CO-SPONSORED SESSION: African Diaspora Religions Unit and Queer Studies in Religion Unit

Slippery Borderlands and Fluid Crossroads: African Diaspora Religions and Queer/Trans Identities

(Co-sponsorship between Queer Religions and African Diaspora Units)

Concretely defined by walls and guards; impeded by nature through mountains, deserts or bodies of water; or delineated by restrictive inchoate ideologies. Borders can have hard edges as well as amorphous boundaries. Borders are anchored in spatial mobility, situational identity, local contingency, and ambiguities of power. Historically borders have been political and ideological sites of economic exchange, cultural mixing, contestation of identity, empire, nation, and regional authority with the imposition of rules, edicts and restrictions. This co-sponsored panel proposes to explore the permeability of borders in light of the policies, politics and presentation of identity predicated on differing ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or systems of faith and spirituality.