Tina Beattie: A Theology of Becoming
TINA BEATTIE JAN 1
Link: https://substack.com/@tinabeattie?utm_source=global-search
I love you. I want you. I hate you. I rape you.
How do we know what whispered intimacies of tenderness or threats of violence seeded us in our mothers’ wombs?
One does not need to make love to make a child. Rape will do just as well. Either way, that momentary ejaculation for a man has life-changing consequences for the woman who discovers she is pregnant, whatever the outcome.
That is a short extract from the beginning of my new book, A Theology of Becoming: Body, Blood, Birth, and Sacrifice, published online today by Cambridge University Press in their Cambridge Elements series. The ebook is free to read online until 2nd February, at this link. It will also be published in paperback. Here is the abstract:
Modern theological approaches to birth have been filtered through an androcentric lens, focusing more on ethical questions of contraception and abortion than on the significance of birth for what it means to be human. In the Catholic tradition, this has been influenced by doctrines and traditions surrounding Mary’s virginal conception of Christ and painless birth. This Element considers the challenges posed by maternal life to ideas and theories about pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a woman and her newborn child. Reflecting on her maternal experiences through the lenses of feminist theory and Marian theology, the author sketches the contours of an incarnational theology that endows the birthing body with sacramental significance. She concludes by asking what it would mean for theological anthropology to adopt this as the normative model of the person reborn through baptism into the body of the maternal Church.
The Elements series is intended for academics to publish short books on areas of interest, without having to develop these into fully-fledged research projects and monographs. Many different disciplines are covered. This is my contribution to the Elements in Christian Doctrine section, edited by Rachel Muers (Professor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh); Ashley Cocksworth(Reader in Theology and Practice, University of Roehampton); and Simeon Zahl (Professor of Christian Theology, University of Cambridge).
It is probably the most anxiety-making piece I’ve ever published, and that’s saying something. Having always resisted the appeal to experience as a reliable foundation for feminist theology, in this I am “reaching back through time to drag my young birthing, bleeding, lactating body into language”.
Here is an edited extract:
A theological account of birth developed through a maternal phenomenology would be a bloody rupture in the theological corpus, entailing a confrontation with the primal howl of origins, by way of which even the most esteemed professor, pope, or bishop was pushed into life through a woman’s vagina, covered in her slime, shit, and blood. Inter faeces et urinem nascimur – we are born between shit and piss, goes a saying attributed to Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux. (Early and medieval theologians, mystics, and artists were less squeamish than their modern counterparts about these bodily realities, perhaps because neither birth nor death was hidden from sight in the sanitised artifice of a hospital ward.) To conceive of these beginnings would effect a conceptual revolution by bringing into language the acts of conception and birth that are the origins of every human life and of the Christian story, in which even God has a Mother. …
Wending her way through twentieth-century texts of psychoanalytic and literary theory, nature/mother is a phantasm, a ghostly apparition evoked by writing as a lingering trace of that which is experienced as lack. For Derrida, this is the whimsical and elusive feminine/woman hovering on the edges of meaning, resisting any attempt at definition or fixity. For Lacan, it is the unattainable Mother/God for whom the infant soul yearns with the white fire of unwritten, unspoken desire beyond all desires. The term ‘white fire’ comes from the Talmud: ‘When the Talmud says that the Torah given to Moses was written “in black fire on white fire,” it … emphasizes the distinction between the language of the Torah, which exists eternally (or, as we now say, virtually), and its physical medium’ (Kirsch, Reference Kirsch2018). Our identities are stories written in black ink on the white fire of a haunting and mysterious otherness.
So I begin with books and texts, but my purpose is to write (as) the maternal body, to scavenge among the discarded remnants of language and rehabilitate them in writing differently, in writing différance by allowing language to be unsettled through the articulation of bodiliness, desire, and desolation. This means allowing imagined memories to disrupt the settled meaning and the conclusive argument. This task finds expression in Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine (Cixous, Reference Cixous1976) and Kristeva’s articulation of love and abjection as the hauntings of otherness that fracture the cohesion of the symbolic subject (Kristeva, Reference Kristeva1982 and Reference Kristeva1987).
I plan to have an online conversation about the book towards the end of January. I’ll publish details in the next few days. In the meantime, I hope those of you with an interest in these issues will read the book online and let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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Link to video abstracts of Tina Beattie, “A Theology of Becoming: Body, Blood, Birth, and Sacrament”: Cambridge Elements: