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Reconsidering José Esteban Muñoz's Legacies on the Study of Religion

Submitted to Program Units
1: AAR's Queer Studies in Religion and Religion and Sexuality Units and SBL's Latino/a/e and Latin American Biblical Interpretation, Reading, Theory, and the Bible, Utopian Studies, Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures

Peter Anthony Mena, University of San Diego, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This year, two sessions consider the impact and influence of the work of the late queer performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz on the study of religion and sexuality, especially since 2024 is the 25th anniversary of the publication of Disidentifications. This session includes papers from both the study of religion and biblical studies.

Papers

  • Kathryn Common,

    Desiring Utopia: Church as Queer Performance

    Abstract

    This paper explores how utilizing queer utopian and reparative reading practices provides a liberative hermeneutic to examine feminist, womanist, and queer theologies of church as resources for helping to reimagine church as queer performance space. Jose Muñoz names utopian imaginings and queer performativity as a way to conjure a new future. With Muñoz as a guide, I ask can church be imagined through the lens of queer utopian performance, that is, church as a community that enacts and embodies a more just futurity? This question guides my current book project, Desiring Utopia: Church as Queer Performance. This paper explores the queer hermeneutical methods guiding the project that includes bringing together Muñoz’s emphasis on the utopian nature of queerness and queer performative spaces that function as an ephemeral place for doing futurity, along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for a reparative hermeneutics and the production of generative knowledges.

  • Elisaveta Dvorakk, Humboldt University of Berlin

    Performing Visual Knowledge after Disidentifications: On Photographic Agency and Agency of Photography

    Abstract

    This paper explores the Hashem el Madani Collection (1953-1982) within the Arab Image Foundation, focusing on exhibitions curated by Akram Zaatari. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentifications, the study examines visual knowledge performance in this epistemological field, exploring agency within photographic practices and photography as a medium. It critiques normative secular-liberal views through Saba Mahmood’s work on agency in the women’s mosque movement. Ulrike E. Auga’s notion of agency photography is discussed as a means to overcome colonial photographic canons. By integrating Muñoz’s, Mahmood’s, and Auga’s frameworks, the paper outlines new modalities of agency, emphasizing the transformative potential of piety in reshaping visual discourses on the 'Middle East'. This interdisciplinary approach offers insights into subject formation, human flourishing, and the politics of representation within both religious and secular-based historical and contemporary discourses on gender and sexuality in Lebanon.

  • Monica Rey, Boston University

    Feeling Brown Feeling Down: Latina Affective Performance(s) in the Normative Whiteness also Known as Biblical Studies Scholarship

    Abstract

    In this paper I wrestle with Muñoz's work on ethnicity, affect, and performance in helping me to understand the existence and presence of latinidad and brownness in academia¬– specifically as it manifests in Latina affective particularity. Muñoz explains “brown feeling” as “a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.” “Feeling brown, feeling down,” then, is “a modality of recognizing the racial performativity generated by an affective particularity that is coded to specific historical subjects who can provisionally be recognized by the term Latina.” What then does it mean to be “feeling brown, feeling down” in biblical studies scholarship as a Latina? This paper offers a few personal anecdotes of how I’ve navigated “feeling brown, feeling down” in the field and theorizes with Muñoz toward a more liberative frame from which to emancipate oneself from the hegemony of White biblical... cont.

  • Megan Robertson, University of Leeds

    Parodic Performance as a Site of Queer African Struggle: Religion and Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa

    Abstract

    Known as Africa’s gay capital, Cape Town is characterised by its colonial and apartheid legacies which have divided the urban centre and periphery in numerous ways. Most notably, the predominantly white city centre remains circled by a predominantly black periphery, known as the Cape Flats. While the city centre boasts a pink-friendly social hub, queer people of colour endure heightened levels of violence and marginalization. Further, the periphery is characterised by more conservative religious ideals, reminiscent of apartheid-era attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, Cape Town also harbours a tradition of subversive performance, dating back to the era of colonial slavery, when slaves temporarily challenged racial and gender norms in the Kaapse Klopse carnival. By drawing on performance theories by Muñoz and African feminists, this paper examines how contemporary theatre in Cape Town continues this legacy, potentially reshaping cultural paradigms to (re)imagine a utopia grounded in queer black consciousness.

  • Victoria Slabinski, University of Virginia

    Decolonial Memory, Queer Utopianism, and the Art of Lee Paje: Alternative Histories as Eschatological Interventions

    Abstract

    This paper draws from decolonial Christian theology and queer of color critique to explore the work of Philippines-based artist Lee Paje, focusing on her 2021 painting “Escape from the Ceremony of Wearing Skin” in which primordial Philippine beings encounter European colonizers who compel them to don gendered “skin.” In doing so, this paper attends to the theological insights provided by artwork that produces alternative histories and engages the past through a mythological register. Interpreted through the lenses of María Lugones’s decolonial feminism and José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopianism, Paje’s painting represents a critique of the colonial/modern gender system and an assertion that the world might have been – and might yet be – otherwise than the rigidities and hierarchies of this system. Paje’s alternative mythologies actively intervene in theological discourses by offering a means of envisioning eschatological realities beyond the constraints of unjust systems and bringing them into being.

Responding
Althea Spencer Miller, Drew University

Full Papers Available

No
Schedule Info

Monday, 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Session Identifier

A25-237/S25-231