Topics in Queer Studies in Religion

This paper brings asexuality studies to bear on Marcella Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology to consider: How can Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology aid us in theologizing asexuality? And how might asexuality studies speak back to and enrich Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology. Despite the hypersexuality and latent compulsory sexuality of indecent theology, Althaus-Reid’s work helpfully unveils and critiques the pervasive cisheteropatrichy latent in mainstream Western “Theology” (including many liberation theologies), and second, returns to the material conditions of the poor, including the sexual dimensions of their lives, as an alternative starting point for indecent theological reflection. Returning theology to lived experience can, and should, move us to engage experiences of asexuality. 

This paper examines the state’s vested interest in producing children as “proper” future citizens by juxtaposing two seemingly disparate legal frameworks: the religious freedom protections afforded to Amish parents in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) and contemporary legislative prohibitions on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth in Tennessee. By analyzing these cases through queer theoretical approaches to futurity, childhood, and citizenship, I demonstrate how debates ostensibly centered on “parental rights” reveal deeper state concerns with maintaining normative citizen formation and reproducing particular national imaginaries. The religious exemption granted in Yoder and the recent wave of anti-transgender healthcare legislation in states like Tennessee (2023) illustrate how the state selectively supports or overrides parental authority based on its assessment of whether the resulting children will conform to desired models of citizenship. 

While Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs extends Edward Said’s study of Orientalism by incorporating a sexual dimension, it is less satisfying from a feminist and queer perspective. It struggles to reject Western Orientalist discourses while avoiding local nationalist frameworks that reinforce misogyny and homophobia. Islamic feminism challenges Massad’s critique by resisting both Western essentialism and patriarchal structures in the Middle East. Far from being contradictory, its existence defies binary classifications and Eurocentric taxonomies. I argue that Islamic feminism already embodies strong globality, positioning itself as a postcolonial transition toward a global feminism that transcends religious differences, not through secularization but by fostering shared ground while preserving diversity. This article reviews research on Islamic feminism over the past twenty-five years and addresses key criticisms, including religious belief and personal choice, its relationship with secular feminisms, veiling, theological debates, political and economic critiques, queerness, and Islam’s intersection with human rights.

This paper brings Judith Butler’s work on freedom and subjection into conversation with Gregory of Nyssa’s belief in the autexousia—self-determination—of the human psyche (soul). Both thinkers are deeply committed to human liberation. Both offer critiques of the discursive practices by which structures of domination are naturalised—in Gregory’s case, chiefly in his condemnation of slavery. Moreover, both consider ‘male and female’ binary sex to present a particular affront to human freedom and flourishing, with Gregory anticipating the eventual eschatological transcendence of sexual difference. This paper advances a Butlerian reading of Gregory’s writing on freedom, while suggesting that his theology offers an apophatic route through the aporias in Butler’s poststructuralist account of subjectivity. I suggest that Gregory provides a view of the human psyche, imprinted with the freedom of the divine, that resists being reduced to the human subject, which (as Butler recognises) is constituted by power.