Queer Faith

Melissa E. Sanchez

Published by New York University Press 2019

Queer Faith

Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

Volume 52 in the series Sexual Cultures

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479871872.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Uncovers the queer logics of premodern religious and secular texts

Putting 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.

Author information

SanchezMelissa E.:

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).

Reviews

Foreword Reviews:
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.

Kathryn Schwarz, author of What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space:
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.

Michael Cobb, author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence:
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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
A Note on Translations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction No Past? Theology, Race, and Queer Theory’s Authorized Genealogies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Queerness of Christian Faith Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. The Color of Monogamy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
3. The Shame of Conjugal Sex Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
4. The Optimism of Infidelity Divorce and Adultery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
5. On Erotic Accountability Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
Coda The Pressure to Commit: Professionalism, Periodization, Affect Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	325
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	337