Queer Theory

Queer theory was coined in the early 1990s to name a growing body of scholarship that analyzed the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and theorized the power dynamics that situated those identities as abnormal in relationship to heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation. This literature has emphasized that sex, gender, and sexuality are historically and culturally defined. Its approach is to “queer” or to destabilize the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality and conventional gender performance. In doing so, queer theorists have challenged both conservatives’ claim that heterosexuality is the only natural expression of human sexuality and mainstream LGBT activists’ counterassertion that sexual orientation and gender identity are inborn.

As scholars have taken up these insights in the study of global religion, they have conveyed that, to quote Elizabeth Stuart, “religion is a queer thing.” Religion scholars have shown, first of all, that all mainstream faith traditions include LGBT practitioners, many of whom have claimed those traditions in the face of condemnation. There is now a robust literature on the ways in which queer people of faith negotiate the intersection of religious affiliation and gender and sexual identity. These studies have shown, in contrast to queer theory's emphasis on cultural definition, that many queer people of faith claim LGBT identities as inborn—even divinely created—to counter the condemnation of homosexuality and gender variance. Queer studies of religion have also shown that “religion is a queer thing” by demonstrating the historical and cultural complexity of religion in its relationships to sex, gender, and sexuality. While many religious beliefs and practices buttress normative formations of marriage and family, religious traditions have also subverted conventional roles and have authorized alternative practices of sexuality and kinship. For example, even as Christianity has predominantly censored nonmari-tal sexuality, it has also given religious sanction to forms of same-sex kinship within monastic traditions. Various forms of Christian-influenced new religious movements, including Oneida Perfectionism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, have also sanctioned nonmarital or non-monogamous sexual practices. Adding to these complex dynamics in Western faiths, studies of non-Western cultural practices further complicate the picture of religion in its relationships to sex, gender, and sexuality. Work on Hinduism in contemporary India, for example, has considered the tradition of the hijra, and investigations of precontact Native American cultures have documented the role of the berdache, or “two-spirit” figure. Both of these figures seem to challenge binary models of sex and gender by offering a ritual role for a “third sex” (though this topic has been heavily debated). Understood broadly, these and other investigations have “queered” the study of religion by showing its complex place in the power dynamics around sex, gender, and sexuality.