A Queer Tour of Hell

Meghan Henning’s Hell Hath No Fury is a tour de force of tours of hell. Henning fills a gap in the study of early Christianity by introducing and analyzing these fantastic early Christian narratives within the context of Roman punitive practices and assumptions about gendered bodies. Henning’s work is poised to become a “go-to” for scholars of early Christianity and will likely spark more interest in these culturally important, yet under-studied, traditions. Moreover, Henning convincingly argues that tours of hell are more than simplistic voyeuristic forays into the netherworld; instead, they function as Foucauldian heterotopias that regulate human behavior and effectively “reflect and construct lived reality” (p. 148). As such, even though Henning’s work focuses on the narratives in their ancient contexts, she gestures at how our visions of the socially deviant, the “sinner” in Christian parlance, continue to play a role culturally and offer productive sites for thinking about the ways some, namely queer artists, resist regulation.

One of the many strengths of Henning’s book is the multiple references to contemporary practices and conversations, which highlight the importance of engaging the ancient and medieval tours of hell. These references appear in the book’s first pages, where Henning discusses the popular comedy The Good Place and the more macabre American Horror Story. A description of modern evangelical “hell houses” introduces the book’s second chapter. In the epilogue, Henning invites readers to reflect on the popularity of shows like Orange is the New Black, which similarly put “othered” bodies on display. These moments suggest the boundary between the ancient past and the present is porous, just as the boundary between hell and earth is sometimes porous, according to the visions explored by Henning. Just as ancient audiences are invited to view the harrows of hell and change their attitudes and actions, the modern audience of Hell Hath No Fury is asked to reflect upon how we participate in the construction of oppressive regulatory systems, including gender and carceral institutions (p.151).

By extending this call, Henning embodies a kind of intellectual and historical humility and resists the tendency to think only in terms of human progress. These moments of engagement with the modern world are brief but thoughtful. Reflecting on the memorable images of beasts and reptiles drinking from the breasts of women who refused to nurse their children, images from the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the Latin Vision of Ezra, respectively, Henning notes how in the U.S. people are effectively punished both for breastfeeding and not breastfeeding (p. 69). We may not envision snakes latching on to the individuals who must return to work while still breastfeeding, but we do force them into tiny metal enclosures, bathroom stalls, as they connect their breasts to costly and cold machines. Even Henning resists this kind of moralizing rhetoric associated, as someone who offers a tour of tours of hell Henning does have an ethical vision and commitments. The book does not, at least to my knowledge, explicitly articulate a feminist perspective, but it clearly builds upon feminist theory. Specifically, although Judith Butler gets one mention (p. 15), the groundbreaking philosopher’s explanation of how regulatory systems, such as gender, are created through citational practice hovers in the background of the entire book. This makes me wonder about the practice of articulating one’s interpretive commitments, a practice admittedly more common in biblical studies than in Early Christian History, and what is gained or lost by not more explicitly announcing a feminist, or for that matter crip or queer, agenda.

When, in the epilogue, Henning reflects on Orange Is the New Black as a modern tour of hell, I’m struck by the focus on a television show as an avenue for engaging with the modern carceral system. As Henning notes, the show is marketed to audiences critical of mass incarceration and those simply interested in a voyeuristic experience of women in prison. (I’ll note that this is not simply a cis-het male fascination. The Australian show Wentworth has a big lesbian following.) This is not a critique of Henning, but it seems to me that many of the people interested in a show like Orange Is the New Black are those with little direct experience of incarceration, either as someone incarcerated, previously incarcerated, or connected to someone who is or has been incarcerated. However, almost 1% of the population of the U.S. is incarcerated and according to the Vera Institute, a non-profit organization fighting against mass incarceration, 1 in 41 Black adults in the U.S. are incarcerated in a state prison.[1] This suggests that the people for whom Orange Is the New Black offers insight into the world of prison are white, and probably upper class.

Thinking about this made me wonder whether tours of hell are ever intended for those who dwell in a proverbial hell on earth. That is, are tours of hell ever for the person already imprisoned, trafficked, abused by, or cut off from family, or experiencing gender dysphoria? Are tours, ancient or modern, primarily tools designed for regulating the comfortable, the elite, and the straight? I’m not suggesting that there were no efforts at controlling the behaviors of non-elite Christians, but I wonder if these were effective tools across classes, statuses, identities, and experiences.

 Of course, given the diversity of early Christianity, we can imagine there were early hearers who saw themselves on display in the tours. As Henning explains, this is partly how these tours work—they regulate the behavior of audience members by creating a sense that the living and their behaviors are constantly surveilled, an idea she draws from Foucault (p. 83-4). Ideally (at least from the author’s perspective), those hearing or reading the tours recoil in horror upon seeing their sinfulness on display and then they change their ways. However, I’m curious about the deviants and those who, to use an idea articulated by the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, may choose to (dis)identify with the visions as their supposed sin shapes their identity. (Dis)identification is a queer “survival strategy” according to Muñoz. It is a way of dealing with the “phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”[2] One (dis)identifies by identifying with the way others dis you. It is appropriating the slur. It is welcoming the idea that you’re going to burn, or freeze, in hell because there is no other way of being. To paraphrase Perpetua, “… I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a tribas.” I wonder about audience members who identify closely, maybe too closely, with the people who inhabit these hypothetical netherworlds? The “sinners” in these places—adulterers, bad parents, idolators, people who wear too much makeup, gender deviants, the same-gender loving—are my kind of people. The inhabitants of these hellscapes are, in many ways, queer.

The tours of hell explored by Henning evoke, in many ways, queer narratives and art in ways that I find striking and even a little eerie. Heather K. Love describes the queer practice of feeling backwards, identifying with and refusing to give up the past.[3] As a queer person, I want to claim these hells for my people and look at a few of the ways we replicate and recreate these scenes of the abject and of horror. So, here’s a very brief tour of queer hell.

Although disgust is not a major theme in Henning’s book, many of these ancient scenes evoke the abject. In one version of the Apocalypse of Peter, the “place of punishment” is described as “squalid” with a lake of “flaming mire” (pp. 20-21).[4] Filth is theme in a lot of queer art, including in the movies of John Waters, the self-proclaimed “elder of filth.”[5] In the most famous, or notorious, scene from the 1972 film Pink Flamingos, Divine, Walters’ cross-dressing muse, vies for the title “filthiest person alive” and cinches the title when she eats a pile of fresh dog shit (fig. 2). Instead of wanting to avoid the abject, the sinner/ queer embraces it and takes it into their body. As Kent L. Brintnall explains in discussion of the movie Freaks, “The abject is the essence of pollution; it is that which defines the boundaries of the cultural order while at the same time threatens to destroy that order through contamination.”[6] Could it be that the very act of depicting the abject, the body tortured in hell, the authors of these tours encourage and invite the activities and habits they despise? Instead of regulating social order, it seems possible to imagine them disrupting the social order.

Figure 2. Screen capture of Divine in Pink Flamingos (1972).

 Despite, Divine’s apparent eagerness to do this scene, they had second thoughts. In his book Shock Value, Waters recounts how Divine, after performing the scene, was concerned that she might get worms from the dog.[7] Divine even calls a vet pretending to be a concerned parent whose toddler gobbled down the family dog’s feces. Divine’s concern, which made her the butt of jokes among the rest of the cast and crew, suggests a kind of ambivalence that many queer people experience. The worms, like the worms experienced in the tours of hell (Apoc. Pet. 24, 26), are something we’re taught to avoid, to fear. Once we’re infected, it can be troubling to realize they are part of us. Troubling the social order by becoming the abject is not always the easy path.

Mama Edie, played by Edith Massey in Pink Flamingos, sits in a child’s playpen wearing dingy lingerie and eating eggs evoking the kind of tortures revealed in the early Christian tours of hell (fig. 1). The combined references to childhood and adult sexuality mark her as sexually deviant. However, her sin and punishment become her avenue of escape, as she falls for and marries the “Egg man” who wheels his bride away in a wheelbarrow on their way to visit chicken factories.

The punishments of hell potentially introduce new possibilities of relating and being. This is a key idea in Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. Recognizing that queer people are especially good at failure—we fail our families, communities, churches, and other institutions—we are forced to craft our own new ways.[8]

Figure 3. Screen capture of Edith Massey in Pink Flamingos (1972).

Artist Ron Athey, raised in the Pentecostal church, similarly conjures the horrors of Christian hells, although in a more solemn way than Waters. His work draws explicitly upon the practices and protocols of BDSM and Christian iconography.[9] An early performance piece by Athey, Torture Trilogy, featured the artist hanging by flesh hooks, while in Martyrs and Saints Athey embodied Saint Sebastian allowing audience members to pierce his flesh with arrows and to flog him. These works are a response to the AIDS crisis, laying bare, like the tours of hell, the close connection between the erotic and death.[10] Moreover, Athey’s works are visual testimony. Among other things, they witness to Athey’s “disappointment for there not being hellfire and brimstone…Not to mention that living most of my adult life through a time of AIDS has been disappointing as far as high drama goes: it’s taken very little work for me to parallel my experiences with the bejewelled doomsday prophecies from the Book of Revelations.”[11] Athey’s work, relocates hell, reminding the viewer that the tortures of the netherworld are the earthly experience of many. Athey often speaks about his own experiences with the AIDS epidemic, experiencing the deaths of so many around him and being HIV positive himself.

Finally, I offer the work of trans artist Cassils.[12] Their performance piece Up To and Including Their Limits (a 2020 work commissioned by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto) evokes the use of suspension as torture in the tours of hell (e.g., Apoc. Pet. 23; Apoc. Paul 39), as the artist hangs inside a large plexiglass box. In the box, Cassils is suspended by a harness around their pelvis and mostly unclothed. The harness evokes BDSM practices, and their mostly naked body and the placement of the harness suggests the sexed other, as in the Apocalypse of Peter where the narrator describes adulterous women and men hanging by their hair (women) and feet and heads (men) over fiery mire (Apoc. Pet. 23).

Like the sexual deviants in hell, Cassils is similarly proximate to mire, albeit not flaming; rather, the walls of their enclosure are covered with moist, raw clay and the artist forcefully swings themself back and forth to pull down pieces of clay which fall to the floor. The act of removing clay from the sides of the box reveals “windows” allowing viewers to watch the performance. As in the tours of hell, Cassills’ body is on display. This, arguably, is part of the punishment of hell—that one’s proclivities and persuasions are rendered visible to others. In the case of Cassils, they make visible the trans body, forcing audience members to look upon their body intentionally and publicly, instead of through furtive glances.

 Cassils’ work, however, asserts the creative opportunity that comes with being the object of voyeurism. As they scrape clay from the walls of their “prison,” they throw the material to the floor creating an organic looking sculpture. Likewise, in another performance piece, Becoming an Image (performed in various locations from 2012 to the present), Cassils suggests that even in the darkness of hell (e.g., Apoc. Paul 16, 31, 39) resides the possibility for creation. In the piece, audience members are ushered into a dark room, where Cassils uses their body, quite forcefully, to shape a mass of clay into a kind of sculpture or memorial to the experience.[13] The artist punches the clay, throws their body on it, slams into it, as the audience listens to the sounds. Occasionally, a camera flash illuminates the scene, including the audience members. Not only does the clay become a creative output, all involved are part of the creative work. As the title suggests, everyone becomes an image. Furthermore, the fact that the viewers become part of the display, prompts us to ask whether those “viewing” the tours of hell are sometimes implicated in their viewing. The pleasure one may experience viewing the tortures of hell or the pity felt by the viewer potentially assign that one to their own pit of mire.

Even though these queer artists are not explicitly engaging the Christian idea of hell or the ancient texts examined by Henning in Hell Hath No Fury, their work offers a counter narrative to these visions of filth and torture. While I do not mean to valorize the abject experience (I wish upon no one the ancient Christian hell or its many modern manifestations), it is powerful to witness the ways queer interpreters resist viewing the punishments of hell as anything but empowering and enlivening.

[1]  “Incarceration Statistics,” Vera Institute of Justice, accessed February 12, 2023, https://www.vera.org/incarceration-statistics.

[2] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 27.

[3] Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 6.

[4] M. R. James, ed., “The Apocalypse of Peter,” in The New Testament Apocrypha, trans. M. R. James (Apocryphile Press, 2004), 507–10.

[5] See the title of John Waters, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

[6] Kent L. Brintnall, “The Moral Demand of the ‘Loving Cup’: The Presence of the Abject Body in Tod Browning’s Freaks and the Christian Eucharist,” Golem: Journal of Religion and Monsters 1, no. 1 (2006): 5.

[7] John Waters, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (Running Press, 2005).

[8] Judith/ Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), passim.

[9] Images of Ron Athey’s work can be accessed on the artist’s website, https://www.ronathey.org/ .

[10] Matt Stromberg, “Ron Athey, Transgressive Performance Artist,” Hyperallergic, September 2, 2021, http://hyperallergic.com/674282/ron-athey-transgressive-performance-artist/.

[11]Ron Athey, "Deliverance: The 'Torture Trilogy' in Retrospect" in Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, edited by Dominic Johnson, (Intellect Books, 2013), 101.

[12] Images and videos of Cassil’s work can be found on their website, https://www.cassils.net/ .

[13] E. Cram, “Cassils: On Violence, Witnessing, and the Making of Trans Worlds,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): 120–22.

Lynn R. Huber is the Maude Sharpe Powell Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University. Her work focuses on gendered imagery in Revelation, as well as queer biblical interpretation. She is author of a forthcoming feminist commentary on Revelation, which is part of the Wisdom Series published by Liturgical Press. You can find more information about her work at www.lynnrhuber.com.