Скачать или смотреть The Gowland Public Lecture: Transformative Creatures: Theology, Gender Diversity and Human Identity

Given by Professor Susannah Cornwall

Some of those theologians suspicious of the phenomenon of gender transition suggest that it represents a rebellious rejection of a divine plan for human lives. They invoke terms such as “blueprint” to hold that only gender identities which supervene in typical ways on sexed bodies may be understood as licit. In this lecture I would like to suggest that positions like these take too little account of all the ways in which we ourselves as creatures are transformative. I will show that Christians can be understood as curators, not just receivers, of our own lives and traditions. Being creaturely is profoundly formative of being human, yet we are also partners in our own becoming. What has formed and continues to form us as creatures is itself multiple, mixed, and boundary-crossing. As formative creatures, humans have peculiar power to set agendas for non-human creatures and, concomitantly, a peculiar responsibility to exercise this power responsibly. In order to be truly formative of humans, including trans and gender-variant people (who are no more than anyone else empty vessels just waiting to be filled), Christian constructive theology must take into account multiplicities of human embodied experience. I will discuss some work on the correlations between trans identity and neurodiversity, and will suggest that this connection is a salient reminder that received wisdom is not always incontrovertible and that minority reports can help attune us to things we are so used to seeing and accepting that it no longer occurs to us to notice or interrogate them.

Susannah Cornwall is Associate Professor in Constructive Theologies at the University of Exeter, and Director of EXCEPT (Exeter Centre for Ethics and Practical Theology). Her recent research has focused on theology, sexuality and gender diversity. Her books in this area include Un/familiar Theology: Reconceiving Sex, Reproduction and Generativity (Bloomsbury, 2017), Controversies in Queer Theology (SCM, 2011) and Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology (Routledge, 2010). In 2017-19 she led the Modelling Transgender Spiritual Care project in partnership with the West of England NHS Specialist Gender Identity Clinic. Her new book on constructive theology and gender variance will be published by Cambridge University Press.


With Rachal Mann responding

Canon Rachel Mann is a priest, poet and writer. Her memoir of growing up trans, ‘Dazzling Darkness’ recently received a second, revised edition. Author of eleven books, her theological writing has been shortlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize and her poetry highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She is a member of the Church of England’s theological advisory board, the Faith and Order Commission