Experiencing an Activist-in-Residence

For all three years I’ve been here, Susquehanna University’s Center for Diversity and Social Justice has brought an Activist in Residence to campus. The Activist in Residence visits Susquehanna for a period of a few days and gives talks or presentations on issues relating to social justice. In the past, I haven’t taken advantage of these opportunities, but this year I was able to attend two of the Activist in Residence’s events.

The activist was Reverend Irene Monroe, who is a prominent  queer religion columnist and has previously served as pastor. An African-American lesbian theologian, she regularly writes and speaks on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion, particularly the way religion is used in discrimination against LGBTQ people.

I was very excited to hear her speak. I heard about her visit a few weeks beforehand from my friend who is a student deacon. As a religious life leader on campus who has recently also become a member of Susquehanna’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, Irene Monroe’s first presentation, “The Role of Religion in Discrimination,” was really right up my alley.

While the students attending ate the free lunch the school provided, Reverend Monroe engaged us on issues of the Bible and how it’s been interpreted in regards to LGBTQ issues. She pointed out that the dominant religious thinking is that the Bible clearly condemns same-sex relationships and that even people who have never picked up a Bible in their lives proclaim that confidently. Instead of accepting this at face value, she encouraged us to give the Bible a closer look.

She talked a lot about how we interpret the Bible. Much of the time people feel like they’re not allowed to look at these texts with a critical eye—they become untouchable—but Monroe brought up a different way of approaching texts: a hermeneutic of suspicion. This approach requires an examining of questions like:  What interpretation do I want as a reader? Who is normalizing a certain reading of this text? Who is in power? What is the intent behind putting forward a certain interpretation?  There were various examples that Monroe used. In popular discourse, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is associated with homosexuality, though the text is more about violence and inhospitality than sex. The real victims in that text, Monroe pointed out, are women, since Lot offers his daughters to the violent gang rather than the angels. Something else she discussed briefly was translation. The word “homosexuality” wasn’t in the lexicon until 1895, and because sexual orientation wasn’t understood in the same way in Biblical culture, there’s reason to look critically anytime the word “homosexual” appears up in a Biblical translation.  She encouraged students, no matter their faith, to explore these “texts of terror” and said that not knowing what these stories really say is a way of participating in your own oppression.

It was really great to hear from Monroe about these issues, particularly of Biblical interpretation, which I’ve been contemplating and discussing with friends recently. After the lunch, two friends and I were able to talk to her briefly about the talk, which I really enjoyed. It made me look forward to attending another event even more.

Yesterday, I attended her talk “Justice Begins in the Bedroom.” Reverend Monroe talked about how she knows many people who are able to speak eloquently about social justice issues, though it doesn’t translate into their personal lives or sex lives. The focus was mainly on sexual violence and the culture that supports it. I had heard statistics before, but it’s still distressing to hear that about 1 in 4 college women are victims of rape. Typically, women aren’t encouraged to speak up about sexual violence. Instead, they may be blamed by some for the violence inflicted on them because they were drinking, wearing a certain outfit, etc. Many people will actually look to protect, or side with, the perpetrators of sexual violence. She brought up how this often happens on college campuses, where faculty and administration might side with, or be lenient towards, a star athlete or a male student from an esteemed family.  CNN coverage of the sentencing in a Steubenville, Ohio rape case emphasized the emotional duress of the teenage rapists and talked about how they’d now be labeled sex offenders for the rest of their lives; that incident powerfully attests to the concept of “rape culture.”

Reverend Monroe also brought up that a lot of times women don’t even know how to process a violation of their bodies. She shared the story of a young woman who was gang-raped by guys she had been friends with in college. She didn’t label it with the word “rape” or think about herself as gang-raped until she received more education from a woman’s center. She suggested that women are not told what is considered a violation of our bodies. The message women aren’t getting, according to Monroe, is that you have a right to possess your own body.

Like she did in her other talk I attended, Reverend Monroe heavily engaged her audience. During both events, she encouraged students to think about ways to change that culture, particularly on our own campuses.  It is, after all, our college. We pay to go here, and it is up to us to help shape it. I definitely hope that I don’t let these talks slip easily from my mind and that I become more involved in activism on campus.