On Celebration and Critique in Queer Religious Studies

On Celebration and Critique in Queer Religious Studies William Stell Monique Moultrie, Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) Joseph Plaster, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin District ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) Katrina Daly Thompson, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America ( New York: New York University Press, 2023) In recent years, the number of venues for scholarship on American religions and LGBTQ+ lives—be it historical, ethnographic, theological, or otherwise—has multiplied. Academic settings that were once dismissive or hostile have grown receptive, and new spaces dedicated to the young field are emerging (for example, the open access journal QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion). Certainly, not everyone has changed their tune. Like many others working at the intersection of religious studies and queer studies, I have repeatedly witnessed an aversion to analyzing religion among queer studies scholars and an aversion to analyzing queerness among religious (studies) scholars. At a broader level, the situation seems bleaker: culture warriors are attacking gender and sexuality studies in higher education as part of a larger political campaign End Page 243 against trans and queer people. Given how often these attacks are justified by appeals to religious freedom, the future of scholarship on queer religious subjects may be distinctly vulnerable, particularly in public institutions. Nevertheless, as evidenced by the three books here reviewed, there is much to celebrate in this young field. And the field, in turn, has found much in queer religious life to celebrate. Amid the fitting and fruitful celebrations, however, scholars in queer religious studies do well to ask: What fruits are lost when we lean away from critique? The differences among these three books are vast. Monique Moultrie's Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership presents oral history interviews of Black lesbian religious leaders and puts these interviews in service of womanist ethics, constructing a vision for womanist activism, leadership, and spirituality. Katrina Daly Thompson's Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America is an ethnography on LGBTQ+ and other nonconformist Muslims, whose discourse (much of it online) seeks to create inclusive communities defined by gender-expansiveness and social justice. Joseph Plaster's Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin offers a historical and ethnographic analysis of the networks and world-making practices of unhoused migrant queers in tenderloin districts over the past one hundred years. In addition to the differences, there are noteworthy commonalities. Each of these three books takes an exciting turn toward studying queer religious subjects themselves—that is, the religious lives of LGBTQ+ people, not just religious positions on LGBTQ+ issues. Each book attends to queer religious subjects who have been especially neglected in the academy and beyond due to racism, sexism, classism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and respectability politics. Each operates with a capacious understanding of queerness that includes even those who do not identify as queer (though none engages with more critical reflections on this capaciousness, such as those offered by Kathryn Lofton).1 Lastly, each author writes with a confidence that testifies to the strength of the field—a confidence both in the significance of their research and in their own positionality as researchers. Refreshingly, these authors do not seem weighed down by a need to convince their readers that their subjects are worthy of study, do not seem pressured to confine the value of their research to the realm of scholarship, do not minimize or apologize for their investment in their subjects' fates. In fact, each author embraces their allegiance to their subjects, unashamedly celebrates the stories of their lives, and—at least in Moultrie's and Thompson's End Page 244 books—explicitly elevates those lives as examples to be emulated. The results are beautiful. They also raise questions. Given Moultrie's training as a Christian ethicist, Hidden Histories is the most overtly normative, even as her historical research holds immense scholarly value well beyond the study of ethics. Moultrie's eighteen oral history interviews of Black lesbian religious leaders are a precious gift to the future study...