Cristina L. H. Traina

Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals

In this ambitious and broadly interdisciplinary work, Cristina Traina begins from an experience that evades contemporary discussion: maternal sensual pleasure in the care of infants and young children. As Traina notes, this experience puts two contemporary dogmas on a “collision course”: the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure is intrinsically good and the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure between unequals is intrinsically exploitative. As with other feminist turns toward neglected experience, this one calls for a recalibration of ethical models—in this case, a more complex and nuanced sexual ethic. Traina challenges readers to broaden notions of sexuality beyond androcentric models focused primarily on particular acts and on genital release. Such models are deeply graven in the Christian tradition and reinforced through reductive cultural appropriations of Freudian thought. But all human relations are embodied and involve desire, argues Traina, and are thus in some sense erotic, though most do not involve genital sexuality. Likewise, her readers are challenged to recognize the pervasiveness of relations of inequality in human life, when most Christian sexual ethics limit themselves to relations between equals, or at least understand a sexual ethic to aim at equality and mutuality. The book engages psychological resources demonstrating the human need for appropriate touch as well as the profound damage done by abusive touch. The need is so universal and foundational that Traina casts it as a human right; yet offering such touch appropriately is a subtle and challenging moral task beset with danger and the potential for self-deception. Traina diagnoses the sexual abuser as a fragmented self, one unable to perceive the concrete reality, needs, and experiences of her victim and bent on the doomed project of creating a whole self by appropriating and objectifying the other. Thus, at the heart of her ethic of sensuality between unequals is the notion of “attunement.” The attuned caregiver can acknowledge and fully experience inclinations, joys, and pains with a contemplative and compassionate awareness that allows considered and appropriate responses. The attuned caregiver lives with “unending, acknowledged desire” (177), a desire that glories in the goodness of the child in her care and, in so doing, creatively elicits subjectivity from her rather than manipulating her to meet the needs of the caregiver.

Ovarian Tissue Cryopreservation and Bioethical Discourse

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, like other nascent medical technologies ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) raises no earth-shatteringly new moral questions. Rather, it poses old moral questions in new ways, thus shedding light not only on our old answers but also on our old methods of reaching them. My task here is to point out the ways in which OTC forces us to embrace important changes of emphasis in bioethics discourse around reproduction, changes that were already burgeoning and are now being reinforced by the unequivocal demands of this particular technology. All but the last of these is specifically tied to discussions that have preoccupied philosophical and religious feminism; the last, as a logical consequence of the first four, connects indirectly.

More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church. Volume 1: Voices of Our Times

Voices of Our Times is the first of two volumes that blend the content of four recent conferences featuring Catholic moral reflection on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) life and relationships with new writings. In Volume II — Inquiry, Thought, and Expression —Catholic moral theologians break newmethodological ground on questions of sexual orientation. Volume I prepares the space for Volume II by self-consciously moving lived experience to the center of moral reflection. Its sixteen experiential essays gather the kinds of thoughtful reflections on personal experience that typically appear as featured columns or publishers’ blog posts. These are sandwiched between two robust methodological essays that set the experiences in the context of Catholic Christian traditions of moral reflection: the introduction (by moral theologian Christine Firer Hinze and medievalist J. Patrick Hornbeck II) and the afterword (by practical theologian Tom Beaudoin and ecclesiologist Bradford Hinze). Readers who have not before encountered writing by LGBT persons of faith are in many ways the targets of this book. They will encounter a collection of clear, thoughtful essays by both LGBTand heterosexual persons about LGBT folks’ challenges in living their sexuality faithfully and about the pain of living their faith from within a non-heterosexual experience. Themes that recur (as Bradford Hinze notes, 180–182) are the feeling of condemnation that many LGBT Catholics feel from the church’s statements and from their treatment by families, employers, friends, and representatives of the church; their resultant anger and pain, often to the point of leaving the community; for those who stay, frustration at the wider church’s refusal to recognize the gifts their sexuality brings to their lives, faith, and ministries; and finally, a sense of hope that things may one day be otherwise. For readers familiar with personal reflections on the experiences of LGBT Christianity, the content of the excellent personal, reflective essays that fill the center of the book may not feel so new. Even they are encouraged not to skip Eve Tushnet’s reflection on the underappreciated benefits of queer celibacy, an essay that any person discerning between celibacy and other forms of life should read. Reflections by transgender Christians are rare in comparison with material by gay and lesbian authors; thus Catholic convert Hilary Howes’s poignant account of the importance of her own and her wife’s faith to her transition frommale to female is especially valuable (the book contains no essays by self-identified bisexuals). Readers who already have Bryan Massingale, Thomas Gumbleton, Donald Cozzens, Jamie Manson, or Mark Jordan in their reading baskets will appreciate their more experiential essays here. Among the most important messages for both groups of readers is the profound generational divide in “liberal” American Catholicism that these essays exhibit. The ageing generation whose memories include Vatican Council II, or at least a culture of discussing and aspiring to the expansive elements of Council’s vision, inherited a sense that the Church’s true direction was inclusive and future-looking. Many Catholic LGBT persons and their allies from this generation live out of an eschatological hope in a different future. However, these essays reveal that some of the earlier generation as well as most people too young to remember the heady days of post-Vatican II Catholicism have no expectation of the Church’s inevitable evolution toward love, mercy, and openness. Instead, they have experienced the “backlash” that began in the 1980s and generated piles of authoritative documents in moral theology. Jeanine Viau’s reports on interviews with LGBT young adults are particularly revealing. For them, the Church is primarily legislator, not agent of love and mercy. Many see no reason to remain within it. As M. Sheila Nelson points out, as these LGBT folk and their allies depart, “a significant source of the life of the church, its energy, the sap that enables growth and fruitfulness, is being drained away” (80). The implicit message is

Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality. By Mark D. Jordan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. xx + 273 pp.

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