Queering and Transing Origins

Welcome to QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, a project intended to increase and transform both the production of and access to knowledge about the full range of rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality.This transformational access and its accessible transformations are a long time coming and could not have come at a better and more urgent time.All too often, accounts of our increasingly polarized political and cultural landscapes take for granted that to be religious is to be intolerant, and that to be progressive-an umbrella label under which LGBTIQ people are assumed to sit-is to be against religion.Yet evidence of interest in the intersection of religion, spirituality, gender, and sexuality is all around us, in a rapid proliferation of academic work as well as in the voices of many LGBTIQ cultural leaders, who experience religion or spirituality as an essential aspect of their lives and find their most important activist work to be that which is religiously rooted.The assumption of antipathy between camps is furthered by a lack of platform, a lack of resources, anti-LGBTIQ biases, and unimaginative perspectives on religion that have for too long plagued many institutions of knowledge.The history of trans and queer studies in religion demonstrates that these popular and persistent narratives, or at least the ones that are most loudly espoused and amplified, are woefully incomplete and thus inaccurate.Scholars whose research challenges such limited perspectives have worked for decades in relative isolation from one another, gathering together at times during meetings focused on broader shared interests but rarely having their own dedicated spaces in which to develop, share, or publish their work.This lack of space has also prevented robust and collaborative connections between scholars, activists, artists, and those who wear more than one of these hats; yet we know-and can see all too clearly in the devastating speed with which core protections have been dismantled in recent years-that such collaborations, such networked spaces, are critical for social change.This journal, we hope, will provide one such space: a crucial hub for connecting academic and other public infrastructures for a more sustainable shared future.