Queer studies and religion

Anyone with a passing familiarity with queer theory should be suspicious of any introductory article on queer studies and religion, including this one. ¹ In making this observation, I cast no aspersion on the various lucid and helpful introductory overviews of queer theory (Hall, 2003; Jagose, 1996; Sullivan, 2003; Turner, 2000), queer studies and religion (Goodwin, 2011; Schippert, 2011; Schneider, 2000; Wilcox, 2012) and queer theology (Cheng, 2011; Cornwall, 2011). ² Rather, I want to draw attention to the tension between the demands of an introductory article—order, classify, simplify—and the suspicions of queer theory. Because “queer” has an array of meanings and “queer theory” includes a variety of scholarly endeavors, writing an introduction requires making choices about what queer means and what queer theory includes. ³ And such choices are precisely the kind of regulatory, normalizing, exclusionary practices that queer theory interrogates.

Judith Butler, one of the formative voices for queer theory, has confessed to being “permanently troubled by identity categories” (Butler, 1991: 14)—such as “woman” or “lesbian”—because of their exclusionary nature. Despite their social and psychic violence, such categories are required for thinking and communicating; they also enable important political, ethical, cultural, and intellectual acts. The challenge is to keep them supple and (relatively?) open, to signal their unstable and provisional nature (Butler, 1991: 17–19). Lee Edelman has contended that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (Edelman, 2004: 17). For Edelman, queerness is a perpetually disruptive pulsion that exposes the falsity of the cultural order’s promise of satisfaction and plenitude. How could one capture in an introductory overview (should one try?) that which seeks to undo the fantasy of mastery that inspires the writing of such summations?

With these worries in mind, I turn to competing uses of the term queer. ⁴ In marked opposition to Butler’s anxiety and Edelman’s assertion, “queer” is often used to name identity. It is convenient shorthand: a way of saying, less cumbersomely, “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual.” ⁵ As shorthand, however convenient, it occludes differences among these identities. Do the gender differences between lesbians and gay men make a difference? Do the differences between gay male and trans experiences of gender and sexuality make a difference? What about differences between bisexual and asexual experiences of desire? Or different capacities to “pass”? And then there are the various factors—race, nationality, age, religion, class, physical and mental ability, body size—that complicate these identity categories. Although signaling a laudable fantasy of political solidarity, this use of queer ignores queer theory’s critique of identity categories. Scholars of religion would likely use the term this way when analyzing how certain persons are understood within religious discourses or how certain persons make their own religious meanings.

Rather than naming an identity, “queer” can also name a relation to power. In the oft-quoted words of David Halperin:

“Queer” … acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but … available to anyone … marginalized because of her or his sexual practices (Halperin, 1995: 62). ⁶

Persons who identify, or are identified, as queer have varying relationships to “legitimate,” “dominant” power. By focusing on the historical, social, and cultural forces that mark some practices—and identities associated with them—as normative and others as deviant, by focusing on the ways practices become identities, this usage allows for a consideration of differences among those identified as queer. Despite Halperin’s focus on sexual practices, it also leaves room for thinking about race, religion, nationality, and corporeality (a suggestive list) as queer. Because it potentially unmoors queerness from sexuality, this use has the potential to downplay the erotic dimension of oppression and stigmatization that queer theory initially sought to understand. It also has the potential to dull the activist impulse of queer theory by focusing attention primarily on understanding the operation of marginalization and exclusion rather than developing strategies for resisting them. Scholars of religion would likely use the term this way when trying to understand how religious discourses shape, disrupt, or transform conceptions of normal and deviant.

Ron Long’s introduction to The Queer Bible Commentary exemplifies the range of work identified by the word queer. Long explains that attention must be given to biblical texts because they are used to resist “movements [to establish] the moral equivalence of homosexual and heterosexual love … which” he identifies as “the issue in GLBT … liberation” (Long, 2006: 2). Although Long understands that acts addressed in biblical texts and seemingly similar acts undertaken in the contemporary moment mean differently, he uses “homosexual” to describe both and implies a relation between acts and people. His article, therefore, despite its lead position in a queer commentary, ignores queer theory’s suspicion of transhistorical and transcultural descriptions of identity. Second, although Long includes the “T” in his acronym, he fails to reflect on how the movement for transgender liberation may be about something quite different than the morality of various forms of love. ⁷ (He also ignores how love itself has a history). Third, and perhaps most importantly, by characterizing the movement’s goal as legitimation, Long reveals a desire to decouple gayness and queerness (on Edelman’s and Halperin’s understandings)—a desire to eradicate the queerness of queerness. This movement wants to redefine normal rather than interrogate how norms are produced and enforced; it wants to be on the other side of dehumanizing violence rather than thinking through how the desire to be human perpetuates and strengthens the violence of normalization. Although not all the volume’s articles follow Long’s lead, the fact that The Queer Bible Commentary’s introduction is at such odds with concepts closely identified with queer theory signals the broad range of work in religious studies that names itself as queer.

But there is at least one more use of queer. This third usage designates a mode of inquiry: queering, as in queering a text, a tradition, an historical period (Goldberg, 1994; Ramer, 2010; Shore-Goss et al., 2013). To queer means to question, to interrogate, to trouble: it signifies a process by which the familiar, the dominant, the coherent are rendered strange, marginal, unstable. Scholars use the term this way when investigating the unacknowledged strangeness—especially in relation to gender and sexuality—of religious and theological discourses (Althaus-Reid, 2001; Burrus and Keller, 2007; Loughlin, 2007). But this use also raises identity questions: if queering is a mode of inquiry, what kind of inquiry is it?

Most accounts of queer theory give pride of place to the work of Michel Foucault (1977, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1986, 2006) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004a, 2004b, 2012). Much less frequently, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, 1993, 2003) is mentioned. And David Halperin’s (1990, 2002, 2012) work on the history of homosexuality is sometimes included. Although there are significant differences among these authors, Laurel Schneider characterizes their common focus as the “cultural deployment … of power through social constructions of sexuality and gender” (Schneider, 2000: 206). They examine the complex ways that erotic acts and other bodily performances are assigned gendered and sexual meanings in specific cultural and historical contexts. Their work is informed by close readings of literary, historical, philosophical, medical, and legal texts. Curiously, given their role in shaping understandings of gender and sexuality, these authors do not consider biblical, religious, or theological texts. Foucault’s History of Sexuality argues for the significance of the Christian penitential rite in making sexuality a significant feature of subjects’ sense of self (Foucault, 1978: 18–21), but Foucault’s interest in Christian practices is rarely mentioned in “secular” discussions of his work. Mark Jordan (1997, 2000, 2011) and Virginia Burrus (2004, 2007) have produced rich histories of Christian understandings of sexual and gender identity in conversation with this work. ⁸ Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pelligrini (2003) have produced an excellent collection of articles on Jewish identities and texts. Saba Mahmood (2005) and R. Marie Griffith (1997) rely on Foucauldian conceptions of power to analyze women’s agency in seemingly repressive religious contexts. ⁹ In an edited volume, Ellen Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (2006) show the value of Butler’s understanding of gender performativity for the study of religion. ¹⁰ In tension with this work’s insistence that stable, coherent identities are products of social and cultural processes, rather than ontological realities, Butler frequently states that the goal of queer politics is to render previously unthinkable, abjected subjectivities culturally intelligible, to rescue maligned subjectivities (that exist outside social and cultural discourses) from their mistreatment. By suggesting that the borders of social inclusion are inexhaustibly elastic and that cultural legitimation is the sought-after prize, Butler’s work blunts the critique of identity by calling for its deferred recognition. ¹¹

Some scholars have questioned these authors’ centrality, suggesting alternate genealogies for queer theory. ¹² José Esteban Muñoz, for example, suggests that the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, especially her 1981 anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, be recognized as a foundational text for queer theory (Muñoz, 1999: 21–22). Bridge, Muñoz contends, would compel consideration of the “multiple antagonisms that index issues of class, gender, and race, as well as sexuality” (Muñoz, 1999: 22). While including Bridge, Michael Hames-García begins his genealogy of queer theory with African-American author James Baldwin (Hames-García, 2011: 26). With Baldwin as a founding father, race and religion become central to queer theory. Without calling for alternative genealogies, scholars have critiqued Foucault for failing to consider race (McClintock, 1995; Stoller, 1995), whereas others have relied on Foucault to show that race and sexuality are co-constitutive and cannot be separated, even analytically (McWhorter, 2004; Somerville, 2000). ¹³ Jasbir Puar’s (2007) analysis of the ways nationality, religion, race and sexuality work together to mark certain bodies as exemplary and others as dangerously other shows scholars of religion they must pay attention to “multiple antagonisms.” ¹⁴ By showing that sexuality can never meaningfully be separated from other facets of identity and the cultural discourses that give them meaning, this body of scholarship demands a broader interrogation of identity formation. It also, by implication, demands that religious discourses be considered when trying to understand the social operation of sexuality—and, as importantly, vice versa. It bears noting that Teresa de Lauretis (1991) coined the term “queer theory” to name an approach that would attend to gender and racial difference when analyzing sexuality. By sometimes treating, conceptually and rhetorically, racial and ethnic identities as if they have a reality that sexuality does not, and by sometimes suggesting, implicitly or explicitly, that a racial identity, properly lived and actualized, can serve as a telos in a way that a sexual identity should not, this work sometimes exempts race and ethnicity from the critique of identity categories that characterizes much queer theory.

A third approach to identity within queer theory gives pride of place to psychoanalytic discourses. This strain of queer theory is virtually absent from religious studies and theology. For example, one could read the introductory works cited in the first paragraph and never know that Butler and Sedgwick—as well as Leo Bersani (1986, 1988, 1995), Tim Dean (2000), Teresa de Lauretis (1994, 2008) and Lee Edelman (2004)—engage psychoanalytic texts carefully, and often sympathetically. ¹⁵ Although sharp disagreements among these authors make generalizations complicated (see, for example, Caserio et al., 2006; Dean, 2008; Halberstam, 2011: 106–111), they share an interest in the ways desire and the (death) drive foreclose the possibility of a stable, coherent subjectivity. Their work—particularly Bersani’s early writings (1986, 1988) and Edelman’s recent offering (2004)—calls attention to the ways the desire to be a coherent subject generates deep hostility toward that and those considered other. Thus, responding to the problem of normalization’s inherent violence will require more than understanding how normative identities have been fashioned or, mapping identity’s complex co-constituting factors, it will, potentially, require an abandonment of the very desire to be a subject. ¹⁶ These approaches, which consider the political and ethical possibilities that flow from the drive’s dissolution of identity, should be of particular interest to scholars interested in mysticism and apophatic discourses. They could also be generatively paralleled with conversations about the “sacred” (Bataille, 1986; Caillois, 1959; Durkheim, 1995; Kristeva, 1982). Recently, Lynne Huffer (2010) has argued that queer theory has irresponsibly combined Foucault and psychoanalysis. She urges a return to Foucault, with attention to the significance of his History of Madness for queer theory. Although Huffer’s analysis sometimes conflates therapeutic practice with psychoanalytic theory in a way that prevents her from seeing how the latter is similar to the Foucault she champions, her work shows that queer theorists need to exercise more care when assembling their theoretical resources.

If I were a fairy of different kind, I would be tempted to wave my wand and erase the words queer and queer theory from our lexicon, from our publishing catalogues, job postings, and dissertation abstracts. Like much fairy mischief, this would have disastrous consequences: it would render mute a great deal of incisive, generative, courageous work. So, instead of this fantasized fiat, I conclude instead with an earnest plea. In our capacity as producers of queer scholarship on religion, can we be more circumspect in naming what we are doing? Rather than simply calling our work “queer theory” or “queer studies,” can we specify that we are studying the ritual practices of neo-pagan lesbians as a form of self-stylization (Foucault and Butler), or second-generation Filipino gay men’s negotiation of Islamic practice as a site where race, nationality, religion, and sexuality converge (Muñoz and Puar), or the political possibilities of Kleinian readings of Buddhism as a means of thinking anew the relation between religion and psychoanalysis (Sedgwick and Edelman)? As readers of queer scholarship on religion, could we be more insistent about knowing an author’s foundational concepts and formative genealogies? Because many of us doing this work belong to socially and culturally vulnerable populations, we must never fail to be comrades—on dissertation committees, on hiring committees, on tenure-review committees. But because this work is at a state of maturity where we are no longer having a single conversation, if we ever were, we must also be willing to be generative critics, in a fashion that forwards—by clarifying and specifying—the conversation(s).

The challenges of proceeding without a clearly discernible object or method of inquiry should not create undue anxiety for anyone in the field of religious or theological studies. These fields have developed university departments, professional associations, journals, book series, and endowed chairs without methodological unanimity. Of course, peaceable co-existence has not always (ever?) been easy: it has involved rancor and hostility; it has required the difficult work of delineating lines of inquiry and their relation. Because introductory articles on queer studies and religion should be met with skepticism, consider this article that traces possibilities and marks points of entry an invitation to join the conversation.