Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: From “Disability” to a Theology of Social Flesh in a World of Becoming
Rev. Dr. Sharon Betcher, Professor of Theology, Affiliate, Fellow in Teaching and Research, Vancouver School of Theology
Date: Thursday, February 28, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Seminary Hall, Craig Chapel
Despite difference being everywhere in a postmodern world, “disability” remains like a mote caught in the eye. While civil rights movements insisted that woman was not “deformed” man and blacks were not “degenerate” whites so as to claim registry within modern humanism, disability, which signified the underlying difference of such humanist categories, has remained in/valid, the undigestable sediment of modernism. This remains equally true in feminist philosophy and theology where aspirations to “body theology” can yield to the goodness of the discarnate poser, to the cycles of capitalist commodification and/or “cruel optimism” (Berlant). Yet in a world of becoming, of “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful” (Darwin), wherein “disability” would be but variation, why would we continue to hold this view? At what cost? What does this apparent psychological refusal prevent us from seeing in terms of metaphysics, ethics, theology and spirituality? Disability, this lecture asserts, names the location of existential ressentiment that has been rather consistently theologized. Disability” names a judgment against life that must be resolved if we are today—when even waking anxiety begins to assess “the inheritance of loss” (Desai)–to “believe in the world” (Deleuze). Recognizing that we cannot be, none of us can be, that “im/possible naturalization” which has informed humanist notions of ability and body, that place-time when disability resolves into “flesh of my flesh” might be, even amidst so many post-apocalyptic scenarios, an enviable location.
Biography:
Rev. Dr. Sharon V. Betcher is a free lance academic, living on Whidbey Island, Washington, and Affiliate Professor of Theology, Research and Teaching Fellow, at Vancouver School of Theology. A constructive theologian working with pneumatological dimensions, she has authored Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Fortress, 2007) and Spirit and Cosmopolis: Theology for Seculars (Fordham, forthcoming) as well as essays on ecological, postcolonial and disabilities theologies within multiple anthologies, including Polydoxy, Planetary Loves, Eco-Spirit, and Postcolonial Theologies. Her current manuscript project, i.e., Spirit and Cosmopolis, considers theological responses—worked through the lenses of disabilities studies—to the planetary emergence of global cities.