By Tan Yan Rong

Abstract

Why do we believe that a God we neither see nor hear speaks the truth in saying He is God, that a Jesus we have never met has authority to identity himself as the son of God, but not that a flesh-and-blood human might answer to a higher reality beyond the body in asserting their pronouns to be they/them? With the rejection of queerness often being grounded in disbelief, this essay describes how religious and gender ideology win our belief, to consider how we might come to believe in the queer individual as the sole authority on the truth of their identity. Examining how gender and religion, truth and belief intersect in Neon Yang’s Genesis of Misery and A Stick of Clay, this essay argues that the assertion of queer identity makes the messianic claim to exclusive truth through its exclusion from shared reality. Although an individual cannot share with others the feelings of truth behind their claims to queer and messianic identity, this unshareability is hardly the grounds for disbelief, for it is precisely this exclusion from shared reality that gives their claims the exclusive authority of a higher truth, and so compelling our belief for that very reason.

Jeanne d’Arc burned for her persecutors’ refusal to believe that a divine voice they could not hear authorised her to claim the identity of God’s chosen. Today we send many more to the same pyre for daring to claim an identity far more modest than that of messiah. There they burn for our disbelief that some interior sense authorised their claim to a particular label, pronoun, way of dress. There they meet discriminatory attacks fuelled by the outraged disbelief that there could be any “experiential reality” behind the claims to non-binary and/or genderqueer (NBGQ) identity (Arijs et al. 1). For the messiah then and for the queer now, undeniably real lives are at stake in the question of reality and belief. Which begs urgently of us the question of how we might believe where we once disbelieved, that Jean/ne/x might this time live.

This essay asks how the historical shift from disbelief in messianic identity might map out a future wherein queer individuals are believed in as the rightful and exclusive authorities on the truth of their interior experiences with gender. To this end, it examines the intersections of gender and religion, truth and belief, shareability and ineffability in two of Neon Yang’s science-fiction works. A retelling of Jeanne d’Arc, The Genesis of Misery follows Misery as she variously inspires or challenges others’ belief in her claims of messianic and queer identity. Meanwhile, in A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential, the protagonist Stick’s doubts as to its role in a holy war bleed into its doubts as to its divinely-assigned gender role. The two will be read alongside Elaine Scarry’s analysis of how belief becomes reality in Biblical history, and Judith Butler’s account of the strategies by which the gender binary claims our belief.

The first section begins by examining how we more easily believe in that which is “shareable”[1], in that which proves itself not a delusion unshareably confined to a single mind, but capable of existing in the exterior world whose reality is shared by all the human bodies inhabiting it. With this habitual association between the shareable and the real, assertions of messianic and queer identity provoke disbelief for how they locate their truth in an individual interior sensible only to the individual. Yet, this unshareability of queerness and messianism are also the very grounds on which truth claims its absolute and singular authority as truth. As will be discussed in the second section, truths regarded as divine or essential have such exclusive authority over humans because none of that truth is ever made shareable with humans, just as the messiah and the queer would claim all the authority of truth over themselves because nothing of themselves is made shareable to others beyond themselves. At the same time, it is this exclusion from truth that is also the very place from which belief begins, as will be discussed in the final section. Ultimately, this essay argues that the individual assertion of queer identity makes the messianic claim to exclusive truth through — rather than in spite of — its exclusion from shared reality. Though queer and messianic assertions of identity are so distinctive in their refusal to enter the shared reality of the body, their unshareability is hardly the grounds for disbelief, for it is precisely this exclusion from shared reality that gives them the singularly exclusive authority of a higher truth transcending the shareable, and so compelling our belief for that very reason.

1. Between Belief in the Shareable and Disbelief of the Unshareable

“I promise all of you, it’s not just all in my head.” This is the condition upon which systems of belief make their claim to the authority of truth: that they are true not only for one but for everyone, that they are not the immaterial delusions of a single person, but have material, physical reality which everyone can actually share in through their bodily senses. The fact that externality, communicability, shareability tend to cluster around the sense of realness is familiar knowledge: a priest might commission a sculpture of Jesus to make his idea of Jesus “visible to those outside . . . [the] wholly private and invisible content of [his] mind,” such that another, sharing in the priest’s sight of Jesus, validates Jesus as having a sensible reality beyond the psychological interior of that lone priest (Scarry 171, 372). Otherwise, belief, involving immaterial Gods or invisible authorities, would be nothing but imaginative processes confined within the psychological interior, processes which in themselves have no authority of truth for others precisely because their products have their existence, influence, and authority confined to a single human mind. For belief to make the claim to the authority of truth, it must somehow make the impossible movement out from the unshareable interior of the imagination into the exterior world whose material reality is shared by all bodies.

This, at least, is how in Genesis of Misery, Misery’s tentacular massacre of her audience at the Grand Amphitheatre actually ends in many citizens believing in her claims of being the “Black Hole Messiah . . . sent by [their God] the Larex Forge.” Despite her family history of delusional disorders, she sways them into believing it is not just all in her own head, because the deep interior behind her belief has actually been taken out of her head and distributed across all their bodies. There is nothing to disbelieve about the visceral reality of Misery’s tentacles, about how they “lash out” against the “soft oily masses” of other bodies to undo the very “molecular bonds” within them, about how they physically move from the interior of Misery’s body to her exterior. Nor is there anything to disbelieve in how said tentacles are the physically real extension of the “bones in her fingers” coming out of her “[broken] open” body (102-103). This crossing of the unshareable interior into the shareable exterior resembles in process and effect the Biblical thunders and plagues that make the material crossing from invisible belief to visible reality. In Scarry’s account, the path traversed from the invisible causes of plague to the visible effects they materialise upon the body sets a precedent for believing that an invisible, immaterial, unearthly God might through the same path exert materially real influence and authority over earthly human life (Scarry 204). Similarly, as Misery’s tentacles actually share what was once sensibly real for only one person (the existence of interior bones sensed only by their owner), such that it becomes what is real for many other persons (bones sensed by others to exist in shared exterior reality), they set the precedent for believing that what once had experiential or psychological reality for only one person (the identity of messiah) can really explode out of that one person’s head to distribute its realness across the bodily exterior and then mental interior of many other people — that was what once the singular delusion of an individual can become the shared reality of many.

This is the same crossing traversed by the gender binary, when it makes the claim to materially exist as a truth in shared exterior reality beyond the interior of the human imagination. Butler has noted that the gender binary compels humans to “come to believe and perform in the mode of belief” by obscuring its own origins in the human imagination, instead locating authority in some “disembodied agency” of maleness or femaleness that, exterior to the human mind, seems to “predetermine” how gender is to be expressed through the body (520-521). But underlying the rules on how gender is to be expressed is the more fundamental rule that it is to be expressed at all, the rule that humans are to demonstrate the immaterial “interior essence” of gender (521) to be nevertheless shareable through the exterior — and so as real as the shareable. The Vatican Church locates the “full original truth” of gender in chromosomes and hormones (Versaldi and Zani 13) not because the two in themselves share anything about gender, but because chromosome and hormone tests do actually make more shareable the utterly invisible biological processes hidden deep in the bodily interior, thereby serving as a precedent to believing that they might at the same time make shareable some invisible “concept” (19) of gender otherwise trapped in the brain’s interior. In Clay, Stick’s initial belief that its co-pilot Versus must be a girl because she has a “girl’s face and a girl’s body, half soft and half angles” works in the same way. There is nothing to disbelieve in how Versus’ “half soft and half angles” do actually share certain otherwise unshareable processes interior to the body: although Versus alone experiences how the hormones deep within her are pushing soft fat out through the skin over her ribs, eventually, Stick too will confirm with its eyes how the breast thrusts its way through Versus’ skin and clothes into the visually sensible reality Stick shares with Versus and many others. As with Misery’s tentacles, an interior experience with sensible reality for only one materially extends itself past the interior into the exterior, to manifest a reality shareable with everyone else. This serves as a precedent to believing that what has no material reality for any human at all (an abstraction, a gender ideal, a divinity) can nevertheless become a reality shared among all humans. When the invisible hormones actually cross from a deep bodily interior out through the breast, it is far too tempting to take it as proof that some invisible ‘femaleness’ has already been taken through the same pathway out of the imaginative interior — that femaleness is at all shareable, and at all real for it.

Habituated to believing in God and the gender binary on the condition of their shareability, one too easily disbelieves the assertions of queer and messianic identity for their characteristic unshareability. The opposition to the separation of gender from biology might be explained as the opposition to how this reduces “all the reality that there is [to gender]” into that which is confined to the interior of the mind (Baggini). But then, the fact that ideal fe/male-ness only ever exists as an “interior essence” (Butler 521) within the imagination has hardly been a serious hindrance to its claims on our belief. Rather, NBGQ identities are disbelieved because of how the reality behind them remains stubbornly within the interior, to be felt as truth by only one individual, and no one else.

Stick’s teammates are reluctant to believe that Stick’s it/its pronouns really do reflect its interior experiential reality, because of how the pronouns above all manifest Stick’s very refusal to make shareable its interior, among others more accustomed to take shareability as the condition of belief. From Stick’s perspective, its choice of pronouns expresses its innermost “want to be a mech” (Clay). Yet, the pronoun, “fitting over [Stick] snug as a membrane, a film” (Clay) also works very much in tandem with the mech of Stick’s desire, fitting snugly over itself. Stick’s mech differs from Misery’s tentacles in that, although it extends the muscular capacities interior to Stick to Stick’s outsides, as if to share them with others inhabiting the shared reality exterior to Stick, instantly it circles back, to seal Stick’s body within the interior of the mech body, thus withdrawing Stick from that reality otherwise shared with other humans. In the same way, the “xe/xer pronouns” written on Major Reyes’ uniform “[t]ag” (Genesis of Misery 113) extend outwards into shared language some otherwise unshareable aspect of Reyes’ psychological interior, in an exterior-oriented motion doubled in how the clothes on which they are sewn extend Reyes’ skin outside of xer body[2]. But above all, what is shared with others outside of Reyes is how Reyes has refused to make xemself shareable. If elsewhere the “girl’s face” and girl’s pronouns afford reassurance that they might be stripped down to the girl-ness beneath, with Reyes the clothes stay on, the eyes stay out of the body, and we stay in “darkness” excluded from any light Reyes might shed as to the interior experience of xer identity (113). In its teasing refusal, Reyes’ bodily covering demonstrates a kinship with Stick’s “membrane” (Clay), that delicate covering that gives an exterior to the innermost viscera of the body even as it refuses another the possibility of sharing in its sensible reality: touch it, and its flimsy materiality bursts. In this Stick’s “membrane” (Clay) is analogous to how neopronoun and mech thrust the human interior briefly out into the shared visual field, but only as much as is necessary to remind other humans of the shimmering elusiveness of that interior hidden within. Sharing nothing about the human interior beyond its resistance to being shared, the neopronoun and the queer identity it expresses are misinterpreted as a lack of anything real at all to be shared.

The counterpart to this in our own world is how we believe in claims of gender identity in proportion to how shareable the individual has made the psychological interior from which their claim proceeds. Singaporean law recognises a transgender individual’s gender identity to the extent that they have made their interior experience of their gender shareable outside their head through genital surgery, and thereafter through invasive medical examinations meant to confirm said surgery (TransgenderSG et al. 3). One “passes” as man or woman — is believed to be a man or woman — to the extent that they have exteriorised into the shared visual field their man-ness or woman-ness. On the other hand, those identifying as neither man nor woman can never “pass,” can never win belief through the same means, since there is “nothing [for them] to pass as,” nothing for them to make shareable about their gender identity (Arijs et al. 4). With how unshareable the deep interior of individual identity is, everyone outside of the individual remains excluded from the interior from which identity claims its reality, and so remains reluctant to share in the individual’s assertion of its reality.

2. Towards the Singular Authority of Unshareable Truth

Identity claims can thus be discredited for being unshareable: if they cannot be taken out of the head and shared with everyone, then they are ‘all in the head’ as delusions and deception with no material truth. Yet the unshareability of messianic and queer identity is not a mere breakdown in the usual processes by which fe/male-ness and religion assert their realness through their shareability. Rather, they approximate of the structure of truth itself. Though the unshareability of queer and messianic identity might tempt disbelief, it is through this unshareability that they claim intimacy with a higher truth taking its absolute authority precisely from its being unshareable.

After all, the truth, divine or otherwise, is so singular an authority ruling over all humans precisely because it does so from a place of absolute exclusion held apart from all humans. If the usual process of belief is one in which the interior contents are passed out of the interior into the exterior world to share with everyone in that world some bodily sensible reality behind belief, the truth transcending the bodily is its exact opposite. Truth contracts to a singular point, one from which all humans are excluded from, one towards which all humans must then turn to. Jesus’ declaration that “I and the Father are one” (Bible, John 10.30) makes the claim to truth on the basis that “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Bible, Matt. 11.27, emphasis added). Jesus claims all the authority of truth to describe himself as Son of God, because nobody but himself has that authority, because other humans certainly do not, and so can only defer to Jesus on the question. Similarly circular in structure are the claims of biological essentialism, which enshrine the genitals as the sole authority on “authentic” gender (Bassi and LaFleur 311, 315), an authority that nobody else has because the genitals being the sole authority on gender means that nobody else has it. As when Stick justifies its belief that Versus is a girl because she has a “girl’s face,” the tautology twists back onto itself, into a hermetic circle from which its audience are utterly excluded, and for that reason, utterly subject to its being the exclusive authority on truth. Although the content of their respective claims wildly differ, the way that their claims are structured by such exclusionary motions remains constant across religion, the gender binary, and queer identity. The claim to queer or messianic identity is made on the grounds that the individual is the “absolute first-person authority” on the reality of interior identity which “only they have access to” (Baggini), no different from how God and fe/male-ness are granted to be the absolute authority on truth on the grounds that they are in singular possession of a truth about humanity that humans themselves have no share in. Belief might come easier when its interior is made shareable, but truth has its authority as truth for how unshareable it is.

What is unshareable in assertions of queer identity is unshareable in the same way that assertions of higher truth are: as the foundation for claiming exclusive authority over truth. Within Genesis of Misery’s queernormative culture, zie/hir pronouns are used to refer to persons yet to make explicit their chosen pronouns, alongside titles such as “duchex” and “anchorex” (64-65, emphasis added). Both manifest the interior of gender identity as resolutely unshareable, in a way that rhymes all too well with how the “Larex Forge” uses Zie/Hir pronouns to underscore how Hirs is an “ineffable” truth (184, emphasis added) unshareable with humans, an unshareability from which Zie draws supreme authority over all humans. This is the very same logic through which the queer individual claims to be the sole authority on the truth of hir own pronouns and hir own gender identity, as made apparent in Misery’s piloting of the archangel mech, intimately tied up with pronouns, identity, and expression. The turning point of the novel is when Misery abandons the military’s mech for a mech that she believes the Larex Forge has guided her towards. Tucked inside the “shape of an alien monster, something you do not recognise” (248), Misery’s own insides, and the messianism that draws its reality solely from those insides, are withdrawn from the exterior world shared with others, who now become “not sure” where they once “believed” (250). Like Stick’s mech, Misery’s archangel mech is no straightforward sharing of the bodily interior. Rather, as “virgin seraphim” that “[no] human has come for” (244), it is the image of a deeply intimate interior that is untouched — perhaps untouchable and impenetrable, to the same extent that Misery’s interior remains unshareable, held prudishly apart from others. Yet this exclusion from the bodily sensible reality shared with other humans is perhaps the very prerequisite for Misery to approach the insensible higher reality that is God’s sole province. Only when the mech sets her apart from the “Newtonian constraints of the mortal realm” does she become “one with . . . the Larex Forge” (280-284). She even uses “Zie” pronouns while in the mech (215), momentarily sharing in the Larex Forge’s unshareability, so sharing in the supreme authority founded upon that unshareability. That which is easily believable because sensibly shareable gives way to that which is necessarily true — not in spite of how its unshareability makes it difficult to believe in — but because of its unshareability.

As with how God and God’s messiahs are taken to be the sole authority on the truth of their divine selves because nobody else can share in the truth, Misery becomes the sole authority on her queer identity because the interior behind it is not shared by anyone apart from her, such that everyone existing exterior to her must defer to her as the authority on the truth. Her pronouns and her gender identity draw their truth from “what’s honestly . . . in [her own] head,” while Misery’s authority to speak of said pronouns and identity as truth is drawn from the fact that she alone shares in what is in her head (159-16). In God’s case, the distinctively capitalised He/Him pronouns work like the Larex Forge’s Zie/Hir to distinguish Him as one “credited with greater reality and authority than human beings” (Scarry 357). But the pronoun also explains why God has this authority, and how He exercises it. Divesting God of any possible earthly genitalia, the divine neopronouns first express how the truth of His body is not one which humans can share in, to then assert the unearthly God as the sole authority on the truth of His unearthly body for that reason, while simultaneously exercising that authority by policing how humans refer to God even when He is not bodily present. Equally ambitious are the assertions of NBGQ identity, as individuals aspire to be the sole authority on the truth of their interior far above any other humans exterior to it. God-like, they withdraw the body from the shareable and claim their exclusive authority of truth precisely through that withdrawal. The singularly exclusive authority with which the prophet declares, “as I say that God gave me the name of the messiah, so will you defer to the truth in what God says, you who have not experienced God as I have,” is one with the authority with which Misery might declare, “as I say that my interior experience of my gender decided on my pronouns being she/they, so will you defer to the truth in what I say, you who have not experienced my gender and my interior as I have.” The deference to the divine as the sole authority on the truth of otherwise unshareable and unverifiable higher reality sets the precedent for deference to the queer individual as the sole authority on the truth of an interior reality nobody but themselves can share in.

3. Belief from the Shared Exclusion from Truth

At the same time, in manifesting how the truth is the truth for how humans are excluded from it, the messianic claim makes newly apparent how it is this exclusion from truth that is the impetus to belief in the first place. Belief begins at the place of exclusion from truth: for all that Genesis locates the beginning of the human body in God’s laying of hands upon human flesh, the beginning of the capacity, necessity, and desire for belief is to be found in God casting humans bodily out of Eden. No belief is necessary when Adam and Eve could share in the acoustically sensible “sound” of God’s body “walking” through the garden (Bible, Gene. 3.8). But when the human race is held apart from God and unable to verify God through their senses, belief gains new urgency. Jesus perhaps seizes upon our belief most powerfully when he cries out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, when he reveals how he shares with all humanity our exclusion from non-human God (Bible, Matt. 27.46). While being tried for heresy, Jeanne d’Arc would awe even learned theologians by her answer to the question as to whether she thought God put her in a state of grace: “If I am not, God put me there, if I am, please God so keep me” (Barrett 193). Their insensibility to the truth gives the measure of Jeanne and Jesus’ faith, for which they win our admiration — and our belief. For the structure of the messianic assertion is not only comparable to the exclusionary structure of higher truth, but also uniquely messianic for acknowledging its exclusion from that truth. In effect, this is what the messiah says: “I believe that this is the truth of me not because I know it is the truth of me, but because belief is all that is left to one excluded from truth. When you are excluded from sensing any truth to my claims, this is not the grounds for disbelieving me, but the more specific instance of how you, human like me, are excluded from knowing any truth about humanity — and so are already in the position from which I began to believe.”

Unshareability makes the claim to the authority of truth at the same time that it creates the very conditions of belief. After grappling with Stick’s unshareable claims for so long, at the close of the story (previously told in second- and third-person), the reader finally seems able to share in Stick’s interior through Stick’s first-person introspection. In fact, Stick’s ungendered “I” continues to express the unshareability of gender identity in the same way the it/its pronoun does, only that “I” now brings Stick and everyone outside of Stick together into a “we” all excluded from totally sharing in the truth of ourselves: “I’m lurching toward understanding, one day at a time. Same as everybody else” (Clay). Stick tells us the truth when it says it is excluded from any certain truth about itself, that all humans are excluded from ever having the full truth of themselves, the two doubling in how we are excluded from ever learning the name, pronoun, and label that Stick has chosen as clumsy attempts at that truth — attempts which call upon our belief, which after all is nothing but a clumsy attempt at truth. What we believe is that Stick has picked out names and pronouns that truthfully witness how impossible it is to get at the truth of the self. Accompanying Stick’s are more re-namings, as in “Helianthus, who goes by Lars,” “Kestrel, who these days goes by Nike,” “Sparrow, who these days goes by Jasper,” all amidst a “field heaped with flowers and herbs” (Clay). This echoes the earlier days when humanity, still in the Edenic garden with God, “gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heaven and to every beast of the field” (Bible, Gene. 1.19-20). In the days when humans still shared a material paradise with God, they shared also in God’s truth and His call-it-as-it-is authority over truth. But these new re-namings, which take place over unseen “days” from which the reader is excluded, demonstrate that the closest we can get to Edenic truth is in clearly seeing our exclusion from it — and re-naming it belief. Excluded from inhuman truth, we share among ourselves the felt reality of this exclusion, to come together as a community of human believers.

When we believe more in the gender binary and in God for being more shareable than queerness and messianism, we have misunderstood shareability as the overriding condition for belief, when it is in fact unshareability that constitutes the truth and the impetus to believe in the first place. If this unshareability has been and continues to be a hindrance to believing in queerness, the history of messiahs has shown that it is not an insurmountable one. As Jesus’ sacrifice created a New Testament so that we might “read, rather than hurt … to believe” (Scarry 251), so might we eventually learn to believe in another’s words rather than hurt their body over it. Although Old Testament belief involves the interior of belief passing into exterior reality through acts of wounding that pass the bodily interior into shared exterior reality, this would be displaced by the attentiveness of witnessing in the New Testament, wherein the unshareability of Jesus — whose interior is minimally available to us now only in ant-like words on thin paper — is precisely what demands the acuity to perceive what cannot be perceived, the deep faith to believe what can only ever be believed in (Scarry 212-214). Perhaps this is the future we might move towards, away from being Doubting Thomas groping for the wound between the legs. The recent rise in mental health support for LGBTQ individuals seems to herald a shift in attention from the exterior to unshareable interior, possibly accompanied by a new awareness that queer experiences do not need to be made materially shareable to have their own reality. From the increase in mental health professionals who actively seek out training because they feel they “did not have adequate skills to attend to [LGBTQ] issues” (Gan), one might even say that there is now an awareness that the unshareability of queer experience is exactly what puts the onus on the other who cannot share in it to attend to another person with the heightened thoughtfulness and sensitivity that we have already been accustomed to turn towards non-persons. The long years through which we have impossibly believed in an inhuman truth insensible to humans, have all been in preparation for us now to believe in a fellow human whose truth we can never share in — to be blessed as those who have not seen, and yet believed (Bible, John 20.29).

Works Cited

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---. The Genesis of Misery. Tor, 2022.

Endnotes

[1] I am indebted to Elaine Scarry’s use of the word “shareability” to discuss how imagined objects might be brought out of the privacy of the mind through expressive acts of language and artificing (327).

[2] Much of material culture (clothes and walls) act as exterior-oriented extensions of the bodily interior in this way (Scarry 38).

Tan Yan Rong graduated in 2023 from the National University of Singapore with a BA in English Literature. Tan is currently working towards a Masters in nineteenth-century literature at Oxford, with interests ranging from gender in speculative fiction to questions of consciousness and identity in art.