DOI: 10.1111/dial.12416 THEME ARTICLE From body to body: A post-gender politics for the cosmic homo 1 Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen Theology, Aarhus University, Denmark Correspondence Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Theology, Aarhus University, Denmark. Email: teoewp@cas.au.dk Abstract This article engages in establishing some common ground, some human and humane politics for the global Luther, in contradistinction to the focus in much recent schol- arship on difference/s as an almost hegemonic way of understanding human life. The aim is to move beyond feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories to a post- gender politics by employing Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and “abject” bodies. Homo, the human being, will be the hermeneutical key for examining Luther's understanding of God's creation and incarnation as well as of baptism, the Lord's Sup- per, and the church. The aim is that of searching out Luther's differing performances of body, from the carnal body of the incarnate Christ and the human body to the spir- itual body of church and community, and how these matter, materialize and intersect in the body of Christ as one body/homo. KEYWORDS body, cosmic homo, Judith Butler, Martin Luther, post-gender 1 ERASING THE FEMININE In the chiefly German-American Oxford Handbook of Luther's Theology (2014), the human being is treated univo- cally as a “he,” while women are reduced to mere sexuality and the role of wives. Half of humanity hardly exists in this recent treatment of part of Luther's theology. This is far from new. The world has seen multitudes of collected works on Luther, on theology and on philosophy, that either leave out women or leave women to one ultra-brief book chapter on “subaltern” 2 themes, to use Spivak's term for women who as a differentiated gender rank lower than the dominant male. To use Luce Irigaray's terminology, “the feminine” is excluded from the universal human and appears almost only by way of catachresis, 3 in those figures that function improperly and as such transfer sense to describe that which does not properly belong to it. The feminine thus usurps the “proper” and haunts it. According to Irigaray, the exclusion of the feminine from the proprietary discourse of metaphysics takes place as “mat- ter.” She argues that this exclusion engenders a form/matter binary that is the differentiating relation between masculine and feminine where the masculine, occupying both binaries, erases the feminine. In other words, ontologically speaking, the “feminine” cannot be anything. It can only be either the specular feminine or the excessive feminine, but not the femi- nine participating in any ontology. 4 In whatever discourse the feminine is part, it is in fact as the special object or as the abject specificity. Irigaray thus posits that the feminine is not really anything or anybody. In unison with Spivak and Irigaray, Judith Butler is oppos- ing essentialist understandings of sex and gender, as well as the human being per se. By way of alternative readings of such different theorists as Plato, Irigaray, and Freud, Butler tran- scends the feminist categories of sex and gender and subverts any essentialist or ontological understanding of them. Butler heuristically asserts that both body and gender are discursive constructions performed by individuals as part of convention in the form of policing norms and social codes. She recurs to the concept of performativity only to confirm that repeat- edly performed acts normalize an attributed gender, as well as marks of race, class, and sexuality. 5 Butler's aim is not that of totally dismantling any human ontology or prior materiality. Rather, she aims at re-claiming “humanism” by destabilizing the conventional codes of “normal” body and integrating what she conceptualizes as “abject” bodies, those who are left out in our discourses, in order that these bodies also matter and materialize in social 186 © 2018 Wiley Periodicals and Dialog, Inc. Dialog. 2018;57:186–193. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dial