Readers of queer American literature require no introduction to the conceptual rewards that arise when writers intermingle sex and God, queer experience and theology, freedom and religion. Think of Alice Walker's Color Purple and Shug Avery's elaboration of the nonbinary theology presenting God as “It,” a project taking prayer, faith, and divinity as vital components of Avery's womanist and queer thought. As Michael Cobb (2006: 170) notes of the theology in Walker's novel, “So much of what should not be said can be said by a religious language of ‘It,’ which inaugurates the important project of making the stories open to revision, reflection, play, and impression.” Picking up on the broader insights undergirding Shug Avery's sacred rhetoric—that religious potentials need not compete adversarially with queer potentials, that they might instead collaborate in shared flourishing—queer studies has seen a resurgence in the religious, including, most recently, a special issue...
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April 1, 2022
Issue Editors
Review Article|
April 01 2022
Race, Sex, and God
Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition
, Melissa E. Sanchez, New York
: New York University Press
, 2019
. x + 337 pp.Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
, Peter Coviello, Chicago
: University of Chicago Press
, 2019
. 304
pp.Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century
, Elizabeth Freeman, Durham, NC
: Duke University Press
, 2019
. xii +228 pp.
Travis M. Foster
Travis M. Foster
Travis M. Foster is an associate professor of English and academic director of the Gender and Women's Studies program at Villanova University. He is the author of Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (2019); the coeditor of “American Women's Writing and the Genealogy of Queer Thought,” a special issue of Legacy (2020); and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body (forthcoming 2022). His current project is tentatively titled “Womanish: Variant Femininities of the American Nineteenth Century.”
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GLQ (2022) 28 (2): 289–297.
Citation
Travis M. Foster; Race, Sex, and God. GLQ 1 April 2022; 28 (2): 289–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9608203
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