Two Words: Gender Theory

On April 9, 2024, NPR's Morning Edition covered the prior day's release of a new Vatican document entitled "Infinite Dignity" (National Public Radio 2024). Despite its title, the document denied the dignity of many people—in particular those involved in surrogacy or abortion, all trans people and allies, and no small number of academics—by terming our actions and perspectives "threats" to human dignity as the document defines it. Transness was targeted in part through a befuddling phrase that has become familiar to many Vatican observers in recent years: "gender theory." In a conversation with hosts Leila Fadel and A Martínez, decorated religion reporter Jason DeRose offered thoughtful and balanced coverage of the statement, focusing especially on reactions from advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion. And then he said this: "What gender theory argues is that a person's gender identity or self-understanding can be different from the sex that person was assigned at birth." Gender theory, of course, argues nothing of the sort. As a complex and decades-old set of methods and tools for understanding how groups and cultures define, structure, and enforce the relationship between certain kinds of embodiment and certain roles in the world, gender theory does not argue any specific thing. It is a school of thought, not a "theory" or theorem that can be proven or disproven, accepted or rejected. Yet, like other complex and multivocal schools of thought ("CRT," anyone?), it has been twisted and flattened for public consumption, created in the meme-like negative or reverse image of those who find it useful for their own ongoing efforts at nonconsensual domination.1 So how did an experienced and highly respected reporter get this so wrong, and why has NPR offered no corrections or more complex coverage? The stakes of this question are quite high since Morning Edition claims an audience in the millions, and what might appear to be a simple factual error, in fact, plays into a trans antagonistic logic that undergirds the ongoing r/ejection of trans and nonbinary people from many socially conservative spaces and communities. A glance at DeRose's bio on NPR's website shows national awards for coverage of religion, Native American issues, and LGBTQ+ issues. He majored in religion and English in college, holds a Master's degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and has taught journalism at DePaul and Northwestern. This is an impressive record, indeed. What is missing? Anything at the intersection of religion, gender, and sexuality studies. This recent incident encapsulates my answers to the questions posed for RSR's 50th anniversary paired set of special issues: what the discipline looks like today; where it is going theoretically, topically, and thematically; what issues are critical to address; and why the study of religion remains a vital part of the academy and of undergraduate education. There are, of course, many answers to these questions, which is why two special issues are necessary for a robust conversation. There are many answers I would give and many others from which I will learn once the special issues are published. We have been asked, though, to speak from (not to) our own areas of specialization; although I also have a number of those, I will be focusing here on the perspectives on religious studies that are afforded by the rapidly growing and interconnected fields of queer and trans studies in religion. From these angles of approach, four key themes come into relief: transdisciplinarity, positivism, advocacy, and affect/embodiment. Religionists have spilled quite a few pixels arguing over whether our work represents a discipline in and of itself, a collection of various and sundry specialties, or an interdisciplinary field. Interdisciplinarity remains one of the more popular answers to this question; indeed, my own department is housed in our college's "Interdisciplinary Building" (so named for lack of a donor, which may be fortuitous). Yet my own experiences with this administrative buzzword of the 1990s, along with perspectives I have learned from other departments who share this designation, have led me to side with those who prefer the term transdisciplinary. Inter-, after all, commonly means between. Being trained as an interdisciplinary scholar in an interdisciplinary department consisted, for me, largely of studying with teachers from various disciplines and becoming, myself, a chimera located between disciplines, who was only vaguely recognizable at times to those hailing from any of the disciplines that spawned me. Yet, in trying endlessly to explain the study of religion to my interlocutors (and countless uncomprehending search committees) in gender and sexuality studies, I began to realize just how alike those two fields are. I often frame these similarities by explaining that whereas many disciplines make use of a single, specialized set of tools to study a wide variety of aspects of existence, both religious studies and gender and sexuality studies draw on a wide variety of theoretical and methodological tools to study one specific aspect of existence. In toggling between these many tools, each field—and perhaps each scholar in these fields—creates a methodological bricolage that is itself a different kind of method, a sort of methodological found-object art. Transdisciplinarity describes this bricolage and the term's implicit connection to transness places it in a space of crossing. We share that location with fields like gender studies, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, and even, at times, studies of the arts like art history, music, critical dance studies, and performance studies. Like those fields, at times, we revel in our transdisciplinarity and build from its strengths. But at times, we also revert to an anxious defense of our disciplinary status, our self-definition as a science as described in the initial name of the field: Religionswissenschaft, science of religions. Consider, for instance, the principled insistence on "nonconfessional" approaches and methodological atheism or, more recently, agnosticism. On one hand, the principle of noninterference here is important: it is indeed not the task of a religious studies scholar to declare religious Truth or to determine the orthodoxy of certain practices over others, any more than it is the task of a gender studies scholar to declare certain gender identities authentic and others misled. On the other hand, though, the concept of nonconfessional scholarship is in practice applied much more broadly, often with punitive results, especially for minoritized scholars, and it has historically led to strong resistance to, even exclusion from the field of, some of the core principles shared by our cousins in interdisciplinarity. Feminist methods, for instance, require a certain level of self-disclosure on the part of a scholar because long-standing feminist epistemological principles understand knowledge as multiple, perspectival, and contextual. Rather than make the positivist claim to (potential) omniscience through the application of supposedly neutral, "unbiased" methods, feminist methods, along with womanist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race methods, insist on the perceptible presence of the scholar in the research. Such presence, they argue, is more realistic and methodologically sound than the studied effacement of the scholar practiced by many fields that still hold stock in the concept of objectivity. What I have come to call (with a nod to Foucault) the "anticonfessional imperative" in the study of religion mires us in the latter camp, treating any scholarly presence within research as suspect and any hint of the scholar's own relationship to the world beyond the human as heresy. As I have argued elsewhere (Wilcox 2024), this is why religious studies has long held many of our transdisciplinary kin at arm's length (and they have returned the favor) while more religiously engaged approaches have blossomed through their engagement with and in those fields. The unspoken commitment to positivism that still threads through religious studies pushes the field all too often into a rigid position against advocacy, which also contributes to the resistance to deeper engagement with other transdisciplinary fields. Expanding the principle that it is not our role to determine religious Truth, many in the field also resist those who speak truth to power (see Clements 2021 for a discussion of Foucault's differentiation between these two in the posthumously published fourth volume of History of Sexuality); conveniently, this seems to apply especially when the power is held by the resistant scholars themselves. Lacking the nuance to distinguish between passing judgment and naming harm, the field as a whole continues to regard methods and perspectives that focus on power and justice as tainted, in some way, by confessionalism. Instead, it prefers more "neutral" and "objective" descriptions and analyses of religious phenomena, which can be easily demonstrated and empirically proven from a safe distance. Scholars who engage in advocacy for racial justice, gender justice, sexual justice; those who reveal too much of ourselves in our research (particularly if we are minoritized in one or more ways); and perhaps especially those who also argue that certain religious perspectives or practices cause harm and injustice often face challenges within the field to the propriety, even the authenticity, of their work as religious studies scholars. And that is only with the inclusion of their perspectives; affect and embodiment add yet another layer to this picture. Like many fields rooted in the Enlightenment—in other words, like most of academia—the study of religion distinguishes sharply between the bodies and affects of scholars and those of our "subjects." Religious bodies have long been a source of fascination in the field, especially those at more of a (perceived or literal) distance from scholarly bodies, while scholarly bodies and affects in the study of religion, as in most academic fields, are effaced. There are glaring exceptions to this rule of bodily and affective effacement for scholars, of course: all of those bodies for whom academia and academic spaces were not designed, whose original and intended locations in the ivory tower were among the exhibits and objects of study. We experience all too often a kind of bodily and affective hyper-presence in religious studies spaces, betrayed by the double glance or longer gaze, anxious and seemingly last-minute inclusion of communities or theoretical perspectives presumed to be "ours," silencing of our insights, apologetics (in both senses of the term), violations of personal boundaries, or studied ignorance and refusal to engage. Many of us respond to this involuntary hyper-presence by effacing our own bodies from our research, maintaining a dispassionate presence, or artfully expressing our own realities through those of others who are more "properly" the objects of study. Yet, like the broader elision of the scholar's locations and contexts, this effacing, in fact, undermines our scholarship—in different ways depending on our locations and contexts, to be sure, but inevitably for all of us. It also leaves our field in the position of enacting increasing irrelevance, when, as we all know, our subject matter suffuses the world, and our field is therefore critically important to academic knowledge, public knowledge, and education. The state of affairs I have described above—"what the discipline looks like today" from the vantage point of trans and queer studies in religion—is as dire as the future of some religious studies departments seems to be. Yet things are shifting, although at the lumbering pace of institutional change, held back by the bone-deep conviction instilled in many of us that there is an unclearly delineated yet nonetheless sharp line we cannot cross if we wish to retain our credibility within the field. Where we are going may be anyone's guess; what interests me more is where we ought to go and how such developments can better assist those beyond our field in understanding what we already know about the central relevance of the study of religion. For decades now, the linked fields of trans and queer studies in religion have been building an increasingly deep and complex interaction between the three areas of study whose crossroads they inhabit. From an initial tendency to focus on cataloging or additive approaches (what I jokingly term the 'Look! Queers!' and 'Add queers and stir' methods), scholars have steadily developed an increasingly robust and thorough engagement with—and now, slowly, between—queer studies, trans studies, and the study of religion. In moving past a cataloging or additive approach to more deeply analytical and intertwined ones, this scholarship has contributed to the growing chorus of voices from historically minoritized scholars and communities that is bringing increasingly provocative and revolutionary challenges to our shared field and from that field to those we're in conversation with. This is a key direction for the future of religious studies as a whole. Since a thorough discussion of these interwoven shifts would be a book in itself—one, I would venture, that we sorely need—and while even a set of "representative" citations would inevitably exclude key contributions, allow me to simply sketch in very broad terms here seven of the provocations and promising future directions that are arising particularly from scholars who work in trans studies, queer studies, and the study of religion. For well over a century, BIPOC, anticolonial, Marxist, and feminist thinkers have raised sharp critiques of the vaunted "objectivity" of European and European settler colonial intellectual traditions created and driven largely by elites. Their consistent argument has been that any knowledge that lacks multiple perspectives is both incomplete and biased. Particularly in the past half-century, such arguments have pressed a number of fields—including anthropology, which shares roots with the study of religion and which has given us some of our most influential thinkers—to refuse the "objective" effacement of the scholar in their work and, instead, to attend to scholars' own locatedness. Understanding that all knowledge is partial and is profoundly shaped by the knowers themselves, these fields have, with varying success, shifted their research methods and ethics toward an expectation that scholars' social positions, at the very least, will be present in their work and considered in their analysis. Many different approaches to scholarly presence have sprung from this shift, ranging from the perfunctory aside or footnote listing a collection of identities to various forms of autoethnography and autotheory. Yet for religionists—especially those of us traveling in circles influenced by the Religionswissenschaft or History of Religions school of thought—the permissible scope of the scholar's presence has remained tightly bounded. It has indeed opened up over time, though to a differing extent depending on the scholar's rank and job security, but even the most boundary-stretching scholarship stops short at the confessional bright line: one's own perspectives on and experiences with the world beyond the human. Nonetheless, provocations from trans studies, queer studies, and the other fields focused on what Foucault termed the "analytics of power" continue to challenge our demure approach, and we would do well as a field to attend to such questions carefully. I would ask, in particular: What are we so afraid of in our skittishness around the vaguely defined "confessional"? Does forcing scholars to keep our presence in our own research discreet, disembodied, affectless, and (im)partial actually address whatever threatens us? Is it, in fact, a threat, or only a phantasm? While community-based research has gained more of a presence in the study of religion, as with the full presence of the scholar in research, this approach has moved forward most strongly in such areas as theology and ethics, and much less so in the fields most impacted by the Religionswissenschaft/History of Religions school. The latter fields still have a tendency to distance themselves from the communities they study—whether historical or contemporary—in ways that both descend from and sustain the armchair anthropology in which many of our canonical texts are rooted. I suspect, for reasons I sketch out more fully in a recent article (Wilcox 2024), that such distancing traces back again to the positivist commitments that are enforced in the field through the policing of the confessional. Yet it also connects to attitudes toward religion in the field that are fundamentally rooted in white, Protestant, cisheteromasculine supremacy and the related devaluing of embodiment and affect. As a growing number of lifeways, practices, and world concepts were granted access to the hallowed halls of "religion" (see Masuzawa 2005), bringing with them people deemed inferior by European/European-settler imperialist mindsets, many scholars fled those same hallowed halls or hid themselves in the woodwork. It is telling that the more entangled a History of Religions scholar may appear to be with the communities they're learning from or about, the more likely they are to openly disavow that community through expressions of skepticism, dismissal, or even belief to the contrary of the community's perspectives—as though such disavowal is not in itself confessional. Trans and queer studies, alongside the other power-focused interdisciplinary fields, urge us to take the politics of knowledge seriously and to carefully consider the impact of our studies either on the communities we're working with/writing about (if contemporary) or on contemporary communities (if our work is historical or more theoretical). Religionists, with our frequent focus on the worlds beyond the human, need to be even more sensitive, not less, to how our research impacts the communities involved. Community-based research is not "confessional," or at least not necessarily so, because reciprocal relationships of knowledge in which the communities themselves have a voice are a key option for contemporary research ethics. Tracing the lines of power in any research relationship also helps us to understand that there is no universal rule for a scholar's relationship with the community/ies they study; for example, "studying up" the lines of power may entail a very different set of relationships. We are left, though, with these questions: what precisely constitutes engagement with the community or its living descendants in the study of religion? Do we also have a responsibility to those who inhabit this community's world(s) beyond the human? The looming specter of the confessional scholar and the anxious distancing it inspires not only separate us from the communities toward whom we have responsibilities but also make it difficult for us to distinguish between declaring religious Truths and speaking truth to power. This circumstance has made for an awkward and often unspoken approach to the latter. Certain forms of truth-speaking increasingly come with the field; one prime example is the decades-long challenge to orientalist portrayals of some religions. Yet, while pointing critically to orientalist expectations about religion is helpful, again here, scholars continue to exercise caution whenever they are near the boundary between critique and advocacy. There are indeed complex questions here, but queer and trans studies encourage us to understand that there is a significant difference between advocacy and assessing ultimate Truth, between naming harm and declaring a group's beliefs or perspectives True or False. Whatever else it may be, religion is an extremely powerful cultural force that impacts the individuals and communities, memories and descendants to which we bear epistemological responsibilities in powerful ways. When those cause or suffer harm, we also hold a responsibility to describe that harm. To take an example from queer and trans studies in religion, it is possible to name the clear harms caused by so-called "conversion therapy," even to explore and critique the underlying logic that drives such approaches without declaring those who advocate for conversion therapy to be heretics, false Christians, or the like. Our field's dogged dedication to a positivist epistemology, though, leads us to confuse advocacy with confession in ways that sideline us in "objectivity" and prevent the field from being the powerful force it could be. The first three categories above lead in many ways to this one. First and foremost, as scholars, most of us consider ourselves accountable to our academic peers. Yet trans, queer, and other power-focused research ethics place accountability to the minoritized communities with which we work or whom our work impacts above all else. Anti-confessional scholars often claim that such accountability derails our efforts at objectivity, but from the perspective of fields that consider objectivity to be a false front for white, Protestant, cishetereomasculine dominance, accountability is critically necessary to prevent our work from falling back into the extractive colonialist logics of research that have dominated the global North/global West academy at least since the Enlightenment. And again the question returns: If we are engaged with and/or impacting communities in which the worlds beyond the human are present, does our accountability stop at the borders of the human? Such questions also evoke the issue of experimental methods. Despite our profound transdisciplinarity, for the most part, religionists stick to relatively traditional methods: linguistics, textual analysis, interviews, (im/partial) participant observation, archaeology, and art/popular cultural historical methods, among others. Autotheory may be especially anathematized because of how flagrantly it violates the anticonfessional imperative, and there are some promising methods that have seen far less resistance, such as the use of journals or photography when working with contemporary populations, but still, many methods that bring embodiment, affect, and the like into the project through (or partly through) the researcher face fairly consistent opposition. Trans studies and queer studies, along with their power-aware cousins, challenge us to consider the myriad ways in which our epistemologies and analyses shape what we learn. How might we come to understand texts differently if more of us studied how they sound, or their materiality as objects? How might we reconsider ritual if we focused on our and others' embodied experiences? In what ways would the field change if more of us engaged in experimental writing, or conveyed our knowledge through other media entirely? The questions raised by all these considerations have the potential to redefine not just methods in the study of religion, but the field itself. They might offer us better ways to grapple with the colonial taproots of the field, to take cuttings from the best parts of this tree and sprout them elsewhere to create new roots, or even to graft them onto other trees—other fields, other epistemologies—with more life-giving roots. Consider, for instance, what might be the impact of taking the same approach to religion as gender studies, queer studies, critical race studies, and the like take to the social constructs they study, acknowledging both the constructedness of the concepts at the root of their fields and the profound impact of those constructions on life around (and within) us. How would it change the field if we approached the worlds beyond the human as many of our conversation partners do—and perhaps as more of us do than we would care to admit—as realities? What would a religious studies be like that centered minoritized communities, honored rather than appropriated their knowledge, respected and engaged with the worlds beyond the human that are present for them? It is hard to say, but I think it is worth finding out. Since RSR is, of course, focused on religious studies, I have explored in great depth the provocations that trans studies, queer studies, and other power-focused fields offer to the study of religion in terms of methods, ethics, and epistemologies. Yet, without a doubt, the provocations go both ways. Queer and trans people, as Heather R. White points out (2015), have largely accepted the relatively recent presumption that our lives and "religion" are and always have been mortal enemies, and there is enough of a Marxist heritage in both to make "religion" suspect as the opiate of everyone. In addition, as Puar has noted (2007), non-Muslim queer folks in the global North/global West are welcomed into the homonational fold through collective Islamophobia—a repressive trap that even prominent queer and trans scholars and activists have fallen into. Religious studies, then, challenges trans and queer studies to take religion seriously, to pay greater attention to sexuality and gender in the worlds beyond the human as well as in our own, to consider religious identity and religious practice among the key contributors to intersectional analysis,2 to attend more closely to ritual and to world concepts, and to approach the social and interpersonal impact of religion with just as much complexity, sensitivity, and nuance as we use to approach gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and the like. In a recent podcast recording session for FSR, Inc., I was asked how I envision the future of trans studies in religion. Describing the future I dream, in contrast to the one I fear in the spring of 2024, I responded quite simply that it is a future where trans studies are required reading in the study of religion. This is not because I expect every scholar to study trans people; in fact, I do not want that to happen because the majority of scholars are unprepared to work in sensitive, respectful, and nuanced ways with trans folks. The same holds true for queer studies. But trans studies and queer studies both teach us to approach gender, sexuality, and embodiment in nuanced and ethical ways. Trans studies, for instance, has finally managed to convince some scholars that making essentialist assumptions about gender inaccurately imposes a modern binary model of sex and gender onto both past and present cultures where the concepts may be far more complex (see, e.g., Phillips 2020), and queer studies has encouraged us to consider sexuality and sensuality in all of their varied facets and forms and constructs as we think critically about religion. So, why is the study of religion still vital to the academy and to undergraduate (or, really, all) education? Two words: Gender theory. Without equally nuanced perspectives on religion, transness, queerness, and gender, few observers can fully comprehend the complexities of Pope Francis' recent moves regarding same-sex attraction ("Who am I to judge, but don't let them confuse the other faithful") and trans ("They can be baptized, but gender theory is a threat to human dignity") Catholics. Not only is the study of religion vital to the academy, then, but the other transdisciplinary fields and the parsing of power that lies at their core are vital to the study of religion. Religionists are fond of saying that religion is everywhere. So are sexuality, gender, race, class, ability, embodiment, and—most importantly—power. Our field cuts not only across all of these factors, constructs in themselves just like the focus of religious studies, but also across the divides the academy erects between the world most of us experience and the worlds beyond the human that impact many human communities. Here, we lead the way in the face of and through the regnant skepticism of the more power-focused transdisciplinary fields. The insights these fields can collectively offer, working together, are increasingly desperately needed in a world that seems ever more on the brink of disaster. Our battles to career death over confessionalism seem beyond trivial in the face of the immensity of contemporary violence and oppression.