Queering the Pilling Report: Church of England Reports and the 'Queer Art of Failure'

Abstract

Pilling – The Report of the House of Bishops Working Group on Human Sexuality, published in November 2013, initiated a process within the institutional Church of England of discussions and reflections on the issue of (homo)sexuality. This thesis will que(e)ry the contents and methodology of this report, set in the context of earlier church reports on sexuality, analysing the hermeneutical lenses through which Pilling chose to examine homosexuality and its place in church polity. After critically reflecting on the report itself, the thesis will turn to the processes which it launched: official and unofficial conversations about gay identity and gay relationships. Both the report and these processes will be interrogated for their constructions of authority and for their, perhaps unacknowledged, construals of power and privilege in which white, educated, cisheterosexual norms remain unmarked and ‘other’ identities are (albeit implicitly) positioned as abject. Pilling – both report and process – claims that it is not searching for a consensus or a resolution in the sexuality debate, yet its apparent reliance on the neoliberal narrative of progress and productivity denies the possibility of failure. The thesis suggests that one kind of resolution might be through, what Halberstam has termed, the ‘queer art of failure’, a turning away from the hegemonic epistemologies of church reports and institutionally sanctioned debate, towards an undoing of theological privilege and hierarchical constructions of authority. The queer art of failure recognises that failure is part of the human condition and for Christians an inherent part of our fallen nature. Failure may be faithfulness to an apophatic tradition, inhabiting the unknowingness of Holy Saturday and the queer temporality of living in the ‘not yet’.