Queering the Sociology of Religion

The project of queering the sociology of religion relates to intersectionality in that both approaches interrogate religion’s embeddedness in a much larger social reality. Intersectionality has gained prominence in the subfield over the last decade, but less attention has been paid to applying queer theory to the sociological study of religion, a reality that may be related to subdisciplinary discomfort with the topic of sex and, to a lesser extent, with nonbinary gender. I advocate the adoption of queering as a method that involves making things strange by looking to the margins of the subfield rather than using the term to indicate a focus specifically on gender and sexual identities. I argue that the sociology of religion would benefit from prioritizing a practice of queering that involves regularly and intentionally troubling what we study, how we study it, and how we disseminate our research.