06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

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SHADOW FEMINISM AS SALVATION: PERPETUA AND QUEER NEGATIVITY

By Julian Forth
August 19, 2015

In the year 203 CE, Viba Perpetua and her friends were put to death in Carthage for refusing to
renounce their Christian identity. While imprisoned awaiting her execution, she keeps a journal
detailing multiple visits from her father and appearances before state prosecutors. Distraught with RECENT POSTS
concern for his daughter, Perpetuas father pleads with her to deny being a Christian so that she
Wendell Berry is a Dandelion Man:
may live. She refuses. The state procurator, Hilarianus, demands Perpetua to do the same. Again,
A Review of Look and See
she refuses. Ultimately, Perpetuas resoluteness causes her to suffer: her infant son is confiscated,
Brett McCracken reviews Look and
her family ties are severed, she loses all hope in this world, and, ultimately, she loses her life in a
See,
Roman amphitheatre. Her journal is preserved in The Martyrdom (Passion) of Perpetua and
Felicity (The Martyrdom) along with contributions from an unnamed narrator. We Are Stardust: Toward an
Ecotheological Anthropology
Barbara Gold notes that by resisting her father and the state, Perpetua exhibits masculine features
An ecotheological anthropology,
throughout her account and a fluid gender identity according to the categories of antiquity.[1] She
according to Catherine
refuses not only apostasy, but resist familial, patriarchal powers, and the state. Her refusal,
therefore, is at once and inseparably religious and familial, political and gendered. Undoubtedly,
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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

this work of Christian hagiography, though minor within the Christian tradition, offers a profound Mountaintop Removal Mining
and complex account of a womans resistance to power. Jack (formerly Judith) Halberstams Wounds the Flesh of the World
recent book, The Queer Art of Failure, provides a lens through which we can reconsider Perpetuas Glen A. Mazis argues that the
account.
Songs of Lament and Hope

Provocative and daring, The Queer Art of Failure offers an alternative to dominant Western Natasha Duquette explores the

narratives that celebrate success in certain positivist terms such as wealth accumulation, themes of

reproduction, and social acceptability. Rather, the author invites us to consider failure as
possessing potential for modes of being and ways of life that break with the logic of successthat Syringa vulgaris Victor Lemoine

is, failure as queer negativity.[2] Halberstams exploration of such failure reaches a Poet Maryann Corbett reminds us

counterintuitive moment when he considers feminist queer negativityor shadow feminismas of

a response to oppressive, patriarchal power. Halberstam succinctly explains that this shadow
feminism speaks in the language of self-destruction, masochism, antisocial femininity, and a The Winters of Our Discontent

refusal of the essential bond of mother and daughter that ensures that the daughter inhabits the Paul Arnold proposes that the

legacy of the mother and in doing so reproduces her relationship to patriarchal forms of warmth

power,[3] here, we can see glimpses of Perpetua centuries prior. For Halberstam, shadow
feminism is resistance by failing to perform in ways that are self-affirming, socially acceptable, or The Unbearable Weight of Trash:

even gender conforming. This is counterintuitive because it considers the possibility of resistance From Lament to Life

to patriarchal power through forms that appear to offer no resistance at all and are, in fact, Ruthanne SooHee Crapo
radically passive. encourages those committed

Intentional Communities in Our

Halberstam finds shadow feminism represented in many works including Yoko Onos performance
Common Home: Building
art Cut Piece. In this performance, Ono sits on stage as members of the audience one-by-one cut
Interfaith Cultures of Encounter in
pieces of Onos clothes from her body until she is left almost nude, vulnerable, and passively
a New Appalachia
exposed. For Halberstam, Onos performance art points to a female selfhood that refuses
In Appalachias faith-based
wholeness, and instead uses her own body as a battleground to draw out the sadistic impulses
intentional communities, Michael
that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman.[4] Through masochism and
radical passivity, shadow feminism turns the violence of oppressive systems back upon Tracking: A Catechism of
themselves like a funhouse mirror.[5] Creatureliness
Dave Pritchett finds the earthy
practice
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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

To the degree that Halberstam attempts to find alternatives to hegemonic forms of power, he
Sacrificing the Sioux: Oil Pipelines,
engages questions of soteriology and offers a framework for looking anew at the life and death of
Girard, and the New Colonialism
Viba Perpetua. In The Queer Art of Failure, he attempts to articulate a salvation that escapes the
Mick Pope proposes that events
logic of success and patriarchal power and locates it in certain forms of failure and queer
at
negativity. Perpetua unmistakably performs such negativity in her unmoved defiance, her failure
to perform womanhood, and her voluntary suffering as forms of refusing the hegemonic logic of
her time. By providing a lens for rethinking Perpetuas story, Halberstam helps us to expand the
archive of queer negativity and offers a framework for locating its representatives within our ARCHIVE
religious traditions.

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Furthermore, if Halberstams text searches for alternatives that escape dominant Western
narratives of success, they no less escape dominant theological narratives of salvationas the two
are habitual bedfellows. In this sense, he no less challenges dominant soteriologies articulated in
positivist terms such as healing, participation, or moral perfection to be attentive to other TOJ BOOKS
expressions of salvation. The Queer Art of Failure opens an avenue for recognizing an alternative
soteriology in Perpetuas account as a refusal of dominant theological narratives that align too Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll
closely with Western ideas of success and power. $18.40
The Spirit of Food
However, Halberstams account of shadow feminism is not without its own difficulties, many of $24.00
which are part of the logic of the queer negativity itself. First of all, he neglects to explain fully how
God Is Dead and I Dont Feel So
modes of self-negation, masochism, and antisociality are forms of failure that offer more creative,
Good Myself
more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.[6] Particularly, he does not
$18.40
explain if and how shadow feminism can contribute to the themes of non-Oedipal, utopian
collectives explored in his earlier chapters. How does shadow feminism connect to collective Celebrity
projects of resistance? Does the antisociality and self-negation of shadow feminism preclude its $15.00
ability to contribute to collectivity and utopian aspirations? Jesus Girls
$20.80
Furthermore, the logic of shadow feminism risks leading to an extreme of self-negation in which
one no longer has any agency at all. For example, in her final hours, Perpetua finds that she is
Evil
unable to narrate her own death and must hand over her text to another when she writes, If
$15.00
anyone wants to write down the act of the games themselves, let him do so[7]. Her project of Prayer
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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

refusal culminates in her no longer being the narrative agent of her own self-negation. Perpetua, $15.00
being unable to write her death, must leave her text and her death open to the interpretation and
Remembering the Future
the manipulation of another, the unnamed narrator. Likewise, shadow feminisms refusal and
$18.40
self-negation chances being vulnerable to (mis)interpretation and manipulation, even fortifying
the dominant system one seeks to undermine. In short, shadow feminism risks failing at failing- Geography
as-resistance to domination by leading to a place where the differences between refusing and $13.60
being refused, self-destruction and being destroyed are hard to discern. How can we distinguish Trauma
between the self-negation of resistance and the violence of being negated? $14.40

These questions concerning collectivity and agency are not only practical, they are soteriological.
For Christian theology, soteriology affirms life in and with the community of all created beings
(although the nuances of such an affirmation vary broadly). Halberstams exploration of shadow
feminism undeniably challenges us to reconsider the ways patriarchy and narrow definitions of
selfhood persist, even in projects of resistance. He stares unflinchingly into self-negation as a
corrective to our allegiances with domination. However, unless shadow feminism affirms life and
our collective existence in some way, I struggle to understand what salvation it can ultimately offer
from patriarchal and oppressive power.

[1] Gold, Gender Fluidity and Closure in Perpetuas Prison Diary, EuGeStA 1 (2011): 24046
and 24748, accessed July 2014, http://eugesta.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/revue/pdf/2011/Gold.pdf
(accessed July 2014) 24.

[2] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2,
71.

[3] Ibid., 124

[4] Ibid., 137

[5] Ibid.
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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

[6] Ibid., 2-3, no. ,http://eugesta.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/revue/pdf/2011/Gold.pdf (accessed

July 2014), -2. Gold, Perpetuas Prison Diary, 247-8

[7] Perpetua, Martyrdom 10.15

About the Author

Julian Forth
Julian Forth is a tenant organizer and an activist in Washington, DC. He
currently serves on the Board of the Washington Peace Center and of the
Potter's House, and is an editor with The Public Sphere. He's a 2009 graduate
of Duke Divinity School.

Perspective

Feminism negativity Perpetua queer salvation self-negation

22: MARXISM 18: CELEBRITY

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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

BURNING PEAK OIL REVIVING THE STAIRWAY

TO HEAVEN: A REVIEW OF
CALVINS LADDER
Paul Jaussen
April 15, 2013 / Perspective Matt Jenson
February 14, 2011 / Perspective
Reflections on why we ride.
There are plenty of reasons why its a
bad idea to write a book about
ascending spiritual heights. The first is
because that book has been writtenby
Plato (Symposium), Plotinus
(Enneads), Pseudo-Dionysius
(Mystical Theology), Dante (Divine
Comedy), Bonaventure (The Minds
Journey into God), Thomas Aquinas
(Summa Theologiae). There are many
more, and they are weirder.

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06/09/2017 Shadow Feminism as Salvation: Perpetua and Queer Negativity - The Other Journal

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