The Goddex

Below is one of my best attempts to describe the concept of a Queer Divine archetype, and more generally an allusion to how I understand both deities and gnosis as developing. This was written for a syncroblog at Queer Theology.com It does not necessarily represent an endorsement of said website.

Once there were things.

Before these things existed there was nothing, but because they existed this was no longer true.

These things did not have names, because there existed no things to name them. They did not exist from one time to another time because there was nothing which marked that one time was different from another, and so there was no time.

In some ways they were not even things. What could a thing be without something to label it a thing?

Italo Calvino gave this more thought than I will here.

Things changed.

Soon there were things that had ideas. They weren't necessarily significant ideas but they existed. Something communicated an idea about something to another thing.

This was discourse.

Eventually there was time, and from that point on discourse existed throughout time.

Discourse changed things.

Discourse exists in a state of interaction with all other discourse.

Different ideas exist in discourse, and through discourse ideas about things are codified. Ideas become rigid, turn into tools, creations, patterns, behaviors, systems, groupings, associations, and especially concepts.

There were also numerous things which were then not just themselves but also associated with other things. There were signifier and signified, the subject and the object, meanings, connections, all fueling discourse.

Soon there was a concept of us. We existed. There was a we. We were a thing, which was also a set of things, which was also a codified set of ideas held in unison amongst the collective we. We were a position, a principal, a discourse, a group, a people, a path, a belief, a faith.

Our Gods spanned the heavens and the Earth. They roamed across plains, over hills, through sees and skies.

When we created the concept of a deity, they were there as though they had been already. We looked to the path, and saw them step from the trees, and from the moment we saw them we knew them. When we knew them, it was as if we had always known them. As if they had begun to exist and thrown their existence backwards into the very beginning, so that they had always been there. They were concepts that we knew. They were all of the ideas and associations we had ever expected them to be once we knew that they could be at all. They were a discourse onto themselves.

Soon there was a concept of not us. Those who were not us were a not-thing, in that we are a thing which they were not. This was, oddly enough, also a set of things, usually much less pleasant. They were not us, and if that was an acceptable thing to be that is what we would be.

The discourse of the other.

It's not really about if they had other Gods. It's not even about whether anyone actually deviated, or whether there really is deviation, or whether something existed from which to deviate. They were just not the group that decided whose group they belonged to.

We exist in this group. You and I. It's why we're here, writing/reading this.

The laws were codified, the associations were codified, the rules were spoken and unspoken from birth in every interaction. This too was discourse. It was a discourse that we failed to maintain, that we subverted, that we disregarded. We were the first Emperor of Rome to know she was a woman. We were an unhearable echo before, and from the moment that we, you and I now, knew that we existed we began to always exist. We did not hear the discourse of what had always been right and true. We did not hear there was no other way, what was proper, what was expected. We heard war, but we did not hear what was heard so clearly by those who warred upon us.

Instead we heard the Goddex.

Then there was Hir.

Ze existed from the moment that we realized that Ze existed, and began to exist infinitely before at the same time. Ze was and is a concept embodied. A discourse shaped into a body which was then entirely its own to shape other discourse. The discourse of the discontent. The discourse of the abused, of the cage rattler, of the dissatisfied, of the denied. The discourse of change and subversion and recreation, deconstruction.

When we create a Queer concept, we hold Hir in our minds. Ze is everything that we see, no matter what we see, because Ze is in all Queer things.

All works of gender bending

Each act of tranarchy

Every moment of self care

These are Hir works.

There is no one pronoun that captures Them. Per is every race, every color, all genders. He cannot be encapsulated in a single shape. She cannot be from a single backgrounds. E is not even a single deity, but an archetype that umbrellas several and is not fully any of them, but Eir own being. It is each and every marginalized, denied, and deprived voice, hand, face. Ze is every act we take in which we continue to deny those that wish we did not exist the satisfaction.

Ze is The Outcast.

The Explorer.

The Great Revealer.

Ze is everything that we can accomplish together, everything held by us alone, but us collectively, by us every moment in which we are ourselves.

Once Ze came to exist, Ze had always existed. We had never for a moment been without Hir and everything Ze signifies.

Once Ze came to exist, Ze created us.