childrens clothing and the redeemed body

Yesterday we went to Pass it On, a children’s consignment sale that happens twice a year in Oregon. It’s a brilliant idea. Families can resell baby clothes (usually worn for a millisecond) and get back part of the profit. For us this is better than fair trade, better than organic. There’s nothing quite like reused and recycled.

The clothes were divided by sex. Since we’ve been waiting for this sale this is the first time I’ve really been able to encounter the deep gendering of clothes on the rack. There were some newborn “unisex” in the green and yellow shades but after that we faced two rows of basically blue and pink.

The boys section had mini Lakers track suits, fire engines, puppy dogs, lions, bears, button up shirts and every shade of blue imagineable.

The girls section was butterflies, bunnies, muted tones, ruffles on everything and rhinestones. I’m thinking, “I would never in a million years where this stuff! That would be humiliating!”

There was no mistaking when an item belonged to a girl. Even overalls had ruffles on the cuffs and there was a preponderance of pictures on the butts of these jeans. Some of the boys stuff could go either way.

I’m particularly aware of these sorts of dichotomies and feeling the need to assign them meaning as we prepare to welcome a child in the summer. I’m also reading quite a bit of feminist Christology in school. One of my supplemental readings this week is Beth Fekler Jones’ Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Ressurrection. Beth (fellow Dukie; this is her dissertation) argues that the feminist politics which seek to deconstruct gendered bodies is inconsistent with a doctrine of the resurrection. Instead of seeing absolute power at work in gendering or none at all, as the church we understand gender difference to itself be redeemed from the power structures of sin (misogyny) and its consequences (anorexia, genital cutting, slef mutilation, suicide) through the resurrected Christ.

I agree with Jones’ that in the church is one locus for the transformation of gender politics through our particular acts as a church. I appreciate Jones’ attempt to retain embodiment but also don’t want to be too cheery about the way sin works on the particularities of both the masculine and the feminine in our fallen world and our faith communities. In one sense, the gendering of our child to one extreme is present even in the clothing choices presented to her. These attempts at normalization are stiffling.

I also continue to be deeply troubled by the church’s failure to gender by allowing power-shaped identity to creep past the doctrine of the resurrection. The Wild at Heart movement, with its lonely warrior rescuing the maiden and preparing for adventure is the most insidious simply because it it is so wide-spread. But many others have also used the story of our faith to reify fallen gender identity. I could write a book with my thoughts about Eldredge. Suffices say that my thesis of discontent is located in the taking at face value disordered gendering as normative and then attempting to overcome masculine and feminine articulations of this culturally induced panic attack without ever parsing out what’s really going on here. Exurbanization, displacement from the private sphere, dislocation from food sources and production, culturally reinforced stoicism and removal from child-rearing are much more important to scour than to simple say “this is what is in every man’s heart.” Bullocks.

So, Babe Flo-Bix, we hope we can find for you a little space where your gendering will be dictated by love rightly ordered in a community of those who seek to call forth your redeemed self while recognizing that already sin is at work on your body. I pray we can help you see how Christ has made all things new and that the potential for this newness, while incomplete, can be practiced daily in our life as the church. I hope I can be sensitive to the ways the world tries to disembody you, declare your body evil and deconstruct your enfleshed self. I pray my response will be to guide you ever so gently towards the One who called you into being.

God help us.