Constructive Theology and Gender Variance: Transformative Creatures

Description

Some Christians are anxious and uncomfortable about gender diversity and transition. Sometimes, they understand these issues as a rejection of God's intention for creation. Gender diversity has also been assumed to entail self-deception, mental ill-health, and dysphoria. Yet, humans are inherently transformative creatures with a vocation to shape their own worlds and traditions. Transformative creaturely theology recognizes the capacity of gender to shape humans even as we also question it. In this book, Susannah Cornwall reframes the issues of gender diversity and transition in constructive Christian theological terms. Resisting deficit-based discourses, she presents gender diversity in a way that is positive and non-oppositional. Her volume explores questions of the licit limits of technological interventions for human bodies, how gender diversity maps onto understandings of health, and the ethics of disclosure of gender diversity. It also brings these topics into critical conversation with constructive Christian theologies of creation, theological anthropology, Christology, and eschatology.

Susannah Cornwall is Professor of Constructive Theologies in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter and Director of the Exeter Centre for Ethics and Practical Theology (EXCEPT). She is the author of Un/familiar Theology: Reconceiving Sex, Reproduction and Generativity (2017); Theology and Sexuality (2013); Controversies in Queer Theology (2011); and Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology (2010).