Hauntings: Queer/Trans Studies in Religion – serie

Traces the development of new anti-LGBTQ movements in Taiwan and their interactions with the US Religious Right In 2019, global media celebrated Taiwan as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. However, the pursuit of this human rights milestone spurred waves of opposition to LGBTQ rights that have fundamentally shaped the nation's democracy and its relationship with the United States. This book examines Taiwan's anti-LGBTQ movements, analyzes their rise and fall, and reveals their surprising links with American religious conservatism. Given that Christianity is a minority religion in Taiwan and East Asia, the book seeks to answer how and why Christian-led anti-LGBTQ sentiments became so powerful in Taiwan, and how they have built transnational connections with American and other international counterparts. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with leading figures across a wide political spectrum, and two years of cumulative ethnographic observation in both Taiwan and the United States, Kao reveals that moral conservatism has been flowing across borders and adapting to contemporary socio-political institutions as it seeks to protect its moral territories and expand its ideological power. Exploring the transnational ebbs and flows of moral conservatism as a direct response to rising pro-LGBTQ liberalism and queer radicalism, Fear of Queer Taiwan offers a groundbreaking theoretical framework to understand conservatism's fluidity in today's ever-evolving global landscape of gender and sexual politics.

Traces the development of new anti-LGBTQ movements in Taiwan and their interactions with the US Religious Right In 2019, global media celebrated Taiwan as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. However, the pursuit of this human rights milestone spurred waves of opposition to LGBTQ rights that have fundamentally shaped the nation's democracy and its relationship with the United States. This book examines Taiwan's anti-LGBTQ movements, analyzes their rise and fall, and reveals their surprising links with American religious conservatism. Given that Christianity is a minority religion in Taiwan and East Asia, the book seeks to answer how and why Christian-led anti-LGBTQ sentiments became so powerful in Taiwan, and how they have built transnational connections with American and other international counterparts. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with leading figures across a wide political spectrum, and two years of cumulative ethnographic observation in both Taiwan and the United States, Kao reveals that moral conservatism has been flowing across borders and adapting to contemporary socio-political institutions as it seeks to protect its moral territories and expand its ideological power. Exploring the transnational ebbs and flows of moral conservatism as a direct response to rising pro-LGBTQ liberalism and queer radicalism, Fear of Queer Taiwan offers a groundbreaking theoretical framework to understand conservatism's fluidity in today's ever-evolving global landscape of gender and sexual politics.

Explores Muslim queer and trans experiences in the world's largest Muslim-majority countryMany gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society's rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being. Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going.This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them.Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.

Explores Muslim queer and trans experiences in the world's largest Muslim-majority countryMany gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society's rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being. Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going.This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them.Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.

How lesbian feminist theories of sex illuminate public anxieties about sin, guilt, and innocenceStereotyped as manhating, puritanical killjoys, lesbian feminists have drawn almost as much contempt as the conservative Christian movements to which they are compared. Rather than dismissing this negativity, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys embraces it. The book proposes that the negativity of an earlier era sheds light on irresolvable complicities that shape queer and trans life today.Grounded in the archives of lesbian feminist movements, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys centers the contributions of four key lesbian feminists: Beverly Smith, Andrea Dworkin, Pat Parker, and Jill Johnston. Author Wendy Mallette unpacks these writers' understanding of sex as inextricably tied to patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism. Their thinking is brought into conversation with theorizations of queer negativity and the concept of social sin. By taking cues from Black, womanist, and queer Christian theology, Mallette traces how fantasies of innocence—appearing in feminist and queer studies, Christian theology, and debates about sex and race in the public sphere—underwrite a violent tendency to disavow guilt and scapegoat others. Mallette also responds to denials of inherited guilt displayed in recent anti-critical race theory, anti-DEI, and anti-trans legislation. Ultimately, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys reveals how strands of negativity can offer powerful resources to contend with gender and racial oppression.