Page - 117 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Losers, Food, and Sex | 117www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 99–122 on continued, “Seeking an answer to these questions, the church invokes two major themes, or rather, structures its answers to these questions in response to two historic arguments: purity and pollution; text and authority.”53 And he went on to argue that “purity systems function by making the human body and its boundaries a symbol for the social body and its boundaries”.54 The struggle over “Is it OK?” seems to be at the heart of the various nego- tiation processes over masculinities in Rev. (2010–2014): vicar, husband, sexual male body; being female in a predominantly masculine and patriarchic hierarchy that imagines itself as female, as Christ’s bride; archdeacon, careerist, and gay. All the different male characters on screen are trying to live up to a specific form of masculinity. Yet only when they learn to say “it is OK” and accept their own way of being male, appreciating the diversity in being male, do we see them starting to thrive and becoming subversive. The end of season two, with the iconic Christmas meal resembling the Last Supper, provides a key for understanding the negotiations of masculinities in the show. In a pessimistic reading one could conclude that all is not well in ec- clesial space and that while women have now been admitted to all levels of ordination, the institution is still a patriarchal heteronormative space governed by ideas of purity/pollution and authority/text.55 Masculinity dominates feminin- ity, but that is only one part of the picture. In ecclesial space, one master narra- tive of masculinity still seems to dominate over all others – including those of deviant masculinities – and the diversity of masculinities throughout the history of Christianity is often forgotten. As the current debates in the Anglican com- munity over homosexuality show, such master narratives of specific (religious) masculinities, with their roles and expected behaviors, disrupt communities rather than unify them. The iconography of the Last Supper, however, invites a more positive, a more Eucharistic interpretation. The Eucharistic meal invites, draws together, gives body to community and is itself body. Eating and drinking, we absorb someone or something else into our own bodies.56 Psalm 34:9 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good [or sweet, depending on the translation]”.57 The Eucharist, then, allows one to see through the body with one’s “corporeal eyes”58 and to understand differently and see differently, “suggesting a significant correla- tion between the apprehensions of the soul and the sensory experiences of 53 Nixon 2008, 598. 54 Nixon 2008, 599. 55 Cf. Church of England 2013b; Heneghan 2013; Nixon 2008, 599. 56 Cf. Fulton 2006, 170. 57 For a discussion of the sweetness of the Lord and the different versions of translation, cf. Fulton 2006, 181. 58 Cf. Fulton 2006, 175.