Non/Normative Faith

Katharina Wiedlack

Acknowledgments

It took some years and several relaunches to birth this anthology, and it is thanks to the love and care of many people for each other and for queer academic and activist knowledge production that we can finally hold it in our hands. I would like to thank Bee Scherer for nurturing and keeping alive the Queering Paradigms network and book series, and for supporting the editors every step of the way. An equally big thank you goes to my co-editors, Tegiye Birey and Patrick de Vries, whose academic rigor and keen eye for detail were invaluable in putting this book together. A big thank you goes to Polly Gannon for her careful and thorough language editing of the texts and for her support as a friend, mentor, and colleague. An additional heartfelt thank you goes to Markus Firnkranz, whose help with the manuscript is greatly appreciated.

All the chapters in this book have been double-blind peer-reviewed, and I would like to express my gratitude to all the reviewers for their careful and constructive contributions. I would also like to thank our translators, Merav Datan and Chén Xióng-cái, for their excellent work.

Many thanks to Mia McKenzie for kindly allowing us to reprint Lamya H.’s “Not Your Tragic Queer Muslim Story”, which first appeared on the BGD: Amplifying the Voices of Queer & Trans People of Color blog on 7 April, 2014. I want to thank Megamot – a Journal of Behavioral Science for allowing us to publish the English translation of Elazar Ben-Lulu’s text on “Identity, Gender, and Performance: An Ethnographic View of a Queer Purim Celebration in a Reform Jewish Congregation” which first appeared in Megamot issue 2018. I would also like to thank Duke University Press for granting permission to reprint Evren Savcı’s text “Subjects of Rights and Subjects of Cruelty”, which first appeared in her monograph Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam.

Last but not least, my sincere gratitude goes to Lucy Melville and the Peter Lang team for their friendly and professional support.

This book was partly funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as part of the project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine” (AR 567). I thank my entire Magic Closet team, but particularly Iain Zabolotny and Anna T. for their amazing work and friendship.

Bee Scherer

Preface

The arrival of the ninth edited volume of the Queering Paradigms series constitutes a particularly joyful achievement. The book’s focus on complicating religious and cultural intersections is very dear to me, giving justice to the important role that complex – and often contested – religious and cultural subjectivities and belongings play for intersectional mental wellbeing and social justice.

This volume collects multiple voices showcasing and highlighting the often neglected religiosity aspects of subjectivity and belonging for intersectional queer-feminist theory and application. It is a great testimony to the wonderful team of editors that such an exciting balance of regional, religious, and cultural themes are featured in this volume. Also, Peter Lang’s always genial, patient, and supportive team led by Lucy Melville played, once again, an unmissable role. As the QP series editor and as an academic colleague, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Katharina, Tegiye, Patrick, Lucy, and the whole team!

The volume has a somewhat awkward and protracted origin story. The book project faced many professional and personal obstacles in times of restructurings, academic change, and COVID. The successful Queering Paradigms IX conference “Queer(y)ing Justice in the Global South Conference” in Sydney, 11–13 July 2018, was by its funding bodies contractually bound to publish its outcomes elsewhere, and thus had to break with the long tradition QP has cherished with Peter Lang (Oxford) since its inception in 2009.

Hence, the earliest incarnation of some of the research presented in this collection goes back to Queering Paradigms’ collaboration with the second CIRQUE (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer) conference in Pisa in June 2019. Soon after that conference, we started to collect the contributions for the next QP volume under the coordination of Dr Patrick de Vries, who was at that time the INCISE (Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice) business manager at Canterbury Christ Church University (U.K.); he had already played a crucial role as an assistant editor for Queering Paradigms VII: Contested Bodies and Spaces (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018). However, the editing progress on the fantastic mix of presentations forming the QP stream of CIRQUE II was then delayed by my own retirement from Canterbury Christ Church University, the subsequent de-affiliation of INCISE from this university, and the COVID pandemic in 2020.

During a turbulent time of professional change that ultimately led to my return to the Netherlands in 2021, the project had been entrusted to other INCISE colleagues. Unfortunately, conditions did not come together for those caretaker editors to make any progress on the volume either. In the meanwhile, a QP colloquium planned for May 2020 in Kyōto (Japan) had to be delayed for a year and was moved to Paris (hybrid, June 2021); several contributions in this book also stem from this event that was held in conjunction with the now dormant Transgressive Religion Network.

Dr de Vries continued the editing process during the whole time until much needed help arrived in the form of our excellent colleagues from Vienna who agreed to oversee the volume to completion: Dr Katharina Wiedlack, a Queering Paradigms scholar of the first hour who had co-organized the eighth conference (held September 2017 in Vienna) and co-edited Queering Paradigms VIII (published 2020), and Tegiye Birey, MSc, reshaped and shepherded the book to publication to the high standards we have come to expect from our Vienna QP-ers.

So it is, with pride, that I present the ninth edited volume of the series! Technically, this volume can even count as the tenth book, since the fourth QP conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 produced two separate volumes: IV (2014) and IVa (2017).

May this collection succeed in breaking new ground and sparking many new scholarly insights, further activism, and enduring enthusiasm for intersectional Social Justice theory and practice.

Amsterdam, 7 February 2024

Katharina Wiedlack and Tegiye Birey

Introduction

This edited volume assembles academic studies, creative texts, and images that address the topic of spirituality and religion in scripture, teaching, and care, as spaces for queer community, relationality, and ethics, as well as the contested nexus between state, market, and religious institutions. Contributors to this volume scrutinize religious practices, scriptures, institutions, and their legacies from several vantage points and disciplines. The anthology showcases the diverse ways in which queer identities, critiques, and lifestyles intersect with religion. It avoids limiting the richness of these intersections to a single perspective or focus, opening up the thinking on religions, spirituality, faith, pedagogy, and ethics to new discursive conjunctions. The relationship between LGBTIQ+ individuals and religions around the world vary greatly across geographies and histories. While some queers find and generate religious fulfillment and acceptance within their faith traditions, others may reject organized religion altogether, comply with religious expectations, or have an ambiguous relationship to it.

The fields of queer and transgender studies in religion attest to this richness. Relevant academic studies are rapidly growing in volume and strength, producing cutting-edge interdisciplinary academic research, theories and methodologies (see Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2003; Kugle 2010; Taylor and Snowdon 2014; Hunt and Yip 2012; King 2017; Goldstein 2006; Strassfeld and Henderson-Espinoza 2019; Boisvert and Johnson 2012; Wilcox 2020; Scherer 2017, 2012). Some of this work has performed a close reading of religious texts, suggesting queer interpretations of their narratives, and carving out space for divine queer possibilities. Others have turned to institutions of law, family, borders, education, work and religion itself, to scrutinize the experiences of people of faith with non-normative gender identifications and sexual practices, and to detect the ever-changing manifestations of power that appear once religion and sexuality intersect with geography, class, and gender to shape queer embodiments.

If there is one take-away from this body of work, it would be that religions are more queer, and queers are more religious, than hegemonic discourses make them out to be. This knowledge has not only shattered the essentialist norms of queers as secular (and white), and religions as rigidly hetero-exclusive and queer/trans*-irrelevant, but also challenges the secular-religious binary that informs global power relations, as much as it does social sciences and humanities.

Despite significant feminist research that destabilized the limited understanding of agency as only capable of being exercised under certain secular terms and conditions (Barlas 2013, 2016; Mahmood 2005, 2014; Abu-Lughad 2002), and queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s recent revision of her previous position that agency is only possible under secular conditions (Puar and Meiden 2018), prejudices and doctrines about religiosity and queerness stubbornly circulate within the fields that we call our academic homes – queer and gender studies. “[Q]‌ueer studies, and at times also transgender studies, have looked askance at religion, relegating it solely to the status of oppressor” (Wilcox 2020: vi), as Melissa M. Wilcox has pointed out so aptly. This, we have been warned, resulted in not tapping into the subversive potential of religion in its encounters with heteronormativity (Van Klinken 2019). Feminist and gender studies have an even longer tradition of locating oppression in religious beliefs of the racialized Other (Asad et al. 2009; Gemzöe and Keinänen 2016; Barlas 2013, 2016).

Our edited volume challenges the assumption that religions, religious scriptures, and institutions are essentially hostile to queer desires and sexualities, and non-normative or non-binary gender identifications. In doing so, we acknowledge that LGBTIQ+ individuals belong to diverse religious communities, including the religions that we discuss in this book: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. LGBTIQ+ people can have personal, communal, spiritual, and cultural connections to their faith traditions, and these different aspects can be oppressive, or uplifting and supportive. Some religious organizations and communities are specifically tailored for LGBTIQ+ individuals, providing supportive spaces for worship, community, and spiritual growth. These groups, such as LGBTIQ+-affirming churches or synagogues or LGBTIQ+-focused spiritual retreats, are often designed to create a safer and more welcoming environment. Other contemporary religious denominations and individual congregations affirm and welcome queer people, ordain LGBTIQ+ clergy, and perform same-sex marriages. We acknowledge that some faith communities of world religions have made significant shifts towards greater inclusivity and acceptance of LGBTIQ+ individuals in recent decades; yet we want to do so without perpetuating the idea that LGBTIQ+ acceptance is a linear process that leads from oppression to liberation over time. Additionally, we do not want to assume that such progress is inevitable or looks similar everywhere. What we do want to highlight is that numerous LGBTIQ+ individuals and allies within religious traditions continually and tirelessly advocate for equal rights, challenge discriminatory interpretations of religious texts, and seek to create more inclusive and affirming spaces for LGBTIQ+ individuals within their faith communities and, in the process, collectively re-design them.

We stand firm in not perpetuating the often-racist caricatures of religion as rigid and one-dimensional; nor do we claim that religion is in any way immune to violence. Many religious institutions have historically been unwelcoming or hostile towards LGBTIQ+ individuals, often due to conservative interpretations of religious texts and appropriation of religious discourse for political gain. This has contributed to a long history of discrimination, exclusion, and violence against queer people within religious contexts. Many LGBTIQ+ individuals continue to face rejection, discrimination, and exclusion based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression which has long-lasting, harmful effects on mental health and well-being. These personal experiences are not isolated incidents and require nuanced and systematic analyzes. They also risk being instrumentalized by political discourses that can, in turn, cause further harm to those affected, or accentuate their social erasure. As Nikita Dhawan reiterated over a decade ago, downplaying the presence of postcolonial heterosexism is shaped by the binary thinking of oppressor/oppressed, stretched further to shelter the latter with unaccountability (Dhawan 2013). This not only leads to a lack of support-infrastructures where they are needed, but also conceals one of the main mechanisms of imperial domination: creation and maintenance of a circle of elites within colonized communities as accomplices and beneficiaries of colonization, who in turn benefit from imperial perpetuation. Denying the existence of these bonds can lead to a limited understanding of the violence queer bodies meanwhile continue to endure. Dhawan’s sense of urgency for generating a vocabulary that can expose homonationalism, queer racism, and heteronormative violence as a continuum within the same imperialist project has been relevant ever since, further scrutinized by postcolonial feminists in reference to contexts of occupation and migration (Elwakil 2017; Al-Ali 2019). In light of these interventions, we situate our approach to religion and queerness as “both/and” thinking, rather than “either/or”, inspired by their shared character of fluidity, openness to interpretation, and intimate entanglements with power.

Our path to this volume as outsiders to religious studies led us to define our editing strategy as that of translation. Closely related to our approach to the diverse contexts where queer and religion entangle in myriad ways is transnationalism which evokes the question of language and power. The practice of translation sits at the center of the dissemination of religious and queer ideas across space and time (DeJonge and Tietz 2015; Epstein and Gillert 2017; Baer 2021). It also captures the behind-the-scenes editorial process of the publication: the chapters “Identity, Gender, and Performance: An Ethnographic View of a Queer Purim Celebration in a Reform Jewish Congregation” by Elazar Ben-Lulu and “Buddhist Perspective of ‘Homosexual Love’” by Chao-Hwei Shih were translated into English from Hebrew and Chinese, respectively.

As much as translation provided us an avenue to incorporate at least some interpretations of non-Anglophone texts, we are also aware that over-translation of queer or religious concepts into English would mean disregarding the meaning harbored in emic experiences, patterns, and vocabularies. One example of this is our choice of not translating/changing the word “transsexual” in the chapter “A Case Study of Transsexual Insertion into the Job Market in the City of Rio de Janeiro” by Ricardo Henry Dias Rohm, Claudia Cristina Nunes Emidio Gonçalves, Carine Morrot de Oliveira and Natália Fonseca Lopes, as it is used for self-identification by trans* people in the specific Portuguese speaking context the authors address, unlike the fading usage of this term in English-speaking communities. We addressed this tension not by dissolving it, but by asking the authors to address their terminology of choice with a footnote.

In other senses, translation took place across fields of knowledge and genres of writing. The edited volume was designed to allow practitioners of different religions to contribute, while avoiding a tokenistic approach that suggests that a single text can represent an entire religion. The result of our efforts is a chorus of voices that reject the victimization of LGBTIQ+ people through pain narratives that support secularims as anti-dote to queerphobia. Rather than speaking for them or about them, the anthology assembles comments, analyzes and insights about religious spirituality, scripture, practices, and structures by LGBTIQ+ believers. Close queer-reading of religious and legal texts, analyzes of political disputes and media representations, (auto)ethnographies of internal sense of queer religiosities, as well as its hegemonic interpellation, collective subversion, and institutionalization constitute the “guiding thread” of this edited volume. Keeping the style of writings somewhat diverse, we hope to facilitate the emergence of possibilities of meaning in-between perspectives, rhythms, genres, and affects.