The Gospel of Pura Luka Vega: Queer Love, Irreverent Life, and Indecent Faith in the Margin

The Gospel of Pura Luka Vega: Queer Love, Irreverent Life, and Indecent Faith in the Margin

In this particular historical epoch described by many as a time of hypermasculinity and fascist populism, how do we think of emancipatory resistance and decolonizing spirituality that disrupts the patriarchal logic and destabilizes imperial structures that supply blood to the capillaries of our neoliberal order? Where do we locate and source the nerve impulse for our theological task to animate emancipatory praxis of our time? Moving away from the heterosexual theological discourse of emancipation, I suggest that queer life in the margin offers us a different theological vision and, importantly, better provides us with a theological voice that talks back to the system of domination and embraces the marginalized collective selves excluded in our time. Taking lessons from a drag performance, here I argue for a queer spirituality of resistance, one that is particularly angled at the hetero-patriarchal system. Channeling the blasphemous and rebellious spirit of Pura Luka Vega, a Filipino trans drag performer, I lay out a picture of why and what this could mean for people’s theology and I conclude this paper with a proposal for a new theological militant subject: an indecent and irreverent outlaw/outlawed.