What's Next

What's Next Kathryn Lofton (bio) To break up is to take a different position toward the thing departed. These essays argue together that one kind of break, that of being ex a religion, offers a strong vantage from which to analyze the totalizing norms religions designate. The voices here assembled appraise what storifying does to identities that are neither in nor outside, but constitutive in the direction of "ex." As convenor Shira Schwartz explains, the focus is on individuals "who attempt to leave minoritized, insular, totalizing and racialized ethnoreligious communities, who experience the world in such stark and spatialized 'inside' and 'outside' terms, often literally" (130). The insight of what Schwartz establishes is the alignment of a physical exit and exiting as a social process: these come together when a person moves from inside a social movement to departing it, when that person also reflects on what play is possible on each side of that exit door. The most typical source for such an ex-tale reflection is a story: autobiography, history, testimony. "There is an immense pressure on trans people, as well as converts, to tell their personal story," Mariecke van den Berg writes (163). Once upon a time, there was a person; that person realized something, found something, experienced something. The realization changes them from how they were relative to something else. The world embraces or abuses or ignores or confuses that change in the individual. The story concludes with happily ever after or there is happiness in the ever after or some other ellipsis from change. Such stories can support transformational action, inspiring listeners through smoothed plots of alteration. But stories also can also foreclose the multivalent and nonprogressive features of transformation by seeming to delimit what happens next. Is it possible to talk about change without making a story of it? If it were—if change could be described without giving an account of it—would that be desirable? The verdict from these perceptive and open-hearted writers is, tentatively, yes and maybe. It is possible to talk about change without making a story of it, but it is not certain whether that is desirable. How human beings speak End Page 171 stories of their transformation affects how humans understand the personhood that precedes and follows that process. The secular idea is that being playful about gender and sexuality is harder inside a religious movement than when you are outside it. These writers do not hold to such a supposition. Rather, they suggest that secularizing storifying misses how within any social space, overtly religious or not, there are modes of living and learning, "scavenging" (to repeat Schwartz's great image, borrowed from Jack Halberstam) among the available tropes, gestures, and turns of phrase that allow manifold struts and signifiers. An ex life story that suggests it is straight one place and queer another distorts. The question is not whether what is ex is queer or not; the question is where the "totalizing norming" system starts and stops, and who or what enacts transformational action. An individual person, say, a trader of enslaved persons, nabs a young male-identified person from sixteenth-century Ethiopia, transports them to Upper Egypt for castration, and sells them to the office of Chief Harem Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire: their life is changed. Observe how the sentence structure attributes a source for the subject of change. The storifying suggests their fate derived from the slaver (their life is changed). One could imagine also that the young person decided their own fate and changed their life. This collection of authors does not want us to sit in either narrative push, to imagine that one person possesses choice and someone else is only subject to other's choices. Instead, these essays ask how to write change without reducing the subject's complicated unfurling. "Ex-religion might reassemble gender, but perhaps more pointedly," Schwartz presses; ex-religion "disassembles gender, leaving it disaffiliated and in disarray" (121). Across the voices recorded here, religion is a term for trans expression, a way to think through change. A conversion from one religious view to another may also be a gender identity transition. For the authors in...