ABSTRACT
Living is what happens when one is able to feel, connect, desire, enjoy, and flourish in one's embodied existence-in one's skin and nerves, breath and bones. There is no small irony in this association with Seneca, as the stoic school of philosophy to which he belonged held a largely jaundiced view of bodies, preferring to locate pleasure and meaning in disembodied thought. Moreover, the flesh and breath embodied in humans properly reflects this valuation by being rightly ordered. Sexual bodies are therefore, by definition, spiritual, capable of expressing and experiencing divinity in themselves as embodied. There is a great American novel about, among many things, the cross-racial love of two men whose intimacy sustains their sanity under the rule of madness. Queertheology offers a definitive “no” to the denigration of the body and to the separation of the body from what it means to be a self, a human subject. .
