical studies, and other interlocking areas of study involving gender and sexual diversities—from Asian perspectives, and by Asian scholars—in Asia. We were especially cognizant of the dearth of scholarship on the field from Southeast Asia. The Workshop sought to address the marginal experiences of Southeast Asian LGBTQ+ lives, and expand opportunities for discourse in an emerging area of study.

Hosted online by Monash University Malaysia, the Workshop featured sixteen scholars who interrogated the cultural and religious practices of LGBTQ+ lives in Southeast Asia. Scholars came from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia; several were undertaking graduate studies in Europe at the time. At the gathering, each participant responded to the following questions:

1. To what extent have Southeast Asia’s postcolonial contexts defined Christian religious practices and theologies in relation to gender and/or sexuality?

2. How do/can/ought religious institutions/communities attend practically to the diverse gender and/or sexual identities and expressions specific to Southeast Asian postcolonialities?

The Workshop defined “gender,” “sexuality,” and “theopastoral” broadly, mindful of the region’s cultural and geopolitical diversity. This interdisciplinary approach engaged practices that “critically [examined] how the discourse of Asian sexuality has been shaped under the influence of Western colonization in the past and in today’s neo-colonial era of globalization” (Wu 2000, 65). Scholars drew from their religious and academic contexts. Conversations intersected broad and multiple disciplines related to the theme—from scripture, theology, ministry, church, and gender to hermeneutics, disease, youth, and ecumenics; from interreligious dialogues, dis/embodiment, and postcoloniality, to nation, time, space, among others. Together, participants focused on marginal questions and underrepresented issues that reflect the realities of Southeast Asian lives.

While scholars were expected to have facility for theological language, the Workshop affirmed multiplicity of expressions, methods, and foci, engaging systematic, liberation, feminist, queer, LGBTQ+, ecological, political, public, practical, and Asian theologies. Conversations also encouraged epistemologies and analyses that privileged Asian scholarship, echoing Kuan-Hsing Chen’s vision of “Asia as method.” To the extent that “the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point” structures a common assumption, the Workshop generated scholarship that empowered “Asian societies [to] deal with problems similar to [their] own, and thus overcome unproductive anxieties and develop new paths of engagement” (Chen 2010, 212). Indeed, presentations demonstrated that participants “did not construct ‘Asia’ and the ‘West’ or ‘Asia’ and ‘Christianity’ as binary opposites” (Kwok 2005, 41). Instead, there prevailed a sense that geopolitical conditions define subject construction, requiring an honest reevaluation of Southeast Asia itself.

This collection of essays speaks of the cultural, religious, and geopolitical diversity of Southeast Asia. Where some engage gender and sexuality as sociological categories, others employ critical theory to illuminate theological insights that could be gleaned from LGBTQ+ experiences:

Sociologists Jayeel Cornelio and Robbin Dagle open the conversations with an exploration of spiritual struggle as a defining experience for young adult queer Christians who are compelled to navigate tensions of faith and sexuality in the Philippines. Their research affirms the dynamic nature of queer religious identities, with a “spirituality of struggle” serving as an empirical counterpoint to the fundamentalist, patriarchal, and neoliberal character of militant Christianity in the Philippines.

Theologian and biblical scholar Kristine Meneses turns to the lived experiences of disabled/diversely-abled/differently-abled queer subjects, Deaf Filipinos, to explore humor as a strategy of subject-consolidation, resistance, and community solidarity. Meneses suggests that humor rehabilitates the sense of shame that resides in differently-abled bodies, situating in its place a kind of enduring dignity that echoes the excesses of the Resurrection.

In resonant ways, Malaysian academic Joseph N. Goh who works at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and theology employs a critical re-reading of the Resurrection event, by drawing parallels between the early disciples’ misrecognition of the resurrected Jesus and contemporary misreadings of transgender identities. The point at which early disciples were able to re-recognize Jesus introduces a theological obligation to re-recognize trans-modified bodies as a form of encounter with divine justice, inclusion, and creativity.

For feminist theologian and minister Lizette Tapia, colonial conditions diminish identities to sedimentary frameworks couched in Christian heteronormative idiom. Revisiting the practices through which babaylanes—shamanic figures—inhabit positions of power in pre-colonial Philippines, Tapia discerns a “divine multiplicity” and “unlimited incarnation” among queer subjects who straddle the material and spiritual realms. For Tapia, to speak of “babaylan” is, in fact, to acknowledge and affirm the multiplicity of postcolonial gendered subjectivities for our times.

Theologian Michael Sepidoza Campos further asserts that postcolonial queer subjects—like those from the Philippines—require additional layers of critique attending to language, practice, and resistance. By exploring the place of camp, rampa, and posthuman worldview in the constitution of Filipino queer bodies, he suggests that as queer narratives become global, camp and rampa expand critical advocacy and imaginations of the human.

The collection concludes with a Roundtable conversation featuring emerging thinkers Joshua Marasigan, Alfred Candid “Jerlo” Jaropillo, Kakay Pamarán, Irene Nainggolan, Amadeo Devin Udampoh, Erich Von Marthin Elraphoma, and Wan Wei-Hsien. These teachers, pastors, and graduate students from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia reflected on the ways gender, citizenship, and faith structure queer bodies, critiquing tropes of “coming out” that normalize queer subjectivities. As a collective, these scholars leaned into the principle of “coming in/to self” as a platform for subject formation in contexts where naming one’s gender identity bears political and material precarity.

As a scholarly collective, the Workshop served as a “cenacle” where participants created and held space for each other; it generated Pentecostal moments to the extent that each scholar “[spoke] about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11) through the travails of diverse LGBTQ+ idioms; it reflected how “the corners of the world indeed proclaim the diversity of God’s vision and creation” (Córdova Quero and Young 2022, 147) as prompted by the Spirit. The Workshop welcomed participants to be straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, non-binary, cisgender, transgender, baklâ, mak nyah, bançi, pondan, and ally to themselves, to each other and to their scholarship. It was an avenue to be unapologetically Southeast Asians: Filipinos and Filipinas (and more), Indonesians and Malaysians. The gathering encouraged critique, tracing the manifold ways that Christianity has both sedimented and expanded categories of gender, ethnicity, sex, and sexualities. Participants were permitted to “reclaim their visions and voices as sexual subjects in a disenabling ethos” (Goh 2014, 40) that permeates much of Southeast Asia. As an inaugural project, the Workshop gave birth to bountiful moments where “the Spirit [kept] blowing the walls down and the doors and the windows open, until every part of God’s Spirit…[became] the unconditional dwelling place of shalom” (Bohache 2006, 570). The Workshop evinced how “in the pursuit of knowing God in each other and knowing each other in God, material-secular and spiritual-theological dichotomies are false[, for i]t is truly in the deepest recesses of ‘doing human’ that God is revealed and concealed” (Goh 2020, 240).