Panel: BEYOND INNOCENCE: THEOLOGY, VULNERANCE, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY



35.2 - QUEER TABLES

AUTHORS:
Méndez-Montoya Á. (Universidad Iberoamericana ~ Mexico City ~ Mexico)
Text:
In 2024, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, France, there was a performance of a tableau representing the "Feast of the Gods," inspired by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Jan Harmensz van Bijlert. Thomas Jolly, the ceremony's artistic director, explained that his intention was to portray a pagan feast of the Greek gods. Because of its close resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, many people, mainly Christians and Catholics, were scandalized by what they considered an offensive and blasphemous mockery of the celebration of the Last Supper. In this presentation, I argue that rather than taking offense at what could appear as a cultural and symbolic attack against a Christian sacred image, what most conservative reactions reflected was hatred towards a depiction of a "queer gathering around a table," celebrating and welcoming non-heteronormative disruptive bodies pertaining to gender and sexually diverse persons. I propose that Jesus' table is a queer table that opens a space in which to perform a politics of the common, el común, as envisioned by the Zapatista movement. A queer table is a space for collective ethics, for resistance and celebration of a communal performance of vivir sabroso, living delightfully, sharing the common good, particularly among abject bodies. Among the wretched and despised bodies God becomes queer as creation becomes divine.