Cathy Cohen (1997) argues that queer people’s capacity is to cultivate interlocking systems of resistance. Expanding queerness beyond an embodied form of gender of sexual “deviance,” she proposes a project of coalition-building across geographies and traditions. Taking up this framing, we do four things. One, investigate the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of the first openly queer imam, Muhsin Hendricks in South Africa (d.2025). Two, examine the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Three, analyze examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to understand how it is mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. Finally, explore the work of two queer artists in American Chinatowns, imagining alternative spaces and futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns.
This paper investigates the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks (d. 2025), the first “openly-queer” imam in the world. It argues that while dominant clerical groups (ʿulamāʾ) in Cape Town condemned the extra-judicial killing of the imam, they spread a toxic theology of violent exclusion. For the last ten years, members of the ʿulamāʾ advocated a position of virulent exclusion or takfīr based on a theological reconciliation between Islam and queerness. This form of excommunication presents a religio-cultural system of marginalization, legitimating the murder of the imam, and even proposing it as a form of cleansing the “moral corruption” in the broader Muslim community. This paper investigates how religious forms are deployed in service of hegemonic sexual scripts legitimating exclusion. Therwsfater, it will analyze the constructive theological work of Imam Muhsin as a form of reimagining Islam.
This paper examines the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative religious leaders and politicians to promote their exclusionary visions for religious norms or the state. This paper considers anti-trans discourses as an expression of white Christian supremacy relying on the marginalization of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities such as Muslims. First, it draws parallels in anti-trans rhetoric between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim preachers and the bills and executive orders of conservative white Christian politicians. Thereafter it theorizes the use of discourse for neotraditional Muslim preachers. Lastly, this paper ends with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation.
This paper will explore examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to better understand the ways that queerness is being mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. What are the possibilities borne of a refusal to align with the political role ascribed to Jewishness by, for instance, the Trump administration's privileging of campaigns to combat anti-semitism on college campuses? What is the role of queerness in religious and liturgical performances of this refusal? How is queerness sparking re-imaginations of Jewishness, Jewish life, and Jewish ritual in direct opposition to political violence and Zionism as an attempt to enclose and emplace Jewishness? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a reading of queer anti-Zionist Jewish communities through the lenses of queer theory, theories of space and place, and religious studies
This paper examines the works of two queer artists in U.S. Chinatowns who imagine alternative spaces and alternative futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns. In these cultural communities that are increasingly forced into spatial visions of futurity offered by capitalism and carceral violence, queer Chinatown-based artwork (many of whom employ religious and mythical symbolism) instead opens up alternative futures that redefine what safety and freedom look like: they instead illustrate queer visions of freedom and safety through kinship and community that reject mass incarceration or cultural assimilation as means to queer diasporic safety. Reading these queer artwork through the lens of both queer theory and theological aesthetics, this paper considers how these queer/feminist artworks reimagine futures of freedom for Chinatown communities and open up “sanctuary spaces” for queer and minoritized subjects.