Queer Faith

Honorable Mention, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, given by the Modern Language AssociationUncovers the queer logics of premodern religious and secular textsPutting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith reassess the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought. What if this narrative of “history and tradition” suppresses the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith examines key works of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, Melissa E. Sanchez resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the complex historical entanglement of faith, race, and eroticism is urgent to contemporary queer debates about normativity, agency, and relationality.Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer scholarship. Retracing a history that did not have to be, Sanchez recovers writing that inscribes radical queer insights at the premodern foundations of conservative and heteronormative culture.

A smart, vital synthesis of religious studies and queer theory that reinforces the deep affinity between both realms over time. Sanchez refuses the easy celebration of queer as a counterpoint to normal, promiscuity to commitment. Through sublime readings of major early modern thinkers, Queer Faith offers us a capacious genealogy of promiscuity that accounts for its failures, fragments, philologies, and Christian theology, and all the ways our attachments undo us., By placing Christian theologians in conversation with queer theorists, Sanchez illuminates what is lost when the two are put in opposition: Sanchez shows that theology provides crucial terms for registering the inherent promiscuity of human attachments, whether we understand those attachments as devotional, interpersonal, or communal. Queer Faith takes up race, religion, eroticism, and ethics in ways that bridge the gap between early modernists and scholars focused on our own contemporary moment, forging a vibrantly original argument at the intersection of diverse and influential voices., From erotic accountability to procreation and orgasms, Queer Faith is an incisive exploration of human sexuality’s many manifestations. . . . Sanchez engages her subject with humor. Queer Faith is an enjoyable and outstanding piece of scholarship., Clearly written and extensively researched, this book is far more engaging than most academic texts, supported by detailed notes and an extensive index that simplify search., ...its achievements are difficult, challenging, and utterly exhilarating. Sanchez builds rich analytic frames and then compellingly reads texts toward them.

Melissa E. Sanchez is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Erotic Subjects (2011) and Shakespeare and Queer Theory (2019), and the co-editor of Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, Sexuality (2016).