Tamice Spencer-Helms

Eucontamination

Theology

“I came across Billie and Paul’s work in a workshop at a queer Christian conference, and it pinged in my spirit as the exact way to describe what I had been experiencing in the Black church. I had been experiencing disgust, but I didn’t know what to call it—because it was so subtle and pervasive. We agreed on Blackness. We agreed on the same truth. So, the resistance I was feeling, I didn’t know how to name. Encountering their work on disgust and eucontamination was a revelation. It gave me language for what I had been feeling but couldn’t articulate. It became a crucial part of my own process of self-actualization and healing from the diseased ways I was taught to move through the world. And as I become more regulated, I’m seeing so much lived manifestation of their deep psychoanalytical, scientific, and theological work. I truly believe that we can infect the world with good. It’s working for me.”