ABSTRACT
When human relations are marked by injustice, alienation, oppression, and unsustainability, transgressing norms can be a way of opening the imagination to new possibilities of relating, of engaging in practices that generate better social structures. Religion is one way of negotiating the poles of normativity and transgression. Thus, to begin with normativity and transgression is to participate in a long-standing theological tension between upholding the rules and norms that are necessary to hold a loving community together and resisting the unjust and alienating patterns that such rules and norms often enshrine. To begin thinking about sexuality in terms of normativity and transgression, we can start with an obvious point: sex happens every day. Through the work of Richard Rambuss in the area of erotic desire and the sacred within Christian history we glimpse how the sacred erotic transgresses the boundaries of vanilla heterosexuality, that form of sexuality that is paradoxically upheld with such vigour by Christian morality.
