"WE NEED A GOD WHO BLEEDS" | WOMB IMAGINATIONS LECTURE at PRINCETON UNIVERSITY by Desiree McCray

Title: We Need A God Who Bleeds: Menstrual Divinity and the Black Womb as Holy Disruption
This presentation engages my original poem “A God Who Bleeds” in conversation with Ntozake Shange’s call: “We need a God who bleeds now.” My writing begins where Shange’s assertion leaves off, offering a poetic-theological meditation on the womb, menstruation, and incarnate divinity. Rooted in the memory of my first period at my aunt’s house, the poem interweaves personal narrative with womanist theology, Black feminine poetics, and body politics to challenge dominant religious paradigms that distance God from bleeding bodies. In this work, the womb becomes a site of revelation, rupture, and remembrance—an interior altar where holy womanhood is baptized in pain, without shame.
Drawing on Black womanist theological frameworks and the work of Monica A. Coleman, Delores S. Williams, and Renita J. Weems, I explore how poetic expression enables radical uterine imaginaries. Menstruation emerges not simply as a biological process but as a spiritual act that disrupts sanitized renderings of the divine and reclaims embodied authority, especially among Black women and femmes.
By fusing poetics and theology, this presentation invites a reimagining of the womb as a locus of sacred presence, menstrual resistance, and divine possibility. “A God Who Bleeds” suggests that to bleed is neither to be broken nor bound, but to be tied to the sacred. In a world that too often renders bleeding bodies invisible or impure, this work offers an academic and artistic intervention into how we imagine the uterine divine in light.