Are Liberation Theologies Ready to Liberate Maricas? Reflections on the Challenges of Liberation Theologies Today

1. Liberation for Whom? Towards Indecent Theological Liberation

Latin American Liberation Theology (LLT), according to Gustavo Gutiérrez (1975), has proposed a “permanent cultural revolution” (p. 62), promoting a theological praxis that responds to the concrete realities of the most oppressed people. However, with time, its transformative impetus seems to have cooled. Mysterium Liberationis (1990), a foundational text that consolidated the thinking of the first generation of liberation theologians, today rests somewhat quietly on the shelves of theological academies, witness to a revolutionary fire that has been, in part, stifled.

Despite the great historical impact of this liberating project, today this theological corpus faces contemporary criticisms that point to its limits, as the theologian Elina Vuola put it, speaking of the “limits of liberation” (Vuola, 2002). Although LLT was consolidated in the fusion of horizons beyond Roman Catholicism, involving Protestant, Anglican and Methodist theologians in a transversal movement within Latin American Christianity, an urgent question arises today: Are these theologies capable of confronting and transforming the intersectional oppressions experienced by LGBTIQ+ people, particularly sex-gender dissidence?

Thanks to the intersectional turn in LLT, which came with the visibilization of human rights activists (women and afro-latinxs and LGB people) in the last decades, it has been insisted that patriarchy, cis-heterosexism and racism not only aggravate a primary condition of poverty, but rather engender poverty. Thus, we face “a diversified poverty with economic, cultural, social and gender dimensions” (Aquino, 2024: 8). Thus, by intertwining itself with the structures of oppression that LLT has traditionally challenged, Indecent Theology invites us to “turn everything upside down” (Aquino, 2024: 10) by reorienting the theological project towards a liberation that is not merely inclusive and diverse but, above all, transgressive. Herein lies its indecency, in a question that “go further” (Althaus-Reid, 2019: 31) the mere representativeness of diverse people and problematizes the modes of relationship and sex-political positioning, uncovering the countless abusive, violent and colonial practices that are harbored even in liberation projects. Marcella Althaus-Reid (2000b) defined her proposed Indecent Theology as follows:

Indecent Theology is a theology which problematizes and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppression in Latin America, a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence. An Indecent Theology will question the traditional Latin American field of decency and order as it permeates and supports the multiple (ecclesiological, theological, political and amatory) structures of life (p. 2).

Also, in her article “Marx in a gay bar,” speaking about Indecent Theology as a queer but liberation theology, she states:

It is a transgressive sexual theology, but it uses twisted epistemology concerning the crisis produced by globalization, social exclusion, and savage capitalism. [...] We cannot understand consumerism and the spirituality of consumerism without analyzing the form of production. Therefore, an Indecent Theology is a Feminist Theology of Liberation (FTL) that uses sexual suspicion to dismantle the sexual ideologies that structure doctrines and organize churches (Althaus-Reid, 2019: 43-44).

Undoubtedly, Althaus-Reid opened the door for incorporating the intersection between Queer Theory and Abya Yala (Latin American) complexity in theological reflection. Previously, Queer Theory in Queer Theologies had been primarily understood from a Caucasian and Global North perspective. Her work sparked a movement of reflection that encouraged a reevaluation of traditional theological structures, promoting a more inclusive understanding adapted to the Latin context. Althaus-Reid’s goal was not to dismantle LLT but to deeply explore this contextual and hermeneutical circle of suspicion by questioning the traditional approach to theology in the context of LLT. She promoted an indecent and Latin American theological project that represented both a continuity and a disruption of LLT, as well as of theologies specialized in addressing sex-gender diversity.

In this sense, and paraphrasing Pedro Lemebel’s revolutionary question, it could be said that Althaus-Reid’s indecent project sought to answer the question: Won’t there be some marica or loca on some corner unbalancing the future of LLT?

But who are maricas, what is their place in Abya Yala, and what is their participation in LLT? These questions are the ones that have moved my theological work because, although they seem to be simple questions and constantly addressed in theological spaces that call themselves “inclusive” and “diverse,” those of us who enunciate ourselves from marica positionality continue to find places and situations that do not usually assume our experiences in their radicality. They ask us for a certain “homosexual decency” and, in doing so, lead us to a dead end in which we are left with the choice of assuming the “impostures” and “composure” demanded, or abandoning those places forever. Moreover, most of us maricas cannot even have the option of deciding, but, because of our experiences, we are already exiled from theological spaces: because we are very indecent, so indecent that we cannot think of strategies of “imposture”, much less of “composure”. This is the existential situation of the marica.

When I speak of maricas, I am not talking about privileged homosexual people who celebrate their acquired rights and speak from their comforts (Santos Meza, 2024). When I say marica, I think of my own life and the lives of my friends, for whom the novelty is that we are still alive, that we manage to go to sleep with full bellies, that we can have a roof over our heads at night, that we have access to medicine and that every time we take public transportation we can return home safely. The maricas can’t pretend to be anything else, because our bodies, our movements, our voices and our vulnerability give us away. In this sense, I borrow the words of Pedro Lemebel in his manifesto Hablo por mi diferencia: “Here is my face. I speak for my difference. I stand up for what I am. And I am not so strange” [Aquí está mi cara. Hablo por mi diferencia. Defiendo lo que soy. Y no soy tan raro] (Lemebel, 2020: 121).

Returning to the theological sphere, we can recognize what Boff rightly said: “The Latin American Stations of the Cross have too many ‘stations’ for us to even enumerate them. Let’s limit ourselves to stating that colonialism was transformed into neo-colonialism, and that the servitude of yesteryear persists, under different signs and different masters, to this day” (Boff, 1986: 48). Therefore, here I focus on a particular station: The reality of the maricas, jotos, travas, travestis and veados of Abya Yala, whom the conceptualization of “queer” fails to address, because it is insufficient.

From colonial times to the present day, the perception of Abya Yala (Latin America)2 has been shaped through a “Eurocentric lens” (Mignolo, 2009; Mignolo, 2011) that determines its place in the world order, configuring the inhabitants of Abya Yala as exotic objects of study (Aquino, 1999; Althaus-Reid, 2000a; Althaus-Reid, 2009). In the theological realm, this externalist vision has also been replicated, leaving Abyayalenses voices as footnotes to Anglo-Saxon and European theologies. For decades, LLT has struggled to counter this marginalization, raising its own voice and demanding recognition as active subjects in the global theological conversation. Today, as in the past, it is still a primordial necessity to open “our” space, to speak with “our” voice, to discuss “our” issues and to announce with great insistence that people of Abya Yala are not a “pastoral problem” or a mere “bibliographical note” that exoticizes the theological works of European and Anglo-Saxon scholars (Córdova Quero, and others, 2024: 26).

Perhaps, today, liberation theologians no longer dare to ask the question that Marcella Althaus-Reid (2019) was asked: “And you, Marcella, what is your work, your theology?” (p. 32). However, it does seem that for many people today the question is: What do maricas have to do with Liberation Theology? For Althaus-Reid, theology urgently needs to face hermeneutically the irruption of the sexual subject in history, in the same way that liberation theologians had to face the irruption of the Church of the poor or the underprivileged of history. Precisely, when looking at the experiences of sex-gender dissidence in Abya Yala, especially of maricas, a new question arises: Is Liberation Theology as it has been formulated so far sufficient to embrace and emancipate those who live on the margins of sexuality and gender?

In this context, the term “queer” has gained popularity, but, as Hugo Córdova Quero points out, it is not enough to adopt this globalized concept without examining its limitations and its lack of rootedness in the experiences of the communities of Abya Yala (Córdova Quero, 2018). The experiences of queer life in Abya Yala can best be approached from the expression marica −which includes jotos, travas, travestis and veados−. In this way, it seeks to point out that they are complex realities that are often subjugated to the categories of the Global North −such as “gay” and “queer”−, in which the specificity of their experiences, with their peculiar histories and own contexts, are not widely captured. Just as the construction of a “Abya Yala (Latin American) space” in theological narrative prompted an inquiry into the sources of a theology that was rooted and incarnated in the lives of people, and had to go to the faith and the multiple spiritualities in the Continent to listen to the countless religious experiences and re-read the traditional narratives, Indecent Theologies must keep this exercise of returning, over and over again, to the lives of people, to their daily struggles and their own experiences.

For a long time, LLT ignored the sexual realities of poor people, presenting them as asexual and worthy of pity, as Marcella Althaus-Reid (2000b) points out. Today, this omission extends to many maricas, who have been subsumed under the normative categories of Anglo-Saxon queer discourse. Thus, the liberation proposed by these theologies remains incomplete and, often, ineffective and empty. Just as the irruption of the poor into liberation theology at its origin, the irruption of dissident sexual subjects demands a profound transformation of traditional theological categories, including the also traditional LGBTIQ+ categories (Córdova Quero, and others, 2024). Thus, when spaces for LGBTIQ+ theologians are currently being constructed in which maricas voices and spiritual experiences are not usually validated, nor is there the presence of travestis or non-binary people, the question arises: Are Liberation Theologies prepared to liberate maricas?

Being marica is not exclusively a matter of opening one’s legs to someone of the same sex; it is a way of taking a sex-political position. Theologies at the service of maricomprensión [marica-comprehension] are understood from intellectual heterodoxies that allow the construction of situated epistemo(theo)logical knowledge, which are not superficial contextual allusions, but which activate a sort of “politics of localization” by pointing out a real position (Lemebel, 2020). For this reason, considerations of cultural translation will be relevant to the extreme of Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak, 2004), you must ask yourself: Can the marica speak? Is what the marica says listened to in liberationist theological spaces? Is the theological reflection of a loca considered a valid interlocutor? Can maricas and locas inhabit liberationist spaces? Are maricas safe in such places?

2. The Horizon of Indecent Theologies: Towards Maricas Theologies

Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology can be understood as an authentic expression of LLT, seeking to embody the nuances, pleasures, dilemmas, and ecclesial hopes, as well as to transform the social reality of the people of Abya Yala. Today, Latin American Queer Theologies make constant connections with contextual and regional approaches, seeking a more accurate understanding of the reality of sex-gender diverse people. These emerging local theologies are framed within the paradigm of Queer Theologies, even when they do not explicitly adopt that terminology, as in the case of Althaus-Reid’s theology, which, as mentioned above, was called “Indecent Theology”. I sense that this indecency can find a great emancipatory force by returning to the territory to inhabit it: Abya Yala is our place.

Between 2012 and 2024, Latin American meetings have been held to continue walking along the horizon opened by Althaus-Reid. In 2012, the First International Symposium on Queer Theology was held (San José, Costa Rica. 7-11 August), organized by the Ecumenical Research Department (Boehler, and others, 2013); this was followed by a series of congresses in São Leopoldo (Musskopf, 2024).3 In 2022, the Second International Symposium on Queer Theologies was held (San José, Costa Rica. 2-6 August 2022). From it emerged the recently published Mysterium Liberationis Queer (Córdova Quero, and others, 2024), a liberationist work that actively challenges the acts of violence of cis-hetero-patriarchy and provides arguments and figures for new horizons in Latin American liberation theology. Mysterium Liberationis Queer is driven by an intersectional research impulse that destabilizes the foundations of the cis-hetero-masculinist liberation theology of that first generation. It is a book of more than 500 pages in which its authors attempt to resist theological normativity, proposing some paths of escape and dreaming of more just futures.

Indeed, when theological reasoning is intertwined with the lived experiences of individuals, particularly those shaped by dimensions such as class, race, gender, and sexuality—especially when these factors affect us on a profound, personal, and bodily level—it does more than simply contribute to a pre-established theological discourse (Aquino, 2024). This intersection has the power to challenge and transform the very foundations of that discourse. By engaging with these marginalized or often overlooked experiences, theological thought is not only enriched but also redirected, leading to new conclusions and perspectives that were previously excluded or misunderstood. In this way, the process becomes a dynamic reorientation of theology itself, pushing it beyond its traditional boundaries and opening it up to a more inclusive, holistic understanding of human life and suffering.

Such intersections, which have critiqued, resisted and confronted dominant theological logics, have been embodied in a series of liberationist “wokist” ghosts: feminism and queer theory, critical race theory and trans liberation (Aquino, 2024: 10). As a liberationist project, its purpose has been none other than direct and insurrectionary action in the face of the cis-heteropatriarchal violence of theology (Richard, 1990), which is why it strives to multiply liberationist horizons rather than exclude vital options.

In this sense, a critical appropriation of multiple belonging demands attention to the experience of the multiple who “don’t fit in”. Whether by choice or by accident, because of the cruelties of others or of our own positions, this is also a reality that the rhetoric of inclusion overlooks. In view of this reality, theologian Carmen Nanko-Fernandez (1990) asked:

Who is left out of our constructions of identity and community? Who is left out when we omit or ignore the histories of our intersections? Who is ostracized based on arbitrary criteria that determine the norm? Who is privileged and who is excluded when a particular norm is assumed to be common? Who is silenced? Who loses agency? Who are the gatekeepers who control access? (pp. 9-10).

Queer theological discourses, which in recent decades have been consolidated in the United States and Europe, have left out the experiences of Latin American sex-gender dissidences. Moreover, we can affirm that it is evident how “queer theologians from Latin America consult the works of queer theologians from the Global North, but the latter do not explore the contributions of their Latin American counterparts, even when their works are written or translated into English” (Córdova Quero, and others, 2024: 20). This is why we must remember what Althaus-Reid already observed: there is a difference between Queer Theologies −which are not necessarily liberationist theologies, nor are they interested in being so− and Indecent Theologies −understood as Latin American Queer Liberationist Theologies−4.

The writer of this reflection enunciates himself from the second typology, because I do not wish simply to speak of queer representativeness in theology, nor of theological inclusion. However, I must say that it is difficult for me to do it at all, because I still feel insecure in these spaces. And it is from there that I want to ask: Are LLT prepared to liberate maricas, or is an insurrectionary act necessary to take this cultural revolution to new depths? This reflection explores the challenges facing LLT today, pushing its boundaries to “go further” (Althaus-Reid, 2019: 31)5.

The questions of the theologian Nanko-Fernandez, formulated over 30 years ago, lead me once again to the initial story, because I do not stop thinking about all the maricas, locas and travestis who feel exiled from the LLT spaces, who find countless cis-heterosexual complicities, who feel that there is only room for “adequate” gays, lesbians and trans, that we are violated by homo-normativity, Christian-centrism –which is often supremacist and authoritarian–, pastoral and paternalistic condescension, as well as by the prevailing “ageist logic” that suggests that young people should maintain a kind of blind obedience to people who have been in the struggle longer. These are some of the aspects that I often feel in my own experience as a marica theologian. So, I am interested in insisting on this: We need maricomprendernos!

A few months ago, at a meeting of Latin American theologians, this became very clear to me. It so happened that I presented a conference in which I pointed out that it was urgent to promote spaces and exercises for theological maricomprensión. Several cis-gender people who were there listened to my intervention; but then, privately, they tried to correct the use of the expression “marica”, telling me that it was a term that applied only to “men who have sexual relations with other men” (MSM), and that women did not feel included and represented with that term. I have received this same argument several times from anonymous reviewers of specialized papers.

This had a great impact on me, because in spaces that are not enunciated from a gender-sexual “diversity” perspective, but from a gender-sexual “dissidence” perspective, the recognition of the queer term is not reduced to a question of sexual orientation and gender identity, but is much broader and more complex: there are negras maricas, travestis maricas, bisexualas maricas, lesbo-maricas, putas maricas, and others enunciations. The mariquismo is a very complex universe, which tries to draw the horizon of dissident minorities of the sex-gender system, but from the recognition of the complex mesh of intersetionalities that subsist in the history of dissidence.

Precisely for this reason, it is necessary that also in theology we enable spaces to understand the factual implications of marica experiences. If LGBTIQ+ people do not manage to consider dissident and disruptive experiences, without being shocked by the indecency, any effort to get cis-heterosexual people to do so will be futile (Santos Meza, 2023b). Thus, people of gender diversity should be the first to try to understand what Pedro Lemebel called maricomprensión.

3. An Urgent Need: Theological Maricomprensiones

The movement towards a theological maricomprensión, which articulates the realities of maricas, travas, travestis and other dissident bodies in Latin America, does not seek to adapt to “new” realities, but rather to revisit situated experiences and recognize the potentialities of Latin American sex-dissident contexts to transform theological, socio-cultural and political coordinates. Theologies for maricomprensión, being exercises of invasion and perversion of traditional liberationist theologies, of their discourses and habits of thought, can help to transform theological, political, epistemic and symbolic coordinates, to dispute the common meanings established in the spaces of legitimization of theological knowledge and practices.

But, for this, it is necessary to go beyond the identitarian and the nominalist, beyond that sort of naive voluntarism of the nomination (Cadahia, 2024) that can also co-opt the marica, because “it is not the deliberate self-denomination that will allow us to find the way out of the prison of phalogocentric language” (Braidotti, 2004: 91-92). The simple fact of enunciation as dissidence from the sex-gender system does not imply an automatic transformation of the material structures of power that are present in theological practices. To liberate subjectivity requires more than mere acts of naming: we need to free ourselves from socio-historical bonds through tropes of the popular collective imagination that allow for real socio-symbolic interventions, but, to do so, we need to begin to maricomprendernos through theologies situated in these wounded lands of Abya Yala, where, as Lemebel (2020) said, “there is passion and Calvary for a while” (p. 34).

As suggested by the intellectual heterodoxies of Lemebel and other situated maricas perspectives, Indecent Theologies propose a conceptual revolution that starts from the vital experiences of Latin American mariquismo and does not depend on Anglo-Saxon and European narratives. This approach is not about simply translating the queer discourses of the Global North, but about constructing situated epistemo(theo)logical knowledge, deeply rooted in the Latin American context, that recognizes the complexity of living as a dissident subject in these lands (Santos Meza, 2023a).

The proposal of a Theology for maricomprensión implies, then, dismantling cis-heterosexual narratives, but also homonormative logics that that attempt to “domesticate” or “sanitize” the experiences of sex-gender dissidence. If its project of liberation is radical, theology must betray the normative frameworks that have shaped its development, renouncing the practices of exclusion and exoticization that have marked its history. This reflection is ultimately a cry of resistance, an insistence that Latin America’s maricas, travestis, travas and veados have not only a place in LLT, but a transformative power that can rewrite its foundations −or perhaps, rather, destabilize or fracture them−. At the heart of this proposal is the conviction that liberation cannot be achieved without fully including the experiences, bodies and subjectivities that have been marginalized and silenced for so long. Thus, Latin America calls for Maricas Theologies that not only understand but assume a radical commitment to liberation in which to occupy the marica is to betray the normative frameworks that brought us into existence. Why domesticate us in a cis-heterosexual system? Why assume an imported cis-homosexual normativity?

This approach to LLTs from the experience of maricas seeks to demonstrate that theological practices and narratives are capable of being thought, felt and constructed from the realities that are “materially inscribed in the subject” (Braidotti, 2004: 95) of their discourse, which in this case refers to the Latin American and lo marica, understood as places of oppression and political positions, since these realities are both social, cultural and historical “sediments” and possibilities of emancipatory “reactivations” (Laclau, 1990). This is a radical way of perceiving and perceiving ourselves, of constantly reassembling the imaginary according to survival strategies that allow us to find points of escape and maroonage during these cis-heterosexual societies that refuse to grant us life, pleasure and reality.

It is time for us to break into Latin American liberationist theological narratives as maricas, who do not ask nicely for the word, but speak without asking permission, without seeking approval to communicate our stories, which are also theological transits (Preciado, 2003).6 It is time to write trying to propose interruptions to the hegemonic logics of the production of theological meaning. And to do so by exercising scriptural pulsations that deny the triumph of cis-heterosexuality and homonormativity as a way of organizing life. To do so by trying to produce micro-fugues to the ways of representation that place some bodies in supremacist realities and reject others. It is time to produce liberationist theologies trying to dynamite the apparatuses of cognitive production that are aligned to classist, racist and transphobic narratives because the bodies that many of us have are neither heterosexual, nor cisgender, nor white.

From there, we try to propose critical and activist liberationist theologies −situated− that take a stand against the hegemonic ways of managing discourses and epistemological production in liberationist theologies. This is how many maricas have been able to find a place in the flows of circulation where we can deny a sympathy or a “being comfortable” within global (teo)capitalism, proposing concepts, practices, experiences, images and forms of organization that challenge what usually produces meaning within theological work.