Abstract
Religious studies, queer studies, and transgender studies have long kept their distance from each other for reasons ranging from benign neglect and ignorance to active hostility. Yet scholars working in the interstices between these fields have spent decades developing gay and lesbian studies in religion and queer studies in religion. Strassfeld (2018) has argued for transing the study of religion, and transgender studies in religion is experiencing marked growth partly in response to his call. Nevertheless, although queer and transgender studies in religion are gaining increasing acceptance in religious studies, scholars outside of these subfields still generally consider them inessential to the field as a whole, and many continue either to ignore queer and trans topics and perspectives or to address them solely in the most limited of terms. Queer and trans studies, for their part, largely still ignore or actively dismiss religion, addressing the topic only in simplistic ways that would make any religionist cringe. How, then, are those of us who live in these interstitial spaces, cringing at the infelicities of all three fields, to demonstrate the richness of the intellectual soil in this space not just for ourselves but for the larger fields? This work argues for the critical necessity of developing theory from the interstices between religious studies, queer studies, and trans studies – a task already begun by such scholars as Janet Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Jasbir Puar, Ashon Crawley, Max Strassfeld, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and Yannik Thiem – and suggests specific areas in which such theoretical work has particular potential to alter queer theory, trans and gender theory, and religious studies theory as a whole.
Highlights
On a cool October Sunday in 2007, two nuns went to Mass
The nuns who attended this particular Mass do not belong to a Roman Catholic order
Its members hail from many different religions and from none at all; some are staunch atheists, while others are neopagans, Buddhists, Jews, practitioners of Hindu-based new religious movements, Anglicans, evangelicals, and Roman Catholics
Summary
The terms ‘opiates’ and ‘fakes’ summarize two of the most common assessments of the intersections of queerness, transness, and religion. A third consequence of the elision of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in the context of global imperialism is its ability to simultaneously occlude and reinforce the all-consuming hold of Protestantism on culturally Protestant states, especially those that claim secularity This case is stark, and well-developed, in the U.S context, where historians tell us that at least since the nineteenth century European immigrants who adhered to minoritized religions – mostly Judaism and Catholicism – gained the grudging acceptance of their new home by altering their religious practices to be more like Protestantism (see Orsi 2010; Sarna 2019). We might come to a better understanding of how ritual and gender function together, or of how resistant forms of ritualization can bring non- or anti-normative subjectivities into being
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