This panel explores the expansive transdisciplinary knowledges, religions and spiritualities, methods, and epistemologies that define queer and trans studies in religion. Panelists will share their research on topics related to Afro-Brazilian religions, secularities, and experiments in teaching and learning. They engage questions of the limits of secular framings of sexual freedom, embodied pedagogy, the value of non-Western epistemologies in postcolonial social justice pursuits, the need for affirming childhood transition narratives, and offer their takes on what it means to engage in “bad” religion and reading.
This paper details some of the ways that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires queer and trans activism. The last few decades has seen staggering rates of violence against queer and trans Brazilians and there persists a continuous flow of hate crimes against Afro-Brazilian religions. This climate has created particularly precarious lives for those who belong to both communities. Afro-Brazilian religions are known for being more hospitable to LGBTQ+ people, in part due to the ways the religions’ deities, the orixás, defy European notions of gender boundaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires meaningful ways that queer and trans activists engage with in their social justice work such that it generates new pathways to freedom not obstructed by white supremacist heteropatriarchal epistemologies. I offer a reflection on the importance of non-European epistemologies in analyses of the sociopolitical milieu that creates such precarious lives for queer and trans Brazilians.
This paper reflects on Althaus-Reid as a (perhaps the) nascent “canonical” figure of queer theology, as her texts as required to be taught to beginners. What happens to the notion of a “canon” (or even minimally, a standard reading list) when Althaus-Reid is a cornerstone of it? And what happens to Althaus-Reid’s work when it is made canonical, however destabilized that notion might be? How does one teach her, and to beginners? Based on experiments in teaching and learning, this paper will considers various insights and challenges from the teaching of Althaus-Reid’s work.
In May 2024, a marketing campaign for the dating app Bumble took to billboards across America with a vicious jab against celibacy, commanding ‘THOU SHALT NOT GIVE UP ON DATING AND BECOME A NUN.’ In this paper, I examine the dynamic contours of religion, secularism, sexual freedom, and capitalism that underwrite Bumble’s anti-celibacy attitudes. This paper is oriented around two questions prompted by their campaign: First, what does Bumble’s choice to use explicitly religious language and imagery mean for hegemonic notions of sexual freedom? And second, why is celibacy—whether or not it’s understood as a religious commitment—posed as such a threat, and as incompatible with queer and feminist politics? I argue that in positioning itself in contradistinction to the perceived regulatory apparatus of religion, Bumble enacts its own regulatory protocol which mandates gendered and sexual self-governance and self-constitution through the pursuit of digitally-mediated sexual intimacy.
The transgender child is a highly contested figure in the politics and culture of the United States today. This paper demonstrates how both religious and secular narratives are deployed against childhood transition, analyzes their shared political theological commitments, and proposes an alternative framework. Religious arguments against childhood transition frame trans adults as both a sexual threat and religious outsiders, imagining them as an anti-Christian “cult” that preys on vulnerable youths. Secular arguments against childhood transition, meanwhile, presume the existence of a rational self buffered against undue outside influence. Both narratives share a commitment to cisness, as a structuring fantasy of normative development and repetition, as well as an understanding of transness as “bad religion” beyond the acceptable bounds of religious pluralism. We urgently need alternative theological and political narratives that affirmatively promote transition as a good for all who seek it, including children.
Recent works within trans studies in religion by Max Strassfeld and Colby Gordon have performed "bad" literal readings of sexed religious materials to resource trans possibilities within religious traditions. In addition, these thinkers have argued that contemporary critiques of such readings resonate with historical Christian polemics for allegorical, spiritual readings over material, literal readings. This paper develops this connection further with Saba Mahmood's description of the semiotic ideology of modern secularism in which "proper" religious reading practices must not collapse the arbitrary distinction between sign and signified. Therefore, current suspicions and critiques of trans literalism both as a reading practice and as an ongoing political commitment to the materialities of changing sex can be understood as one way in which transness (in current political parlance, "gender ideology") is marked as outside the bounds of proper secular rationality.