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.