Queer/ing Religion

After studying feminist ethics and liberation theology in seminary in the 1980s, I joined a reading group with like-minded women. We called ourselves "the seminary lesbians under theological stress." In 1991 we marched in San Francisco Pride behind a big, hand-painted banner. Sporting lacy bras, we handed out hot-pink stickers to a queer public thrilled by our mash-up of naughty sex and illicit religion. The stickers read: "The goddess loves you. xo, The SLUTS." Campy provocation or queer blessing? We were going for both! Roars of delight and tears of relief flowed from among the onlooking crowd as we passed. At that point, the relationship between LGBT studies and religious studies was limited to mutual exile. Queers are bad for religion; religion is bad for queers. To be sure, some worked toward inclusion. This was almost always a question of producing some form of LGBT respectability—what we today would call homonormativity—and virtually never one of queering religion. Thinking queerness and religion together, much less claiming both, remains a conundrum.My own efforts to remain faithful to the possibilities of this conundrum led me to become an anthropologist and to move away from the hegemonic terrains of Christianity and the United States. An encounter with a South Indian goddess opened up new ways of feeling and thinking through, in between, and against the categories of sexuality and religion. The devi, or goddess, Yellamma, whose devotees in Karnataka, South India, I have been in conversation with for twenty-five years, is herself a conundrum—for scholars of religion as well as for her devotees. Her priests are female and male sexed women whose initiations are conducted as rites of marriage. They are called jogatis and jogappas, or devadasis, and they call this goddess their husband and mother. Transformations in gender and sexuality are a mode and medium of her power. As one priest put it to me, "Yellamma is not simple, she makes men into women." Saying "she came to me in a dream and called me to her temple," women withdraw from sexual relations with their husbands and leave untenable marriages. They take the path of divine service out of gendered kin obligations, which are otherwise extremely difficult to escape in this rural context where endogamous relations remain the most powerful arbiter of social belonging. Other women exchange saris for dhotis and turbans, renounce the kin obligations conventionally assigned to women, and take up men's work in Yellamma's name. At her festivals, jogappas—male sexed women whom the goddess has claimed—wrap saris, conduct rites, bestow blessings, play sacred instruments, dance, and sing in her name. Yellamma's pujaris (priests) are widely understood to embody illicit sexuality; their dedication is often described as an induction into prostitution under the "cover of false religion." Following Yellamma's women as they conducted rites commonly framed as "empty" led me to ponder a question: whose ways of talking to god(s) can count as religion? Illicit sexual personhood—I was learning, very far away from any queer metropole—indexes religious illegitimacy. Religious propriety indexes sexual propriety. These formulas apply to everyday possibilities of recognition as well as scholarly treatments of both queerness and religiosity. As long as Abrahamic and Brahmanical patriarchal religions are ascendant, being loved by the goddess might indeed make you queer(er).Scholars laboring in the relatively untrammeled terrain between queer studies and religious studies have long lamented the ways these fields have foreclosed possibilities of cross-fertilization. Within queer theory, sexuality is typically conceived in secular terms as an effect of discursive, psychic, and somatic flows or structures. Most scholars of religion view their object of study through a straight lens. In reflecting on why people are quick to refuse the idea that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are nuns—as they identified themselves to her in her research with them—Melissa Wilcox (2019: 18) has proposed a formula: Sex negates "true" religion;Queerness and transness equal sex;Therefore, queerness and transness negate "true" religion.Drag queens can't be real nuns, and prostitutes can't be real priests, or so the logic goes. The question becomes, how might our scholarly projects open themselves up to the mutual entanglements of religiosity and sexuality? A variety of approaches have been taken up by scholars oriented by and toward both sex and god(s). Riffing on Omar Kasmani's thoughtful typology in Queer Companions (155–59), I would suggest three main pathways: explorations of the religiosity of queerness, elaborations of the queerness of religion, and queer thea/ologies.Elaborations of the religiosity of queerness have taken the ritual of Pride, the space of the BDSM dungeon or dyke bar, innovations in same-sex weddings, and sex rites as sites in which the cosmic, ethical, and soteriological functions of queer practices might be elaborated through the categories of religious studies. Considerations of the queerness of religion work through queer categories and methods to shed light on the perversity of religion, its desire for the ecstasies and suffering of the body. Wilcox's study of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence might be characterized in this light as a study of sexy religion against propriety. In a similar vein, I have suggested we investigate the "sexuality of religion," in that "all rites and religions have sexuality, they mobilize and organize sexual economies, distributions of fertility, the limits and possibilities of public pleasures, and the shape of our desires" (Ramberg 2014: 222). Queer Thea/ologies bring a queer lens to canonical sacred texts, revising and reclaiming religious orthodoxies for the LGBTQ faithful.Three recently published books, drawing from ethnographic archives compiled in the global South, offer some novel ways to take up improper objects and pursue impertinent methods between the problem spaces carved out by the categories religion and queerness. In their own way, each builds on and goes beyond the three main pathways I have outlined above. Notably, writing from Pakistan, the Dominican Republic, and India, these anthropologists fold insights drawn from critical race, decolonial, postcolonial, and post-secular theories forged in the global South. These insights reconfigure what it might mean to queer religion. Kasmani advances what he calls "reading queer religiously" (28, 159). Ana-Maurine Lara's approach might be characterized as Black: queer reading/writing/ritual. Saria makes a cut in the space between religiosity and queerness in order to recast the question of social reproduction. To elaborate in greater detail their contributions to the field of queer/religion, I offer brief summaries of these monographs.Drawing on extensive fieldwork at the most significant site of Sufi pilgrimage in Pakistan, Kasmani extends ethnographic meditations on relations between fakirs and saints. In his monograph Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, he takes these relations as generative grounds for queer questions about intimacy and temporality. Each chapter centers a particular site within the pilgrimage complex—grove, shrine, courtyard, lodge, and graveyard—and his conversations and encounters with one or two fakirs or healers. These pairings allow Kasmani to elaborate the myriad ways the queer companionship of saints unfolds across the unstraight lives of fakirs as well as how their healing practices are emplaced and place making. That is, the organization of the book attends to the temporal and spatial possibilities of saintly intimacies.One of his key interlocutors describes herself as "in the line of fakiri" (8), referring in particular to the thirteenth-century antinomian saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar whose tomb this site surrounds. Thinking with Sara Ahmed (2006), Kasmani takes lines of orientation as a key hermeneutic and unfolds the "unstraight affordancies" and "obstancies" (15–16) that fakiri intimacies make available. Being "in the line" of Lal puts this woman, "unlike other women" (8), out of step with expectations typically upheld for wives, mothers, and daughters. In her case, she managed her husband's desire that she leave the shrine and return to their domestic life by recourse to her commitment to Lal. She could not take leave of the saint without his permission. Becoming close to saints opens up intimacies afforded fakirs but not other women.In attending to the nonreproductive, nonheterosexual intimacies and temporalities surrounding Lal, Kasmani asks queer questions of religion. Setting aside more predictable objects of queer inquiry, such as sexual identity and acts, he frames his project as "reading queer religiously." Rather than "Islamizing queer or queering Islam," Kasmani brings both categories into productive crisis, "troubling religion as a nondefinable, Eurocentric, and colonialist category" and imagining queerness beyond rights, cities, secularity, and Europe (28). What are we looking for when we are looking through a queer lens? Kasmani answers this question in a particularly innovative fashion. For him, queerness is not so much a question of sexuality as an object of study. It serves instead as hermeneutic, a mode of reading. "It follows that fakir lives in this book are not confirmations of queer presence elsewhere but orientations in and of themselves" (28). These non-straight orientations unfolding around a Sufi shrine provincialize the secularity of sex and the propriety of Islam.Kasmani warns against the limits of recuperative readings of religion as being queerer than we have been taught. Such quests for lost ancestors and origins risk what he terms "queer jacketing" of religion. Rather than uncovering Sufism as the queer space within Islam, Kasmani is interested in "reading queerness religiously." That is, Kasmani eschews the pathways of queering religion or religioning queerness as methods that risk re-stabilizing the categories religion and queerness. Further nuancing the question of how to pose the relation between the categories queer and religion, Kasmani turns to an Urdu concept: suhbet. This term bears a range of meanings, he explains, from conversation to auspicious encounter to sexual congress. It signals an intimate abiding with. "How, then, might we imagine a suhbet between queer studies and the study of religion?" he writes (156). Within a suhbet—coming together and staying with—between religious and queer studies, "each might alter the other's forms of knowing," he suggests (156). More concretely, by taking nonurban, non-secular spaces in the global South as generative sites for queer concepts and methods, he embraces an improper object of queer studies. Further, in characterizing this promiscuous religious site—"Sufi by renown, Shivaite in heritage, and increasingly Shi'i in following" (3)—as manifesting nothing more than the everyday religious plurality of Pakistan, he disrupts nationalist Shi'i assertions and concepts of faithfulness as necessarily singular. In reading queerness religiously, this ethnography unsettles the epistemological foundations of both queer and religious studies, leaving the reader to contemplate unorthodox intimacies between saints and fakirs, religionists and queer scholars, shrines in the global South and gayborhoods in the global North.In the wake of decades of participatory ethnography in the Dominican Republic, Ana-Maurine Lara has written a poetic monograph that advances a set of arguments about the place of criollo traditions in broad struggles for justice and freedom. But this is not just a book that advances arguments; it takes the form of a ceremony. In Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty, Lara invites her readers to enter shared "body-lands, water-memories, and altars-puntos" that makes decolonial queer Black conviviality possible. She invites us to receive her work as an ofrenda (offering) in service of healing and thriving. Her rhetorical modes of address are drawn from Afro-descendant aesthetics and form: "As with jazz, bomba, atables, and krik?krak!, this is a call and response. 'Queer freedom: Black sovereignty' is the call" (14). Her formulation, "queer freedom: Black sovereignty," insists on the inextricability of decolonial and emancipatory projects across sexuality, race, gender, and Indigeneity.This is a book that performs its interventions. It is divided into chapters that enact a dimension of criollo ritual observance. In the table of contents where a reader would expect an introduction and conclusion, instead they find "opening ceremony" and "closing ceremony." The first element on the first page of the "opening ceremony" is explained in the first footnote, which precedes the main text. She writes, This drawing is a vêvé, a landing point for the misterios, the energies present within these pages who will traverse this ofrenda along with us. . . . As roadways, vêvé remind us to take note of our physical and emotional presence within ceremonial time and space. . . . Footnotes in this text are also vêvés. Here, they are symbolic doorways, placeholders, and landing points signaling where the reader might need to go to know more, to contemplate, to connect. (1)In making a ceremony of a book, Lara might be said to be queering the scholarly monograph. Certainly, she moves beyond the secular presumptions and subject/object relations governing most scholarly writing. Readers and misterios alike are called into this book. Queerness here is a question of sexual orientation and identity, but also a mode of playful/serious reading that draws on both African American traditions of "reading" (calling out) together with Afro-descendant religious modes of "reading" your head (calling in). When a servidora/priest "reads your head," she is discerning what misterios you belong to as well as your intentions and relations in the ceremony. Rather than take Afro-descendant religion as her object of observation, Lara makes of it a source of her hermeneutics and mode of writing, hence Black: queer reading/writing/ritual. Lara moves beyond queering religion or religioning queer in composing an ethnography of queer: Black ritual and resistance that is itself a ceremonial enactment and an offering.Throughout, Lara is concerned with the ongoing violence of Christian coloniality, logics of purity, blood quantum, and plantation slavery as well as the continuities of ritual and "deep knowledge" (127) that subvert, rupture, and displace the hegemony of ethnonationalist Catholicism. She takes her readers on an intimate journey through ceremonies and conversations with priests, priestesses, keepers of altars-puntos, and initiates. Many of these interlocutors do not directly discuss their relationship to misterios whom they serve, and whose altars-puntos they keep. These practices are stigmatized as "witchcraft" and "demonology" by virtually all Protestants and some Catholics. Lara is attentive to the forms of opacity produced by this politics of religion, both in terms of what kinds of religious publics are possible as well as the limits of ethnographic transparency. Indeed, she demonstrates a rigorous commitment to critiquing the logics of purity wherever they may turn up. Her evocative and layered descriptions of criollo practices open the reader up to possibilities for queer, Black, and Indigenous preservation and thriving. As an exercise in decolonial anthropology, this book calls the reader into a space in which colonial knowledge and power structures are contested, decentered, and overcome by deeper and older forms of being, conjuring, and gathering.Vaibhav Saria's compelling, generous, and raw ethnography of hijra lives, loves, and worlds in rural Odisha, Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India, delivers fresh challenges for scholars of religion and sexuality. Often framed, however problematically, as "third gendered" or trans, hijras have been part of subcontinental culture for thousands of years. They figure in ancient epics and played significant political and social roles in Mughal courts. Under the British, they were criminalized and dispossessed of their property. More recently, they have emerged as exemplars of political incorruptibility and purveyors of public health in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Saria draws on classic works in queer theory and South Asian studies to unfold hijra worlds in ways that trouble both fields. For instance, they put Lee Edelman's (2004) antisocial thesis next to theorizations of the foundational role of the ascetic in Indic social order to disturb both. In a rejoinder to Edelman's notion of reproductive futurity, Saria writes, "Not everyone experiences temporality as determined by secular liberalism and given the religious meanings attached to hijras, the temporality that structures their lives borrows from longstanding histories and traditions of ascetism" (6). Within Indic epic, mythological, and social traditions, the ascetic is classically understood as a figure of renunciation who has cut any ties to familial networks and reproductive aims and whose power is a function of their location outside or beyond the householder stage of life. By contrast, Saria locates the erotic-asceticism of hijras not outside the domestic but diagonal to it. In their analysis and description, hijras participate in the reproduction of kin networks through time and are integral to the constitution and reconstitution of the social.More concretely, as sex workers, hijras do reside outside domestic sexual economies and moralities, and as ascetics, they are peripheral to the social. At the same time, as kin, they are not exiled from their families. Indeed, their earnings through sex work and their haq (dharmic or ethical right to collect money on trains, at weddings, and at ceremonies celebrating the birth of a child) frequently supplement if not sustain their natal families. In Saria's words: "Money they make through begging on trains, at weddings, religious festivals, and childbirth ceremonies and through sex work illuminate an extended erotic economy in which families live through the labor and bodies of hijras. When hijra bodies are considered crucial to sustaining the domestic sphere, we are offered a means of formulating the stakes of nonprocreative sexuality in kinship" (15). Further, as Saria demonstrates, hijras serve as pedagogical figures for domesticated men who might be their lovers, and hijras may get married, procreate, adopt and raise children, or otherwise participate in reproductive labor, if aslant to heteronormative and patrilineal modes of reproduction. In Saria's analysis, the center and the periphery are not conceptualized in binary opposition; inside and outside are shown to be more porous and blurry than queer critiques of the straight family have assumed.Being on the periphery provides hijras with a kind of mobility across domestic, political, and religious domains. Thus, for Saria, "liberation for hijras is not from religion, as in a Christian context; rather, myths and religious texts are routes to engage the liberal democratic state in India" (6). These routes suspend teleological time, displacing heteronormative and salvific temporalities. One of Saria's friends and interlocutors, Mehraj, references the ancient epic centering fratricidal violence to explain her distance from her natal kin: "I don't like all this, I want to stay away from the Mahabarata of this world" (74). If the epic is about the fundamental violence of patrilineal inheritance practices that turn brothers into beasts fighting over property, then hijras, in turning away from such claims, bring a less bestial, more human present into being. Another hijra whose story figures centrally in the book, Mangu, takes refuge from her family when their demands for money become too burdensome in a nearby majhar—the shrine of a Muslim saint. Such routes provincialize the secular liberal assumptions of what Edelman has framed as reproductive futurism. Hijras world futures, but not through the conventional lines of kin or land and not outside Indic spaces of religiosity and myth. Saria's rich account gives us new ways to think about social reproduction that displace both the secular orientation of queer studies and the protestant underpinnings of religion as a category. In shedding light on the religious and mythological lineaments of the social in East Odisha among hijras, their families, and neighbors, Saria queers reproductive futurity as always already contaminated. It is neither free from violence (having projected it onto putatively predatory homosexuals) nor purely the outgrowth of heteronormative couplings. Saria's pathway through the terrain between religiosity and queerness recasts this problem space as a question of social reproduction.Theoretically generative ethnographies such as these should help put to rest the tired presumption that anthropologists merely apply theories that necessarily emanate from the global North. Writing into queer and religious studies from the global South necessitates drawing on innovations in decolonial and critical race scholarship. The improper objects and impertinent methods that such innovations produce call on all of us—wherever we are writing from—to renovate these fields and inhabit anew the forms of intimacy possible between them. The SLUTS, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, fakirs, hijras, and criollo practitioners are all queering religion and religioning queerness in different ways. Let us devote ourselves to them and the ways they contaminate our received categories and inheritances. Let us love the goddess back.