Religion and Gender, vol. 1, no.

1 (2011), 66-84
www.religionandgender.org
URN: NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101578
ISSN: 1878-5417
Publisher: Igitur Publishing (Utrecht)
Copyright: this work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution License (3.0)

Implications of Queer Theory for the Study of Religion

and Gender: Entering the Third Decade
CLAUDIA SCHIPPERT

Abstract
This essay explores the conceptual and contextual shifts in queer theoretical work
as it is entering into its third decade of articulation. The essay reviews important
recent themes in, and examines implications of, queer theoretical scholarship for
the study of religion and gender. I suggest that among the implications are a more
un-disciplined study of religion (and secularism) that takes seriously shifts
resulting from transnational and diasporic queer scholarship, as well as shifts in
conceptions of agency and resistance resulting from analyses and critique of
homonormative positions, and that can critically intervene in homonationalism
and Islamophobia.

Keywords
Queer theory, queer critique, homonormativity, queer religious studies, North
America.

Author affiliation
Claudia Schippert is Associate Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at the
University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, USA. Her research is in queer
theory and religion, feminist and queer ethics, religion and popular culture, as
well as critical approaches to bodies and sexualities. Her current research projects
 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

include work in queer pedagogy, queer popular culture studies, and a project
tentatively titled ‘Queer Discipline’. Email: claudiaschippert@gmail.com

Introduction 1
Queer theory has existed for roughly two decades and has contributed to
diverse fields of inquiries in a number of academic disciplines and areas of
scholarly engagement. Originally developed in the early 1990s, at the
intersection of theory and activism, queer theorists intended to
problematize the production of dominant and normative categories of
sexuality. Drawing on Michael Warner’s phrase, ‘resistance to
heteronormativity’ served as a summarizing description for queer
theoretical projects. 2 Much of the work in the first decade was spent
explicating how norms became networked through practices and
institutions in producing and maintaining heteronormativity. While queer
theorists in academic contexts intended to disrupt the reliance on identity
categories that had been the foundation for a great deal of liberationist
politics, some early criticism pointed to the persistent whiteness and
dominant literary discourses engaged. In the study of religion and gender,
liberationist approaches had figured prominently and significant debates
around the importance of agency and community took place.
The shift from identity-based analysis to the queer positionality of
‘resistance to heteronormativity’ helpfully shifted the subject at the centre
of the study of religion and gender. Whereas earlier approaches may have
relied on assumed gender divisions (men’s rituals, women in Judaism and
so on), queer theory provided a challenge to the definitions of categories of
gender and helped to disrupt existing perspectives of investigation and
discover new ones. Applying the subversive intentions of queer theory to
the study of religion, liberation theologians, religious studies scholars, and
religious ethicists began to explore queer theory’s potential in the late
1990s. Among the themes that scholars of religion have discussed are
queer challenges to Christian theology, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender) and queer readings of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures,

1
The author gratefully acknowledges support received through a sabbatical leave from
the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida.
2
M. Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1993, xxvi.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

and explorations of the intersections of sexual and religious identities. 3

Important extensions of liberation theology included queer theology from
the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion; Marcella Althaus-
Reid’s work is exemplary for these developments. 4 The implications of
transgender and intersex identities for theology and the study of religion
have more recently become important themes.5
It should be noted that, at this point of the development and
dispersion of queer theoretical work in the academy, no essay can cover all
of queer theory and religion. This essay’s scope is limited to a primarily
North American context and to religious studies as it surfaces within
scholarly discussions in that geographic context. While queer studies in the
North American context surely intersect with many other fields, in this
essay the recently prominent contributions from and intersections with
postcolonial studies are foregrounded. I argue that these recent
approaches provide sets of particularly critical and productive challenges
with far-reaching implications for the study of gender and religion.
In this essay I thus focus on the conceptual and contextual shifts
that queer theoretical work is contributing to academic discourse. In
particular, I suggest that the very discipline of religion is being challenged,
certainly in the ways it has been constituted in its modern academic

3
R. E. Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up, Cleveland: Pilgrim Press 2002; R. E.
Goss and M. West (eds.), Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, Cleveland:
Pilgrim Press 2000; D. Boyarin, D. Itzkovits, and A. Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and
the Jewish Question, New York: Columbia University Press 2003.
4
M. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and
Politics, New York: Routledge 2001; The Queer God, New York: Routledge 2003. In
Indecent Theology she argues that all theology is sexual theology and, bringing queer
theory into further productive conversation with feminist materialism and liberation
theology; in her subsequent study, The Queer God, she challenges the oppressive
powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness, and global capitalism.
5
T. Sheffield, ‘Performing Jesus: A Queer Counternarrative of Embodied Transgression’
in Theology & Sexuality 1:3 (2008), 233-258; S. Cornwall, Sex and the Uncertainty in the
Body of Christ: Intersex Condition and Christian Theology, Sheffield: Equinox 2011.
Sheffield demonstrates that ‘a queer reading of the Chalcedic body, analysed alongside
transgender narratives, is a site from which to construct identities of hybridity and
transgression that disrupt ancient and contemporary fictive narratives of normative
gender and sexuality.’ Similarly, Cornwall’s first full-length examination of the
theological implications of physical intersex conditions and their medical treatment
explores the necessary shifts in a body-focused theology when we take seriously
perspectives that defy binary or complementary gendered embodiment.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

version, when we take seriously what current queer studies bring to the
discussion. Likewise, what emerge as proper objects of study for (queer)
scholarship on gender and religion is affected. The essay contains four
sections. In the first section I ask what it means to study religion queerly
and argue for studies of religion in unlikely places and with at times
unlikely trajectories. Specifically exploring studies that are queering religion
(and secularism), I point to examples such as the study of an organization
of parodic drag performers that is (not?) religious and the study of
secularism through the lenses of queer religious studies. While the
discipline of religious studies has adapted queer methodologies only
haltingly, these are some promising developments. I argue that in order to
study religion queerly, religious studies finally need to become (more) un-
disciplined.
Secondly, the rising importance of transnational and diasporic
queer and feminist scholarship, especially within the North American
context, with which this essay is primarily concerned, is briefly reviewed
and potential implications for religious studies are discussed. In the third
section I explore what since Lisa Duggan coined the term has been called
‘homonormativity’: the emergence and analysis of a homosexual
normative position that defends itself against ‘queerer’ others. I argue that
these trends toward an idealization (or perhaps assimilation) of ‘queer’ are
dangerously problematic – and they certainly are contrary to the non-
normative etymology and scholarly use of ‘queer’. Scholars rightly call for
vigilance and a shift in attention to a different conception and function of
‘normativity’, especially, perhaps, within queer ethics. This direction of
critique within queer studies is helpful to – and needs to be considered in
further development of – queer approaches to religion and gender. The
fourth section focuses on a current analysis of homonationalist strategies
and their connection to Islamophobia and US domestic anti-terrorism
strategies. The resulting increased detention and incarceration, in the US
and elsewhere, emerges as a relevant and critical topic for the queer study
of religion and gender in a contemporary political context.

Studying Religion Queerly

What does it mean to study religion queerly? Applying queer theoretical
approaches to/in the study of religion results in different topics that can
surface as proper objects of study. It is to be expected that these topics
change depending on the geographic, cultural and political context and the

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

shape of studying religion queerly is thus never finally determined. As I

have suggested elsewhere:
The content of a queer theoretical approach, which seeks to engage and
disrupt these [heteronormative] procedures, varies depending on the shape
or function normativities take in particular settings. Consequently, at the
intersection with the study of religion, realms of ‘appropriate’ areas of
study might shift and new fields can come into focus (transvestites, gay
bars, and drag queens as realms for learning about the performance of
sanctity, as Althaus-Reid would have it, for example). 6
The history of early applications of queer theory to religious studies has
been anything but straightforward. While there has been ongoing work to
synthesize queer approaches to religion and gender, early anthologies like
the one edited by Comstock and Henking exemplify the invocation of queer
as a summarizing term for LGBT identities without much space given to
queer theoretical critiques. Yet Thumma and Gray’s Gay Religion gathers
interesting essays that go beyond merely gay identified religion or religious
practitioners. 7
In the context of theology, Loughlin recently reflected on some
early queer theorists’ moving away from queer terminology, because it had
become too implicated in normative and identity-based strategies. He
suggests that theology might be catching up a bit more slowly, which
might, in turn, offer its own set of possibilities:
But the term [queer] – and its deployment – is less well known in theology,
and so it is still possible that this positionality, this distancing or divergence
from what is held as normative, will serve to destabilize and undo that
normativity: the surety of heteropatriarchal Christianity. But in the case of
theology there is something more. 8
Loughlin has in mind here the specific parallel he sees between a [queer]
‘identity without an essence’ and what some Christian theologians – going
as far back, he suggests, as Thomas Aquinas – would call ‘the name of God’.
Further exploring the challenging intersections of queer theory and
theology in the recent anthology Queer Theology, many of the Anglo-
American contributors make the body and desire a central issue for

6
C. Schippert, ‘Queer Theory and the Study of Religion’ in Rever 5:4 (2005), 90-99.
7
G. D. Comstock and S. E. Henking (eds.), Que(e)ring Religion: A Critical Anthology, New
York: Continuum 1997; S. Thumma and E. R. Gray (eds.), Gay Religion, Walnut Creek:
AltaMira Press 2005.
8
G. Loughlin (ed.), Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, Malden: Blackwell
2007, 9-10.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

reflection in Christian theology. They demonstrate, for example, that a

great deal of Christian texts and traditions are significantly queerer than
the development of modern Church doctrines and teachings might suggest.
One goal of the ongoing development of such a queer theology, then,
might be to uncover the queerness that was always already in Christianity,
perhaps even at its very core. Such an argument resembles literary theorist
Eve Sedgwick’s earlier queer theoretical work in literary theory. 9 Sedgwick
had claimed that modern European and North American literature must be
read from an anti-homophobic perspective in order to understand the
formation of modern normatively gendered narratives. Sedgwick pointed
to the frequent deployment of erotic triangles that are central to the
development of (heteronormative) characters. Indeed, she argued that
much of modern, presumably heterosexual, masculine identity is based on
homosocial relationships. In what might constitute a parallel move, queer
theologians such as David Matzko McCarthy re-read the queer desires of
saints. And Tina Beattie examines the particular heterosexualization and
domestication of Mary within Christian history. She suggests how a critical
rereading can uncover the queerness, or non-heteronormativity, of a
Christian attempt to seek immortality not through raising offspring but
through eternity in Christ. 10
Even when focusing on religious studies beyond theology, as I do in
the remainder of this essay, the intersections of queer theory and religion
have been notoriously difficult and underexplored and ‘the study of
religion seems to be adapting only haltingly and partially to contemporary
developments in LGBT studies and queer theory’, as Melissa Wilcox
suggests in her assessment of the field of queer studies in religion.11
Nonetheless, scholars of religion and gender have much to contribute to

9
E. K. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New
York: Columbia University Press 1985; Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University
of California Press 1990.
10
Loughlin summarizes ‘the undertaking of queer theology’ as follows: ‘to make the
same different, the familiar strange, the odd wonderful; and to do so not out of
perversity, but in faithfulness to the different, strange, and wonderful by which we are
encountered in the story of Jesus and the body of Christ’ (31). The contributors to the
Queer Theology anthology vary greatly in their investment in perversity versus faithful
engagement with the tradition, but taken as a whole the collection can illustrate some
of the current struggles at the disciplinary intersection of queer theory and theology.
11
M. M. Wilcox, ‘Outlaws on In-Laws? Queer Theory, LGBT Studies, and Religious Studies’
in K. E. Lovaas, J. P. Elia, and G. A. Yep (eds.), LGBT Studies and Queer Theory: New
Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain, Binghamton NY: Haworth Press 2006,
73.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

queer studies – and much to further develop in applying contemporary

queer theory to the study of religion. Wilcox points to the potential of
‘paying close attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality that
religions hide in plain sight […] and the roles of religion in both inscribing
and challenging heteronormativity and dualistic conceptions of gender.’12
Work in performance studies has been influential in the formation
of queer theory from the beginning. For example, performance studies
scholars like José Muñoz have shown the importance of investigating
performance to glean queer strategies of resistance and disidentification,
especially among queers of colour. 13 Paying careful attention to queer
practices and rituals from the perspective of religious studies can point
those studying religion and gender in important directions of rethinking
identity, agency, and resistance. In this vein, some scholars have turned to
queer practices within realms that might be considered akin to or part of
religion while they may not always have surfaced as legitimate areas of
study within the academic discipline.
Wilcox makes the case that while the Sisters of Perpetual
Indulgence are not a religious organization, they offer a rich site to rethink
existing categories of ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘secular’. 14 The white-faced
Sisters combine Catholic imagery with drag and leather culture and offer a
complex site for queer religious negotiations. As the Los Angeles house
explains, they are:
an order of gay male, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and non-gay nuns
whose mission is the expiation of stigmatic guilt and the promulgation of
universal joy. The same way the Catholic Church sold indulgences in the
Middle Ages to forgive people their sins, the Sisters have granted the
lesbian and gay community a perpetual indulgence, forgiving them of all sin
and guilt often placed upon them by right-wing religious and political
organizations.’ The Sisters’ main goals, says the Los Angeles chapter, are ‘to
strengthen [their] community through drag activism, by raising much-
needed funds for community charities, and by bringing about a better
understanding of gay spirituality’. 15

12
Wilcox, ‘Outlaws’ 93.
13
J. E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999; Cruising Utopia: The Politics and
Performance of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press 2009.
14
M. M. Wilcox, Queer Women and Religious Individualism, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press 2009.
15
Wilcox, Queer Women, 77.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

Wilcox demonstrates that the distinction of compliance and resistance is

complicated when the group functions for some queers ‘as a central part of
[their] religious and spiritual practice.’
As a parody of the Roman Catholic Church, gleefully intoning their rallying
cry—‘Go forth and sin some more!’—the Sisters’ playful queering of
religious space intersects with a searing critique. Yet as a secular
organization, the Sisters become sacralized queer space when members (…)
find in them a deep expression and source of spirituality. 16
Taking seriously the complexity of parodic and other practices at the
intersection of what is defined as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ can afford
scholars of gender and religion insights into the manipulations of norms
and agency at play. At the same time, attention to the simultaneity of
religious and secular significance of organizations such as the Sisters raises
the related issue of rethinking the distinction between definitions of the
secular and religious itself.

Within modern European and North American contexts, secularism has

been viewed as the other to religion. And yet, Janet Jakobsen and Ann
Pellegrini argued that the religious/secular distinction is a distinction
without a difference. They explored, in Love the Sin, how specifically
Protestant Christian claims have entered the legal decisions of the United
States Supreme Court and other purportedly secular institutions. 17 In
demonstrating the religious, and specifically Protestant, basis of sexual
regulation in US law, Jakobsen and Pellegrini bring sexuality and gender
studies together with religious studies and ethics to bear on issues of
contemporary sexual regulation. While developing a queer ethics of valuing
sex differently, their work also signals another important direction of queer
studies in religion, that is, the emerging work on the Christian nature of US
secularism and implications for addressing secularism in critically informed
ways.
In the introduction to the edited volume, Secularisms, Jakobsen and
Pellegrini further describe their approach:
Our argument is not that this [modern American] secularism is really
(essentially) religion in disguise, but rather that in its dominant, market-
based incarnation it constitutes a specifically Protestant form of secularism.

16
Wilcox, Queer Women, 129 and 187.
17
J. R. Jakobsen and A. Pellegrini, ‘Getting Religion’ in E. A. Castelli (ed.), Women,
Gender, and Religion: A Reader, New York: Palgrave 2001, 518-527.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

The claim of the secularization narrative is that the secularism that

developed from these European and Christian origins is, in fact, universal
and fully separate from Christianity. As a number of critics have now
argued, however, and as we shall see [in the anthology], there are reasons
to doubt that claim. Secularism remains tied to a particular religion, just as
the secular calendar remains tied to Christianity. 18
Many contributions to Secularisms demonstrate that the very categories of
‘secular’ and ‘religious’ need to be rethought, including the specific
relationships of secularisms to religions other than Christianity in other
parts of the world.19 I suggest that one particularly timely project within
queer studies in religion that is always also implicating the study of gender,
is related to the undoing, or recalibrating, of binary terminology of religion
and secularism ‘so as to open new configurations in the political debates
structured by them.’ 20
When approaching religion queerly, then, we can no longer simply
‘add’ queer identities to an ‘inclusive’ liberationist agenda (not that there is
anything simple about liberation). The implications of the challenges and
rethinking of the field of religion indicate that what is being studied as the
discipline of religion is shifting to focus on previously excluded topics.
Studying religion queerly can be, and perhaps will need to be, (more) un-
disciplined.

Transnational and Diasporic Queer Scholarship

A great deal of scholarly activity in the second decade of queer theoretical
work in North America concerned the expansion of queer theoretical
approaches beyond the initial fields of literary and film studies. In this
context, political and social issues have moved further to the centre of
investigation. What ‘counts’ as a queer topic has shifted to include
questions that no longer add as an afterthought but rather centrally
explore race and ethnicity, and that approach issues of gender and sexual
identity from within diasporic or transnational contexts. While some might
argue that this is a specifically North American preoccupation, I would
assert that the material circumstances of diasporic or migrant bodies and

18
J. R. Jakobsen and A. Pellegrini (eds.), Secularisms, Durham: Duke University Press
2008, 3.
19
For example Najmabadi’s essay on Muslim feminism in Iran or Rajan’s discussion of
Indian feminist concerns about the privatization of religion and related proposals of a
reconfiguring of public relations between religious and secular discourses in India.
20
Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Secularisms 10.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

communities emerge as an increasingly global phenomenon with the

implicit need for critical engagement in local or specific national political
strategies. 21 The negotiations of material circumstances tend to occur in
connection with religious practices and identities and thus offer a rich field
for ongoing explorations of religion and gender. 22
Theoretical approaches to transnational sexualities and queer
diasporic identities have challenged queer theorists to address identities,
community and consumption practices, and the workings of kinship and
family practices in more complex configurations. No longer is the white gay
Western (Christian/secular) man the assumed author, audience, or object
of study within queer theoretical texts. Prolific and promising work has
been forged within queer South Asian studies. For example Gayatri
Gopinath examines the ways in which discourses of sexuality are
inextricable from prior and continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism,
racialization, and migration. Martin Manalansan’s ethnography of
immigrant Filipino gay men in New York City carefully traces how their
identity develops not necessarily along the same lines as queer modernity
or citizenship narratives would suggest.23 In these areas, the relevance of
religion in the creation and maintenance, but also the disruption of
normative and queer configurations, is not to be underestimated, but has
not yet been fully explored.

21
See for example A. Cruz-Malave and M. F. Manalansan (eds), Queer Globalizations:
Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, New York: New York University Press 2002.
22
For example, several essays in the important 2005 special issue of Social Text, ‘What is
Queer About Queer Studies Now?’, discuss the by now infamous ‘Queer Shame’
conference in Michigan in 2003, specifically exploring how the almost exclusive
whiteness of the invited speakers became a visible marker for a problem increasingly
addressed in terms of the normativity of whiteness, maleness, and North American
cultural identity within academic queer studies, or what Perez argues is a ‘resistance in
white establishmentarian queer theory to thinking race critically.’ H. Perez, ‘You Can
Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!’ in D. L. Eng, J. Halberstam, and J. E. Muñoz
(eds.), What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now? Social Text 84-85, 23:3-4 (2005), 171-
191. Also see J. Halberstam, ‘Shame and White Gay Masculinity’ in Social Text 84-85,
23:3-4 (2005), 219-234.The Social Text special issue marks a collection of work by
younger scholars who have since developed diverse approaches within queer studies.
Their work’s potential influence within the study of religion and gender is still not fully
explored, but many significant points of connection exist.
23
G. Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures,
Durham: Duke University Press 2005. M. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in
the Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press 2003.

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One example of specific attention to the complexity of religious,

sexual/gender and national identity negotiations is found in Salvador Vidal-
Ortiz’s work on the syncretic Santería. 24 He demonstrates that when queer
practitioners attempted to distance themselves from certain constructions
of gay identity that would be recognizable to mainstream US culture, this
break from gay identification should not be viewed simply as a result of
homophobia. Rather, he suggests,
[W]hat is seen as homophobia by some is actually a negotiation of a
relationship to ‘Americanness,’ a resistance to constructs of gayness, and a
rejection of a culture of ethnicity-based consumerism and identification.
Because the sexual identity formation literature has not given much room
for anything outside of a gay identification – the alternative most often is
adherence to a homophobic culture … – ruptures within sexual identities
that do not belong to either of those, or to both simultaneously, are twice
unintelligible. 25
The emerging body of queer ethnic and diasporic scholarship challenges
many assumptions in conventional – including queer conventional –
scholarship regarding kinship or same sex desire. It is producing new
perspectives and a reordering of issues concerning identities, nationalism,
communities, and material practices. Scholars of religion and gender have
a rich emerging body of critical work to engage – to which scholarship
attentive to gendered rituals or transformative practices can make
important contributions.
The analysis of gender and religion in popular culture in particular
could bring recent queer studies into helpful conversations with religious
studies. For example, BUBOT NIHAR (Paper Dolls), a documentary by Israeli
filmmaker Tomer Heymann, chronicles the lives of several transgender
Filipino migrant workers in Israel, who are also performers in a weekly drag
show, called Paper Dolls, for the Filipino queer community in Tel Aviv.26
Filling the positions taken by Palestinian workers before the second
Intifada in 2000, most work as health caretakers for elderly Orthodox
Jewish Israelis and are precariously positioned within Israeli society,
because they are ineligible for citizenship and their work visas are tied to
their employment. The documentary traces several individuals’

24
S. Vidal-Ortiz, ‘Sexuality and Gender in Santería: LGBT Identities at the Crossroad of
Santería Religious Practices and Beliefs’ in S. Thumma and E. R. Gray (eds.), Gay
Religion, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press 2005, 115-137.
25
Vidal-Ortiz, ‘Sexuality’, 128.
26
BUBOT NIYAR (Paper Dolls). Dir. T. Heymann 2006. Prod. Claudius Films.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

transgender identities as they are differently defined vis-à-vis dominant

norms both of Israeli society or larger ‘Western’ normative discourse, and
vis-à-vis the pre-migration Filipino context. Allan Isaac argues that
Heymann’s depiction of the rituals and communities invokes ‘multiple sets
of mediations in gender and national belonging, but gestures towards a
different sense of pleasure, danger and beauty/byuti, a concept elaborated
on by Martin Manalansan in Global Divas.’ 27 Additionally, I would note, we
might find rich layers of signification that relate to gender and religion,
such as the question of how Jewish and Catholic practices of kinship
intersect with narratives of national belonging that support and/or undo
specific gendered roles.
In addition to a shift away from, or beyond, disciplinary (or modern
discursive) conceptions of religion as a field of study, studying religion from
within transnational frameworks challenges normative assumptions of
race, cultural and religious location and identity. Geography and economy
matter, that is to say materially register and influence lived reality, in ways
that need to be more fully explored within a queer study of religion and
gender, or a study of religion that is done queerly.

Homonormativity and Critique of Queer Ideals

It was within the context of an emerging ‘responsible’ homonormative
position, marked by attacks on promiscuity and other deviant sexual
practices from within the gay community, that ‘a new strain of gay
moralism’ developed. It began to advocate for rights in increasingly narrow
private realms, almost exclusively organized around the issues of same sex
marriage and gay participation in the military. 28 Lisa Duggan first used the
term ‘the new homonormativity’ in an article describing the sexual politics
of neoliberal conservatism, offering an extended critique of approaches
such as conservative American gay journalist Andrew Sullivan’s aim to
establish the ‘normality’ of the ‘good’ and responsible gay subject along
similar lines to the ones defining the heteronormative subject. In other
words, establishing the subject’s normality and value by distinguishing
itself from and vilifying as deviant the other, who is often racialized, class-

27
A. Isaac, ‘Filipino Visuality and Other Minor Diversions’, unpublished paper presented
at Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities, Rutgers University, 9 October
2010.
28
L. Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’ in R.
Castronovo and D. D. Nelson (eds.), Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized
Cultural Politics, Durham: Duke University Press 2002, 182.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

marked, sexually deviant, and/or unpatriotic. This new homonormativity,

Duggan suggests, ‘is a politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains
them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and
a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and
consumption.’ 29
Attention to the operation of norms within queer approaches had
been important in earlier queer theoretical work in religion, for example
Jakobsen and Pellegrini’s Love the Sin. 30 More recently, the seemingly
ubiquitous definition of queer as ‘resistance to normativity’ has been
critically evaluated and the implicit operations of norms within queer
approaches themselves have found closer scrutiny.
In particular, transgressiveness or resistance that is understood as
‘freedom from norms’ had become something like a queer ideal which,
problematically, is too easily connected to liberal individualism and
conceptions of a humanist subject. Such a queer ideal also often relies on
an emancipatory or progressive narrative that would require the ideal
queer to emancipate himself (sic!) from practices and spaces that are
viewed as normative, or from communities and practices that are ‘not
quite as free yet’. Such an ideal(ized) queer subject often relies on a
stylized adherence to capitalist consumer choices that imagines escape
from the bonds of family and other normative spaces as ideally queer.
Conversely, such an approach often considers all practices and persons
who remain ‘caught’ within normative spaces as unable to enact resistance
or queer agency. As Jasbir Puar writes: ‘In this problematic definition of
queerness, individual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather
than complicity with them, thus equating resistance and agency.’ 31 I want
to suggest that recent work by Saba Mahmood can provide important

29
Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity’, 179.
30
J. R. Jakobsen and A. Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits
of Religious Tolerance, Boston: Beacon Press 2004. Also see J. R. Jakobsen, ‘Queer Is?
Queer Does?: Normativity and Resistance’ in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, 4:4 (1998), 551-536; C. Schippert, ‘Containing Uncertainty: Sexual Values and
Citizenship’ in K. E. Lovaas, J. P. Elia, and G. A. Yep (eds.), LGBT Studies and Queer
Theory: New Conflicts, Collaborations, and Contested Terrain, Binghamton NY:
Haworth Press 2006, 285-307.
31
J. K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke
University Press 2007, 23.

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perspectives by studying feminist and queer agency that supports and

consolidates norms.32
Mahmood’s ethnography of a women’s piety movement that is part
of the larger Islamist movement in Egypt demonstrates how ethics and
politics are connected in the moral reform movement whose orthodox
practices tend to be viewed as irrelevant or of no great significance to
political considerations. In her careful ethnographic study, Mahmood
demonstrates that the women’s practices accomplish negotiations with
various levels of authority, even though many of their activities might not
be noticed by a typical feminist postcolonial observer. Mahmood confronts
the difficulties that a great deal of feminist analysis has with the dilemma
of ‘women’s active support for socioreligious movements that sustain
principles of female subordination.’ 33 As her study shows, rather than
avoiding such case studies by declaring the groups to suffer from ‘false
consciousness’, a more nuanced investigation of agency can shed light on
complex negotiations that can queer/disrupt/shift the modern Western
white conception of agency (and, by extension, also a queer insistence on
transgression of norms as the sine qua non of queer agency). Such an
argument is especially important in the study of Muslim communities and
practices, as they continue to be perceived in a steadfastly ‘backwards’
manner in the mainstream Western (including feminist and queer
scholarly) imagination.
Mahmood shifts from an individual focus on agency to one that
accounts for complexity in the networks of power and authority that give
rise to the subject. She is particularly critical of existing feminist scholarly
work on resistance that is preoccupied with finding resistance and
subversion of existing norms and as a result, at times, remains blind to the
productive practices that might draw on particular norms and can
nonetheless result in shifted configurations enabling life.
I believe it is critical that we ask whether it is even possible to identify a
universal category of acts—such as those of resistance—outside of the
ethical and political conditions within which such acts acquire their
particular meaning. Equally important is the question that follows: does the
category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the

32
S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2005. Also see S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion,
New York: Routledge 2004; Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,
Durham: Duke University Press 2006.
33
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 5.

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 Schippert: Implications of Queer Theory

analytics of power—a teleology that makes it hard for us to see and

understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated
by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms? 34
Detaching the notion of agency from the goals of progressive politics,
Mahmood deploys a Foucauldian approach to ethical practices in
describing how norms of modesty and piety are lived within the
movements she studies. She points out that ‘the most interesting features
of this debate lie not so much in whether the norm of modesty is subverted
or enacted, but in the radically different ways in which the norm is
supposed to be lived and inhabited.’35 Shifting the debate thus can also
open up new ways of understanding how norms and agency interact.
Agency on the part of the women participating in the mosque movement
in Egypt is thus delinked from specific liberatory feminist ideals or concepts
of agency tied to progressive politics. Nonetheless, when observed closely,
the women’s practices have specific consequences in the configurations of
power. For example in the realm of secular-liberal sociability and secular-
liberal governance, even though these results may not map exactly on the
intentions of the pietist movement.
What emerges in Politics of Piety is not a series of typical activist or
progressive practices, but ‘[t]he political efficacy of these movements is (...)
a function of the work they perform in the ethical realm—those strategies
of cultivation through which embodied attachments to historically specific
forms of truth come to be forged.’ 36 Earlier Mahmood had pointed out that
one ‘might say that the political agenda of the mosque movement (the
‘resistance’ it poses to secularization) is a contingent and unanticipated
consequence of the effects its ethical practices have produced in the social
field.’37 Mahmood intervenes helpfully in feminist approaches that
would too easily presuppose the kind of agency they wish to discover or
evaluate in progressive and women’s movements. She aims at recentering
the relevance of ‘resistance’ and the category of agency away from a
prediscursive voluntary subject to one emerging as effect of bodily and
religious practices. In her methodologically useful reflections on the ethics
of critique, Mahmood further demonstrates how learning about the
mosque movement required bracketing of sentiments already formed in
relation to religious and socially conservative movements, in order to

34
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 9.
35
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 23-4.
36
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 35.
37
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 34-35.

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unlearn our assumptions about neoliberal movements and to hold open

‘the tension between the prescriptive and analytical aspects of the feminist
project.’ 38
While Politics of Piety engages primarily feminist and postcolonial
studies, I suggest that Mahmood’s approach is instructive to queer
scholarship on gender and religion in successfully decentering the (often
Western white male Christian) assumption of resistance or
transgressiveness that the ‘ideal queer’ too often seems to posit. Further
studies that explore queerness with regard to religion and gender should
address the implications of the problems that are posed when a notion of
queerness as transgression must always rely on a notion of deviance.

Homonormativity, Homonationalism, Terrorism, and Islamophobia

While I have remarked above on the significant implications of queer
theory in the expansion of ‘proper objects of study’ within the academic
study of religion and gender, I also want to suggest that the critique of
homonormative logics, discussed in the previous section, has been
helpfully applied to many areas beyond what might appear to be obvious
‘queer areas of study’ concerning homosexual or queer sexual identity.
Indeed, for many years students of queer theory were puzzled by questions
such as ‘what does a critique of the US war in Iraq have to do with queer
theory?’ While more traditional materialist or other radical political
philosophies surely had much to contribute to such debates, the
contributions from a queer theory and a queer religion perspective had
been less developed. I suggest that as we are entering a third decade of
queer theory, the particularly pressing issue, not only in the North
American context but in other parts of the world as well, of domestic
policing and increases in incarceration of immigrants as well as religiously
and racially non-normative bodies has become a central concern to queer
theoretical work. A critical approach to the recruitment of homonormative
logics in the service of anti-terrorism and the related vilification of Islam
must include the recruitment of queerness in the specific religious-political
issue of Islamophobia.
As Anna Agathangelou and others point out, the basis for the
decriminalization of sodomy (Lawrence and Garner vs State of Texas) and
the demand for recognition of same sex marriage ‘is a highly privatized,
monogamous, and whitened docile subjectivity that has been

38
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 39.

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decriminalized and ostensibly invited into the doors of U.S. national

belonging through recent shifts in the gendered and sexual order.’ 39 The
neoliberal logics that affirm private rights and security are closely
connected to homonormative strategies such as those analysed by
Agathangelou in the Human Right Campaign’s advocacy for ‘the good
queer citizen [to gain] entrance into the nation through the displacement
and explicit effacement of racial, sexual, and class antagonism and
inequities.’40
An argument important for contemporary queer theoretical work to
engage is that the gay rights recently gained, as well as the increasingly
privatized freedoms for queer subjects, coincide with the loss of rights of
(more) deviant and non-national (non)subjects. That these non-citizen
bodies and the (specifically black) bodies within the US are relegated into
the backdrop becomes hardly noticeable, and the civic death these bodies
face becomes more thoroughly naturalized as a result of the gains in, and
privatization of, the queer subject position.
These approaches have not yet been fully taken up in religious
studies scholarship, but offer important and provocative challenges to the
study of religion and gender, especially as it relates to contemporary
cultural and political discourse. One of the most readily visible sites
revolves around Islamophobia.
In the US American context, over the past ten years, Islam has been
portrayed as un-American or even anti-American. This is of course not an
entirely new development, as the liberal heritage of toleration always was
complicatedly connected to the toleration of religiously defined others by
the Christian dominant state. Nonetheless, the vilification of Islam has
become especially important to analyse from a queer theoretical
perspective in its imbrications with homonormative and homonational
strategies. 41
The recruitment of Islam as a ‘queer’ deviant and backward
monster in order to create a good and neutral modern Western (but, in the
US, also always Christian) subject position needs to be further analysed

39
A. M. Agathangelou, M. D. Bassichis, and T. L. Spira, ‘Intimate Investments:
Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seduction of Empire’ in Radical History
Review 100 (2008), 124.
40
Agathangelou et al., ‘Intimate Investments’, 124.
41
It should be noted that Islamophobia is not unique to the US. Swiss bans on minarets
or French prohibitions against religious dress draw on similar tropes, and Puar
discusses situations in the Netherlands and Britain as well in Terrorist Assemblages.

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with particular attention to the significance of gender and sexuality within

religion (and also the recruitment of religious or Protestant Christian norms
in the definition of gender and sexuality). The reassertion of Christian
positions as the unmarked norm 42 and the positioning of Muslims as un-
American (and thus subjects of profiling or detention or legitimate objects
of violence) depends in many cases on their association with non-
normative sexuality. This is not to say that all Muslims are claimed to be
homosexuals. As Ann Pellegrini points out, ‘[t]o be clear, it is less that
Muslims are imagined to be homosexual; in fact, one of the ‘proofs’ that
Muslims are not yet ready for civilizational prime time is that they are anti-
homosexual and anti-woman.’ 43 Indeed, the image of a perversely
backwards Islam is recruited in order to portray Christianity and ‘the West’
as innocent of sexism or homophobia and to thus make ‘understandable’
and normalize the religiously-based racist sentiments that have
contributed to the anti-Muslim feelings and policies. 44
The promotion of discourses of ‘security’ rely on affective
economies that perceive a great threat that legitimizes the increased
policing and containment of those marked as terrorist threats or criminals.
At the centre of several critical analyses of homonormativity and
homonationalism is increasing attention to these ‘affective economies’ that
support the appeals to normative national belonging and the containment
of threats in the spreading institutions of the carceral state and Empire.45
What has been labelled ‘the affective turn’ in literary, cultural, and queer
studies might thus promisingly contribute to queer expansions of gender
theory. Especially in the realm of ethics, these approaches offer a rich field
for further scholarly work on the role of religion.

Conclusion
Queer has become ‘mainstreamed’ in the first two decades of queer
theory’s development, mostly in its meaning as a summarizing identity
term, even when it has not always been inclusive of lesbian, bisexual, or
transgender identities. Nonetheless, queerness has been increasingly well

42
This occurs under the guide of secularism. See Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Secularisms.
43
A. Pellegrini, ‘SNL: Gay Weddings at Ground Zero Mosque’
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/devotion/2010/10/snl-gay-weddings-at-ground-zero-
mosque, accessed November 30, 2010.
44
See also J. K. Puar and A. Rai, ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the
Production of Docile Patriots’ in Social Text 72, 20:3 (2002), 117-148.
45
Agathangelou et al., ‘Intimate Investments’, 122.

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integrated into North American popular culture (from TV shows such as

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to an increasingly celebrated queer culture
of consumption). In the process much of the critical and activist potential
has been lost. As I have pointed out in this essay, the emergence of a
‘normative’ gay subject has become an important scholarly concern within
current US queer scholarship. As sodomy was decriminalized in US law,
what appears as a ‘queer’ political agenda seems to focus on increasingly
private rights claims: mainstreamed and normative gay and lesbian
subjects fight for their ‘rights’, often at the expense of the vilification and
continued criminalization of people of colour and those sexually or
religiously othered. This has been a troubling development. At the current
beginning of a third decade of queer theoretical scholarship, queer support
of neo-liberalism and other effects of homo-normativity and homo-
nationalism thus emerge as central concerns to be further explored.
As we are entering the third decade of academic queer studies,
then, we are faced with new challenges and new sets of conceptual tools
to tackle these. Emerging work in queer studies continues to foreground
the challenges in rethinking categories of bodily identity, while necessarily
at times reframing the very terms of the debate. In the process we are also
continuously posing important questions for the very constitution of the
study of religion and gender.

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