What role does gender, sexuality and the body play in producing the idea that religion, and particularly politicized religion, is equal to conservatism, while secularism is progressive?

This was the central question posed to participants at the 2007 conference from which this special issue arises, "The Politics of Religion and Sexuality," sponsored by the CUNY Grad Center's Center for Culture, Technology and Work, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, and Barnard's Center for Research on Women.[1] The conference meant to address the multitude of recent, highly politicized issues at the nexus of religion, secularism, sexuality, gender, politics, and bodies: the ongoing "civilizational" debate in the U.S. over the threat of Islamism[2] and the status of women and queers in "Islamic" societies; controversies over the banning of veils in France; gay marriage and its influence on U.S. electoral politics; the global schism in the Anglican Church (and potentially others) over homosexuality; the rise of deeply conservative Catholic and evangelical churches in Africa and other parts of the developing world; the stymying of AIDS prevention efforts; the Dutch cartoons of Muhammad; Catholic sex abuse cases; evangelical preacher sex scandals; and the ideologically-driven crusade to "save Muslim queers and women," to name just a few.

These conflicts, particularly over the role of Islamist movements, but also the Christian Right, have often led to an alarmed, if not alarmist, narrative about the rise of conservative, politicized religious movements around the world in almost every religion, seeking to resist secular establishments and "liberal" culture, while mobilizing to re-impose various forms of patriarchal culture. While such developments certainly challenge the secularization thesis, which predicted the decline of religion with modernity, the conference wished to engage the subsequent development, if not standoff, that serves to uncritically equate religion with the conservative and the secular with the progressive.

Interestingly, the conference coincided as well with the emergence of a significant backlash against religion by the science-defending "new atheists."[3] While mildly more progressive[4] than the "civilizational" narrative in its willingness to criticize the theocratic tendencies of the U.S. government, rather than simply focusing on the threat of Islamic radicalism (and helping give a voice to the growing group of "unbelievers" often left out of national politics in the U.S.), this backlash follows this popular and troubling tendency to overstate the distinction between science/secularism and religion, re-inscribing the uncritical configuration of religion with conservatism and secularism with a progressive liberalism. Such popular and dominant perspectives reveal a relatively uncritical faith in the progress narrative of science, Enlightenment, and modernity, in stark contrast to the emerging scholarly consensus that the assumptions of the secularization thesis need to be rethought. Further, it does this in a way that tends to leave the crucial work of cultural analysis behind, particularly any more complex analysis regarding conflicts over gender, sexuality, and bodies, even while invoking these conflicts to justify its claims. If the march of Enlightenment, progress, science and modernity is so unstoppable, as they argue, how to explain the profusion of conservative, politicized, neo-patriarchal religious movements they are so alarmed about? Needless to say, this paradox is left remarkably unexamined in their writings.

The solution typically offered by these narratives is more secularism. Yet, why is secularism always assumed to be the solution, rather than part of the problem? What role does secularism, particularly in its dominant, neoliberal forms, so influential around the globe, have in producing these conflicts? Conference organizers saw many problems with this narrative, not least of which was the unhelpful marginalization of more progressive religious movements and alternate secular perspectives; the assumption that secularism or liberalism is necessarily progressive or even one "thing"[5]; as well as the assumption that "really existing" secularism(s) were necessarily "secular" rather than the expression of a particular society's cultural and religious values. One would think a little reflection on the role of the "West" and its Christian rhetoric of a "crusade" against terrorism during the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would disturb this narrative. The aim then of the conference was to trouble this configuration, by focusing on the role issues of sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation—so often referred to in justifying the association of religion with conservatism and secularism with an enlightened liberalism—play in helping to produce this configuration.

Along these lines, various thinkers, such as Talal Asad, have sought to critically reexamine the shortcomings and paradoxes of the secularization narrative by rethinking the relationship between the religious and the secular, highlighting their historical co-constitution[6], inter-dependencies and inter-imbrications, in what Jakobsen and Pellegrini have come to call Protestant or Christian Secularism[7]. For instance, Jakobsen and Pellegrini point out the influence and role of the Protestant work ethic in creating the practices that have given rise to global, free market capitalism, generally understood as the "universal" underpinning of today's secularism. Others, provocatively reversing the "post-Christian" terminology of the "God is Dead" era of theology, propose the somewhat ambiguous term "postsecular" in describing the current era.[8] While various recent works explore secularism's debt to religion[9]; the role of the media and the political forms of religion[10]; or the specific resonances of the Christian-Capitalist assemblage[11]; we decided, taking insight from Saba Mahmood's critique of Western feminist notions of agency in Islamist movements and other works[12], to focus on the relatively neglected interplay between religion/secularisms, politics and sexuality/gender/body across the "civilizational" divide. Given how gendered, queer and racialized bodies often mediate conflicts in times of global anxiety, and the multiple crises around the globe—economic, cultural, political, and ecological—examining how these crises permeate these intersections seems particularly apropos.

The central questions the conference invited different thinkers, scholars, and activists to examine then were the following: given the associations typically made in dominant political and scientific discourse between secularism and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other, what role does gender and sexuality play in producing this configuration? Secondly, how and why have cultural issues of sexual freedom championed by liberal groups been so effectively used by the Right to pit popular sentiment against them? Finally, how is the emergence of conservative, politicized religious movements indicative of problems stemming from modernity itself and its dominant narrative, science?

In grappling with these questions across a range of specific contexts, a consensus emerged among participants at the conference, and particularly the contributors for this special issue, that sexuality, gender, and the body play a central role in producing the conservative/religion and liberalism/secularism configuration; though in often detrimental ways, as the associations in this configuration tend to be facile and obscure underlying complexities. Examining specific intersections of religions, bodies, gender, sexuality, politics, and secularisms in different national and cultural contexts highlights the extent to which these associations do not do justice to the complexity embedded within some of the most controversial and poignant conflicts of today, even while, paradoxically, issues of sexuality, gender, and bodies often help produce this very configuration. Lastly, science and the Enlightenment progress narrative are far from being the liberating force they often present themselves as vis-à-vis women's rights, sexuality, gender, and bodies. In fact, they are often implicated in helping to produce conservative, politicized religious movements via their complicity with neocolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, and the Protestant/Christian Secular.

The special issue itself ultimately morphed into a focus on the role conflicts around bodies, sexuality, and gender have in producing and being produced by the configuration religion/conservatism and liberalism/secularism in three different contexts. The first section examines their intersections, ambiguities, and co-dependencies within the context of the Christian Secular, science, and liberalism. The second examines their complexities as displayed within different Islamic social and national contexts in opposition to the orientalist, monolithic "Islam" represented in the West. The third section engages in a more playful analysis of various queer visual art and video, examining efforts at re-appropriating and re-configuring religion and religious imagery and the skewing of these dominant associations in and for queer culture.

The tentative conclusion this special issue ultimately reaches is a paradoxical one: that conflicts around bodies, gender and sexuality have both a major role in producing the dominant associations of religion/conservatism and liberalism/secularism while at the same time being produced by them. Further, the dominant forms of secularism, particularly of the Protestant or neoliberal secular forms of modernization so influential around the globe, help produce—and indeed are often entwined with—the very conservative, politicized religious movements that ostensibly oppose them, fueling the intensifying conflicts around sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation this issue examines. While conflicts around sexuality, gender and bodies are nothing new, one wonders to what extent their rising barometer is indexed to the proliferation of stale, stagnant, if not corrupt forms of secularism around the globe, implicated in the revolts of the Arab Spring, the London riots, and contemporary United States politics. The hope of this special issue is that in looking at these conflicts across a wide range of contexts, more insight can be reached about this paradoxical relationship; opening up and distressing this often trite, stalemated, yet dominant configuration in ways that might allow for more interesting, liberating and radical alternatives, beckoning towards a more playful, open-ended, inclusive future for queers, feminists, religionists, and secularists of all stripes.

Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular

The first section, Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular takes up these questions by examining and deconstructing the strict binary often assumed between religion and science/secularism. Ann Burlein, in "The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular," starts off by asking, "what happens to Foucault's contention that the soul is the prison of the body when sexuality gets routed not through confession but through molecular biology and the so-called 'revolution in genetic medicine'?" Further, "how does the market in knowledge-products and services that this revolution has helped produce change expectations regarding the body and its truths?" Despite the fact that genetics makes biology conditional, linking body and soul in non-linear and non-reductionistic ways, Burlein argues the "family" still remains the primary point of access to the production of this (genetically variant) de-standardizing body. The genetic revolution relentlessly re-inscribes conventional relations toward belonging, intimacy, sexuality, and even life itself. Why? As Burlein fleshes out in her paper—employing Foucault's concept of secularism as "in-depth Christianization"—largely because of the influence of the Christian Secular.[13] In other words, the idea, as Asad puts it, secularism in the West is "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it ... nor a simple break from it."[14] Instead, religiosity and the secular co-constitute one another. Nowhere is this demonstrated more fully than in modern medicine, which, in Burlein's words, "provided crucial justification for secular governance" through its "rational" aim to end pain, rather than justify, inflict or palliate it. "Despite medicine's use of this legitimation narrative to assert its status as empirical science", Burlein argues, physicians have "relied on and even strengthened religious sensibilities regarding sexuality and shame."

In a new twist of the co-constitution of the religious and the secular, while 'sexuality' is still key to the molecular body—though differently, insofar as the molecular body develops logics of variation without norm that proliferate individual differences, evading the shame medical norms engender—Burlein shows how molecular medicine "curtails and contains these radical possibilities by foregrounding the domestic family as the primary point of access and production"; realizing its "dream of tapping directly into the forces of life itself" by "backgrounding reproduction and stigmatized forms of identity in favor of foregrounding the lyrical and allegedly liberating discourses and practices of romantic love." Drawing on Melinda Cooper's work on the rise of the biotechnology industry, and its aim to generate "surplus value from life's capacity for future capacity," Burlein argues that while molecular medicine, "still tells sexual sermons (as did eighteenth century sexology), its preaching works not by implanting shame or stigma, but rather by inciting us to invest in the possibility of future growth, not in spite of uncertainty but because of it."

Crucially, for Burlein's argument, it is the capacity of molecular medicine for "smart touch" and screening of potential maladies and genetic errors that ironically re-inscribes the familial romance back at the center. Somatic individuals "seek to anticipate and shape 'nature' before it actually comes to pass," yet, paradoxically, "despite the talk of DNA as 'uniquely you,' and despite the flattening of mommy-Daddy-Oedipus that molecular memories enable, genetic medicine insistently embeds the individual within 'the background-body, the body behind the abnormal body ... the parents' body, the ancestors' body, the body of the family, the body of heredity; in today's clinic ... it is the intimate, domestic family that provides the obligatory passage point to knowledge about individuals as well as citizenship." For Burlein, even artificial reproductive technologies work by "backgrounding reproduction in favor of routing 'sexuality' through the gendered romance ... it is the way that molecular medicine preaches 'the domestic family' that explains why the new technologies for artificial reproduction have not troubled traditional notions of gender and family in the ways that feminist activists and scholars once thought they would." Just as Luther and Calvin "disciplined sexuality through marriage," the "care for the 'self' that is emerging across the various sub-disciplines of molecular medicine is always already care of familial others."

Today, Burlein argues: "Sex still stands in for material relations. Its disciplines still provide support for lyrical forms of preaching and promise. In a world that dreams of rendering even waste productive, medicine's sexual sermons authorize specific expectations regarding what makes life worth living and dying for"—such as the West's supposed sexual "freedom" in contrast with its Islamic "other". Burlein concludes:

Molecular medicine acts as (what Lauren Berlant calls) an intimate public: juxtaposed to the political without necessarily going there, medical discourses deploy 'sexuality' in ways that promise us freedom—especially vis-à-vis our bodily fate(s)—even as these same sexual sermons re-structure the conjunction of experiences that we call 'sexuality.' To call these discourses 'sexual sermons' is not to argue that sexuality 'functions like' a religion. It is, rather, to pinpoint particular practices through which secular expectations surrounding the body and its vitality draw force from long-standing religious sensibilities in which sexuality stands in for ethical relation to the material world. We respond to their force, believe in the body (as Nietzsche put it), whether or not we profess or practice Christianity."

While Burlein focuses on the (typically denied) co-constitution of the religious and the secular within molecular biology, Melissa Wilcox in, "Bodily Transgression: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury," seeks to open the binary between religion and the scientific (Christian) secular by exploring what each might learn from each other via dialogue about mutilation and self-injury. While religious traditions have a long understanding of self-injury as a form of asceticism, Wilcox points out that the clinical definition of self-injury includes the specification that self-injurious practices include only those that are "socially unacceptable." Yet, at what point does "pathology end and normativity enter?" Why, for instance, is piercing one's own ears not self-injury? Or body piercing or tattoos? How does scarification differ from self-injury? Wilcox goes on to explore the different ways in which self-injury, seen from science's standpoint mainly as pathology, with aid from religious theories of ritual and postmodern feminism can be seen as a "symbolic means of giving voice to pain, as a paradoxical form of agency, and as ritual." Where science and modern psychology may primarily see pathology, ritual theory can see voice and agency, even if (often) self-defeating. Conversely, self-injury offers to (potentially romanticizing) theory about religious ritual how agency and voice can be interwoven with potentially self-defeating "misrecognition" of its ultimate aims:

What self-injury offers to the study of ritual is the question of external misrecognition, which fundamentally influences the meaning and concrete social effects of a ritual. The potential for misreading of self-injury leads to a potential for re-victimization of those who self-injure by people whose interpretations of the practice diverge from those of the self-injurer herself. The flip side, though, of the ambivalence of self-injury is that it is in fact empowering—and for very good reasons—despite how self-destructive and maladaptive it may seem from an outsider's perspective. Other rituals may share this fundamental ambivalence. This should alert scholars to be sensitive, in the analysis of ritual, to practitioners' claims of empowerment, even in cases where the ritual appears from our own perspective to be disempowering, and it should also alert us to the risks inherent in the misrecognition of ritual.

Expanding on her reflections of self-injury as a technology of the self or gender, Wilcox concludes by proposing the concept of "technologies of the sacred" as a tool for transgressing simplistic religion/science binaries to see their co-constitution and what each might have to offer each other:

Technologies of the sacred, then, might be defined as those practical, religious ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained. They would include the ways in which social power comes to expression in the everyday sacred practices and experiences of the subject, and also—showing the ambiguity in self-injury as a technology of the self and a technology of the sacred—the religious ways in which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of the sacred can also be understood as those practices that bring a sense of the sacred into being, that construct the sacred, and that shape the self in response to such experiences of the sacred. In this way, self-injury as a technology of the sacred evokes an experience of the sacred, marks that experience clearly on the body, and at the same time reinforces—or, in some cases, subverts, or both—structures of power and domination.

Pivoting from these reflections on individual bodies, the science/religion binary and the Christian Secular, Laura Levitt, in "Shedding Liberalism All Over Again," focuses more closely on the role of the Christian Secular in the "exclusionary inclusion" of different kinds of social bodies in liberalism in the U.S., focusing in particular on the example of the historical experience of Jews who emigrated to the United States. While on the one hand, America has served as a welcome respite for Jews, particularly Eastern European Jews like her ancestors, this has not come without a cost. Like today's Islamic cultures in the U.S., or yesterday's Catholics, the Christian Secular is ostensibly welcoming, but only to the extent outside groups fit into and conform to the frame of its Protestant structure and outlook. It is "okay" to be different, as long as you are a recognizable variation on its theme. For Jews, Levitt argues, this has been recognition of inclusion only to the extent that Jews are seen as "religious" and belong to a "church" (synagogue). "Secular," unbelieving, or merely "cultural" Jews are excluded from acceptable recognition in today's ostensibly "neutral" public sphere. One can argue as well that this dynamic functions in regard to today's relations with atheists, or nonbelievers. When was the last time an atheist ran for President? Or a Catholic won? (Yes, Kennedy did get elected, but only Protestants have been elected President in the fifty years since his historic victory.[15] Engaging with Saba Mahmood's reflections[16] on how liberalism regulates difference through the idea of religious tolerance, Levitt aims to create dialogue between different "excluded" factions, recuperating (while mourning) liberalism's "revolutionary" promise of inclusion in a "more inclusive collective future, a future that risks imagining inclusion in new and more powerful ways that just might bring Jews and Muslims into a more productive alliance with feminists and other others."

Islam, Bodies, Politics

The next section, Islam, Bodies, Politics, focuses more directly on different issues of bodily regulation within specific Islamic national contexts. In "Passing, Politics and Religion," Minoo Moallem analyzes the widely popular—but quickly banned—Iranian comedy, Marmoulak (The Lizard), about a criminal, Reza, who escapes from prison by "passing" as a respectable clergyman. Along the way, she argues, in a comic twist of mistaken identity, the film "brilliantly exposes and unsettles notions of respectability, masculinity, and class capital by interrogating the boundaries of normativity and criminality in what the Islamic State considers a pious, ethical, and religious citizen-subject."

Here, through the lens of a popular film, ironic insight is drawn that challenges quite strongly any equation of religion with conservatism, in this case the equation in the West of "Islam" and "fundamentalist" Islam, in particular, as "backward" and anti-modern. For, as the film shows quite clearly, "respectability" falls along class lines, and particularly, those of the educated, elite. It is the latter which has suppressed the kooche va bazar space of Iranian popular culture, replacing it with Islamic values since the Cultural Revolution. It is on Reza's body, the criminal-turned-clergyman, that we can "read" this distinction between the symbolic capital and respectable masculinity of the educated clergyman, or ahklund, and the lower-class, pleasure-seeking, hyper-masculinity of the playful and light kooche va bazar language of the thug.

Moallem concludes her analysis of respectable vs. non-respectable "passing" in Iranian society with the argument that the presumed opposition between religion and secularism actually undercuts possibilities for secular practices within the framework of Iranian society:

The implication of passing for Iranian political discourse is significant because the current discourses both in Iran and in the diaspora have produced citizen-subjects that are seen, or self-perceived, as belonging to one side or the other of certain impenetrable binaries. This problem has significantly impacted the cultural and political spheres of representation. For example, while the modernist and secularist bias in the sphere of cultural representation keeps referring to the Iranian clergy as the other of the secular and the modern, in reality and on the ground, what distinguishes various groups of people, both men and women, is not their religious or secular appearances, especially when it comes to the dress code, but rather their conservative or reformist political agenda. Indeed, I argue that the dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/religious, and respectable/outlaw based on modern regimes of visibility and corporeality have been crucial in influencing the Iranian political sphere. Constructing religion as equivalent to conservatism and the opposite of secularism has been detrimental to the formation of secular practices within the framework of Islamic political and cultural discourses and practices.

Similarly, Saadia Toor, in "Gender, Sexuality, and Islam Under the Shadow of Empire," explores how inadequate this configuration is to understand the complexity of issues around the regulation of women's, queer, and transgender bodies in Pakistan. Analyzing two high profile controversies of women and sexual minorities, as well as recent documentaries and the writings of self-declared neocon "spokespersons" for the Islamic world in the West, Toor shows how misleading the contemporary mainstream Western discourse on 'Islam' and gender/sexuality is, and the degree to which it is "premised on an essentialized and monolithic 'Islam' emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent." This, in turn, fuels the dominant Western "civilizational" discourse that justifies racist, imperial aggression, and xenophobia under the ideological cover of "rescuing" Muslim queers and women. Under her analysis, it quickly becomes clear how misleading any simplistic equation of Islam with conservatism or fundamentalism and secularism or Western values with sexual freedom is. Rather than invoking "Islam" to "explain" the regulation of gender and sexuality in "the Muslim World," Toor argues instead that it is essential to examine the underlying (and typically ignored) historical and contemporary context of social conditions, relations, and conflicts that have helped produce Pakistan's religious culture:

The (changing) role of religion in Pakistan, for example, cannot be understood outside the region's colonial and post-colonial history. The British politicized religion during the course of their rule in the subcontinent, and religious discourse and identity became a crucial part of the anti-colonial struggle. During the Cold War, the United States found it expedient to use religious ideology to counter "god-less" communism across the globe and followed a conscious strategy of funding and otherwise supporting the most virulent forms of political Islam across the Muslim world.

In Pakistan, this went further back than the more well-known American funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s proxy war against the Soviet Union, to the funding of the "neo-fascist" Jama'at-i-Islami party of the 1950s to fight 'godless' communism. But it was not until the 1980s and the arrival of the American-backed dictator, General Zia ul Haq, that Jama'at-i Islami truly came to power, wherein the "main focus of Zia's program of Islamization and the moral renewal of Pakistani society was the control of women, specifically the need to return them to the 'chardivari' or the home." Interestingly, Toor argues, "this was a class project—Zia's base was the urban petty-bourgeoisie which had been feeling culturally and economically threatened by the recent entry of large numbers of women into the public sphere." Yet, "despite all this 'Islamization,' something called 'Islam' cannot explain the actual ways and means by which women's bodies and sexuality are managed and/or controlled in contemporary Pakistan."

In the two controversies Toor looks at—one involving an upper-middle class woman who went against her religiously orthodox and well-connected parents' wishes in marrying a man from a lower class; and another of a marriage of a female-to-male transgendered person to a woman—she shows how "Islam is invoked very selectively even in so-called 'Islamic societies,' ... even when the issue is the control of women's sexuality." If the rights granted to women under Islamic law become inconvenient for the purposes of patriarchal control, often 'Islam' is all-too-easily tossed aside in favor of 'custom' and 'tradition'"—a dynamic Toor names "patriarchal opportunism." In her analysis of both cases, she shows that it is the patriarchal, economic interest of the fathers in question that motivates their cases against their daughters—for the upper-class father of an influential religious family, to marry his daughter to the son of a friend to consolidate power; for the father of the lower-class, transgendered "daughter," to marry "her" off to pay a debt. Further, the laws they were charged with violating were those leftover from the imperial British penal code, not shariah law—a distinction often lost or unrecognized by Western audiences. Conversely, Zia's draconian Zina Ordinances, in which a woman had to prove a claim of rape by producing "four Muslim male witnesses of good moral character" (impossible conditions often resulting in the woman being subjected to charges of adultery) were opposed at the time by many Islamic clerics as unfair to women. Lastly, all cases pursued under the Zina ordinances passed by shariah appellate courts have ultimately been overturned by the Supreme Court, challenging the Western perception of Pakistan as solely an Islamist, rather than a secular, or mixed Islamist-secular, society.

In this context, Toor argues, even the World Bank's push for "devolution" to local power, which sounds great in the abstract, reinforces patriarchal power and custom:

When grafted onto a society such as Pakistan's which is characterized by deep inequalities at the local level, where powerful landed interests still hold sway, and women are still treated as communal property, it effectively removes any possibility that the most vulnerable might occasionally be able to turn to the State for protection. Even more so than before, when they had to at least answer to a senior bureaucrat, the local police have effectively become the thugs for the powerful interests in their area.

Toor concludes:

What the examples from Pakistan ... illustrate is that understanding the role of Islam even in a single country requires, among other things, parsing the complex and contradictory role it plays at various levels, from national ideology, to social norms and state structure. And at each of these levels there are a further set of questions that need to be asked: how is 'Islam' being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?

The Art of Queer(ing) Religion

The last section, The Art of Queer(ing) Religion, explores efforts at reclaiming, reconfiguring and re-imagining queer roles in religious history through visual art, film, and parody in queer culture, poking and stretching the religious/conservative and liberal/secular configuration.

Given the recent explosion of concern around sexuality, particularly homosexuality and religion, in Christian/electoral gay marriage debates in the United States, as well as its use as a justification for imperial adventures abroad, not to mention the censoring of David Wojnarowicz's video at the Smithsonian, what is one to make of the oft-troubled historical relationship between queers and religion? The troubled status of LGBT people in relation to religion is inarguably one of the standard relationships undergirding the typical association of the religious with the conservative and the progressive with the secular. But then again, the history of secularism is not exactly synonymous with gay rights; only recently have sodomy laws in some states in the United States, for example, been ruled unconstitutional. And certain religious groups, such as Christian groups like the Metropolitan Community Church, the United Church of Christ, the Catholic gay group Dignity, the Episcopal group Integrity, Lutherans Concerned, etc., have often been at the forefront of LGBT rights. While arguably more space has been made for the recognition of queers and their relationships in some secular and religious spaces, more often than not this has fallen along the lines of "tolerance" rather than true acceptance (as Jakobsen and Pellegrini point out in Love the Sin[17]).

Paradoxically, why is it that queers historically perform so many roles for the church yet have often been so singularly maligned by it? Bill Maxwell, a long-time civil rights activist and journalist, in a critical response to the recent homophobic outburst by black comedian Tracy Morgan in a Nashville auditorium that he would "pull out a knife and stab" his son to death if the boy spoke to him "in a gay voice," quotes Michael Dyson insightfully at length:

One of the most painful scenarios of black church life is repeated Sunday after Sunday with little notice or collective outrage. A black minister will preach a sermon railing against sexual ills, especially homosexuality. At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sign his theological death sentence. His presence at the end of such a sermon symbolizes a silent endorsement of the preacher's message. Ironically, the presence of his gay Christian body at the highest moment of worship also negates the preacher's attempt to censure his presence, to erase his body, to deny his legitimacy as a child of God.[18]

Performing crucial ministering work as often (historically at least) closeted ministers or leading the congregation in song, from the back as choir director and organist or the front as cantor or soloist, queers have played a central role in religious history, even as they have often been ostracized, shunned, and demonized by the institutional church.

Why have queers so often put up with this abuse? How to reconcile this injustice? What form would queer "liberation" take here? Should queers reject religion—what previous gay liberation groups often advocated in the 1960s or 70s?[19] Yet repudiation, a path often taken historically, does not necessarily heal these wounds: queers have their own historical, familial, cultural memory to reconcile—their own "loss" of practices, such as musical ones, and the social networks of their historical communities, to mourn.[20] Or perhaps queers should integrate into religion, as today's gay marriage movement argues, and change from within? Yet, as many queer radicals and feminists argue, this risks cultural loss in another way through absorption by sexually normative and patriarchal culture; one of the distinctive assets of queer culture has always been its status, practices and viewpoint as an "outsider" culture.[21] Or might there be other options, such as reconfiguring and re-appropriating queer religious historical memory and practices? I say "re-appropriate" rather than just "appropriate," because there must always already have been copious amounts of "queers" amongst all those "single, celibate" priests, nuns, martyrs, and saints through the centuries, whether realized or not. To this end, the issue's last section reclaims, reconfigures, and reimagines queer roles in religious history through visual art, video, and parody—whether through queering religion, as Kaucyila Brooke's censored "Madame and Eve in the Garden" does, or constituting something new, as the Radical Faerie movement, the queer cousin to ecofeminism, arguably does with its blend of neo-paganism, Native American/eco-spirituality and eco-anarchism, or playing with genre- and gender-bending, as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do.

Visual images from various artists reviewed in this issue play with the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, religion, and bodies. For instance, as I discuss in "HIV Positive: Saints, Sinners, and AIDS Protest Movements in Fig Trees' Queer Religion," John Greyson's experimental docu-opera, Fig Trees, experiments with (re)-appropriating religious imagery and reconfiguring saints and sinners within AIDS protest struggles, set to a revamped score of (queer artists) Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson's avant-garde opera Four Saints in Three Acts. It examines the struggles of several prominent AIDS activist "saints,"—notably Zachie Achmat of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, who famously went on an AIDS drug strike until all South Africans had access to drugs—against various AIDS "sinners": AIDS denialists and pharmaceutical industry and governmental agents more concerned with protecting profits and intellectual property rights than saving lives. Its agility in weaving desire and the imaginary into the interstices of its blend of avant-garde opera, pop culture and documentary, I argue, performs crucial work of queer cultural memory that transcends generational and geographical boundaries, without memorializing or mythologizing away its import. At a time when the "It Gets Better" campaign flirts with advocating a passive waiting of the lapse of time for things "to get better," Greyson's Fig Trees underscores the necessity of struggle for social progress. At the same time, the film's playful and transgressive appropriation of traditional religious imagery and interweaving with queer secular struggles induces its viewers to rethink and re-appropriate concepts of community, belonging, ritual and the healing—even political—power of music.

Also included are images from "The Skull Project" by Paul Wirhun, also known as "Rosi the eggman," a radical fairie and former Ukrainian orthodox monk, who keeps alive the Ukrainian heritage of psyanky, a "religious" tradition with pre-Christian roots, banned during the Soviet era and learned from his mother. Originally developed out of the symbolism and ritual of birth and life, Wirhun plays with the tradition in clever and politically transgressive ways. In the widely popular "Skull Project," a participatory installation at St. Mark's in Tompkins Square in 2004, Wirhun invited participants to paint as many eggs with skulls on them as people killed in the Iraq War—a "queer" tribute to the thousands of lives lost in misguided and misplaced imperial aggression. Explaining the motivation behind the art of psyanky, Wirhun argues, "This tradition uses the inherent life-force in eggs as the power behind the designs seen on the shell. The symbolism in the design conveys the intention of how the egg—as a power object—is to be used. In 'The Skull Project,' eggs become uniquely powerful talismans, as they join together the life-force symbolized by the egg and death as symbolized by the skull."

Wirhun's "Skull Project," and use of psyanky generally, can be seen as a political, but spiritual attempt—transgressing typical boundaries of the religious and secular—to expand the "secular" cultural and political imaginary. In fact, efforts like his arguably keep alive an artistic form that could easily have gone the way of the "secular"—in the sense of being "secularized" and put out of practice—as a lost art. Pysanky also highlights the paradoxical way in which art has often been preserved in religious traditions—such as choral or organ music. While there likely will always be a few "secular" choirs to keep the tradition alive, clearly the choral/gospel tradition is fueled by churches in producing the singers themselves, a paradox for those of a more "secular" persuasion who appreciate the tradition.

Included in this section as well are images and selections from the young queer Peruvian-American artist Carlo Quispe's anarchic life-size comics. Distributed for free in zines in his queer community in New York City, or displayed in "World War III Illustrated," an anarchist collective of comic book artists of which he is a member, Quispe's images evoke a carnivalesque cornucopia of the queer utopic imaginary that plays with notions of desire, the public, radical politics, convention, and the queering of religious imagery. Quispe's evocative imagery transgresses typical notions of public and private, secular and religious in ways that open up a gleeful, inclusive, and radically collective future. As such, the polyphonic yet cacaphonic images of these artists sound the ending notes for this issue, even as they might also serve as the beginning or orchestral tuning notes for new imaginaries.[22]

The aim of this special issue has been to open up new areas of research and provoke interest in alternate and more liberating intersections and resonances between religions, secularisms and bodies, and by extension, races, sexualities, genders, nationhood, art, and musicality. It is hoped that this wide-ranging collection of essays and artwork, by traversing binaries and challenging the dominant configuration of religious/conservative and liberal/secular across the "civilizational" divides of the Protestant Secular West, the "Islamic" East, and queer culture—while delving into the possibilities and playfulness of appropriating or re-appropriating the historical memory of bodies and religion/religiosity within the idea of queering religion—will be a small step in overcoming rigid fundamentalisms of religion, science, liberalism, and secularism for a more radically open, playful and inclusive future.

Endnotes

1. See The Politics of Religion and Sexuality conference program. I would like to thank Janet Jakobsen, Patricia Clough, Stanley Aronowitz, Joe Rollins and Rupal Oza for their aid in planning the conference, and helping to plant the seeds for this special issue. [Return to text]

2. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, Duke University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

3. See: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); David Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Press, 2007). [Return to text]

4. Sam Harris being the exception here. His rabidly Islamophobic The End of Faith, started the "day after 9/11" could be confused with a State Dept. propaganda subcontractor as he beats the drums of war, attacking Arundati Roy and Noah Chomsky for their criticism, while proclaiming the "moral" superiority of Bush and Blair in their war aims compared with Saddam and Bin Laden. [Return to text]

5. As Janet K. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds.) complexify though their work Secularisms (Durham: Duke University, 2008). [Return to text]

6. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). [Return to text]

7. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, "Introduction: Times Like These," Secularisms. [Return to text]

8. Hent De Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). [Return to text]

9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). [Return to text]

10. Charles Hirschkind and Brain Larkin, "Introduction: Media and the Political Forms of Religion," Social Text 96 26:3 (2008). [Return to text]

11. William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). [Return to text]

12. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. [Return to text]

13. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds.,"Introduction: Times Like These," Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 1-35. [Return to text]

14. Asad, 25. [Return to text]

15. Michael D. Lindsay, Faith In the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). [Return to text]

16. Mahmood, The Politics of Piety. [Return to text]

17. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: NYU Press, 2003). [Return to text]

18. Bill Maxwell, "Homophobia: It's a Black Thing,", St. Petersburg Times 19 June 2011. [Return to text]

19. Tommy Avicolli Mecca, ed. Smash the Church! Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009). [Return to text]

20. David L. Eng, David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [Return to text]

21. Leo Bersani, Homos (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999). [Return to text]

22. See Issue 8.3 of S&F Online: "Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert." [Return to text]