Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng
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of color experience. These books include anthologies on the queer Asian American experience such as Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998);9 the queer Black experience such as The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (2000);10 the queer Latina/o experience such as Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (2011);11 and the Two-Spirit Indigenous experience such as Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011).12
In addition to the above anthologies, there have also been works written by key queer of color theorists such as Audre Lorde13 and Gloria Anzaldúa.14 In fact, writings about the LGBTIQ of color experience—including spiritual experiences—can be traced back at least a half-century, with the publication of Another Country by the gay Black writer James Baldwin in 1962. The gay Latino scholar Michael Hames-García has assembled a remarkable timeline of key works by queer writers of color from the 1960s through the 1980s, including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Cherríe Moraga, and Glora Anzaldúa, that predate the appearance of canonical queer theory in the early 1990s by several decades.15
As noted above, there is now an entire movement within academic queer studies—“queer of color critique”—that is dedicated to the work of LGBTIQ scholars of color on the intersections between race and queer theory. In a special 2005 issue of the journal Social Text entitled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” the editors noted that queer studies have moved beyond issues of sexuality and now cover issues “on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics.”16 In sum, LGBTIQ people of color share a common scholarly heritage, and it is important to recognize and honor this history in constructing a queer of color theology.
3. Some Definitions
Concepts relating to race, sexuality, and spirituality are often more complicated than they initially seem. As such, it may be helpful to set out a few definitions of key terms that are used in this book.
First, the term “race” as used in this book is taken from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal text, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. In that text, Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” Although this definition refers to “biologically based human characteristics” or “phenotypes,” Omni and Winant remind us that the “selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.”17
Indeed, contemporary racial categories have their roots in the colonial expansion of western Europe starting in the fifteenth century. As Roger Sanjek has argued, race is a socially-constructed “framework of ranked categories segmenting the human population” that was developed during the 1400s and that “imputed racial quanta of intelligence, attractiveness, cultural potential, and worth.”18 Although none of this scaling is “real” from an anthropological perspective, Sanjek notes that race has “become all too real in its social ordering of perceptions and policies” and in the “pervasive racism that has plagued the globe.”19
Thus, it is fair to understand the term “race” as referring to categories (for example, “Asian American”) that are based upon “physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type” as well as the “generalizations and stereotypes” that arise out of such racial categories. By contrast, the term “ethnicity” (for example, “Chinese American”) refers to a group that shares “common experiences” such as language, culture, national origin, religious affiliation, or other factors that over time comes to “distinguish one group from another.”20 The term “people of color” refers collectively to those persons—including, but not limited to, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Indigenous people—who belong to racial and ethnic groups that have been historically marginalized within the United States and/or colonized by European and North American powers around the world.21
Second, the term “sexuality” as used in this book is very broad and refers to, on a societal level, “the bundle of social phenomena that shape erotic life: laws, religion, norms and values, beliefs and ideologies, the social organization of reproduction, family life, identities, domestic arrangements, diseases, violence and love” as well as to, on an individual level, the related “pleasures and pains that can shape our lives for good or ill.”22 As with race, sexuality is very much a social construct that changes with place and time.
As noted above, the term “LGBTIQ” is used in this book as a collective term to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer persons. This book also uses “queer” interchangeably with “LGBTIQ.” (“Queer” is also a catch-all term that includes those individuals who identify themselves as pansexual, asexual, questioning, allied, and Two-Spirit.)23 And, as I have discussed elsewhere, the term “queer” also has other more specialized meanings within the realm of queer theology, including transgression as well as the dissolution of binaries with respect to sexuality and gender.24
As it may be fairly obvious by now, the subcategories that make up the terms “LGBTIQ” or “queer” are actually quite different from one another. That is, the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” and “bisexual” refer to sexual orientation (that is, the object of one’s attraction on a physical and emotional level). By contrast, “transgender” refers to gender identity and expression (that is, the gender(s) with which one identifies and/or expresses to the world). “Intersex” refers to biological sex (that is, one’s sexual organs, hormones, and chromosomes). What binds these various terms together, ultimately, is a sense of marginalization with respect to dominant societal norms with respect to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and/or biological sex.25
Third, the term “spirituality” is used broadly in this book to describe “those attitudes, beliefs and practices which animate people’s lives and help them to reach out toward super-sensible realities.”26 That is, spirituality refers to one’s engagement with an ultimate reality that is beyond the realm of senses. This can include organized religions—whether the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism—or it can involve more personal or individual spiritual practices.
It should be noted that these definitions are not intended to reinforce essentialist thinking about racial, sexual, and spiritual categories. That is, rather than pointing to something “essentialist” about a person (for example, a person’s inherent “Asianness” or “queerness”), the categories of race, sexuality, and spirituality are actually fluid and highly dependent upon social context such as “time, place, and situation.”27 Although racial, sexual, and spiritual traits may be grounded in physical characteristics or experiences, the significance of such characteristics is socially constructed and changes over time.28
4. Scope and Limitations
Having discussed definitional issues, I believe that it is also important to describe the scope and limitations of this book. First and foremost, although this book does cover a number of very broad issues such as race, sexuality, and spirituality, it is ultimately a work of Christian theology. That is, this book is ultimately grounded in my own identity as a follower of Jesus Christ, which has shaped my vocation as a systematic theologian, a seminary professor, and an ordained minister.
That being said, I am deeply committed to bringing interfaith perspectives and sources into my work. Although I cannot speak on behalf of persons from non-Christian faith communities, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with my maternal grandparents who had spent much of their adult lives in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They never converted to Christianity and maintained a hybridized view of religion as a blend of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. My brother, as I have