Indecent Conocimientos: A Queer of Color Peregrinaje

This essay addresses contributions to Latina, black feminist and mujerista theologies and spiritologies in the quest to fashion a distinctively queer of color and non-denominational approach to spirit and the sacred. This... [ view full abstract ]

This essay addresses contributions to Latina, black feminist and mujerista theologies and spiritologies in the quest to fashion a distinctively queer of color and non-denominational approach to spirit and the sacred. This initial part of the journey moves through the dyad of (des)conocimiento in some key late essays by Gloria Anzaldúa. By mobilizing the various meanings of conocimiento/desconocimiento in Anzaldúa, the essay puts forward a notion of conocer as decolonial knowing conditioned by its shadow-beast or misstep, which is desconocimiento. Conocimiento, following the late radical Chicana theorist, breaks through the tyranny of reason and opens the path to intuition, to the work of spirit and the ancestors in our lives, and to what Anzaldúa in other moments in her work has famously called “la facultad.” Conocimiento, in this sense, collaborates most in this initial elaboration of queer of color spiritologies through its conjunction with the “indecent” as formulated by the late Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid. Attending to Althaus-Reid’s critique of both liberation and feminist theology when it comes to sexuality, the presentation zooms in on the class dimension of her “indecent theology” to attend to disreputable sexualities and practices as the necessary foundation for notion of the sacred that is queer-affirmative and open to dissent from race, class, gender and racial normativities.