Introduction: Queering the Study of New Religious Movements

• Published in: Nova religio 2008-05, Vol.11 (4), p.3-7
• Main Authors: Machacek, David W., Wilcox, Melissa M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Buddhism; Catholicism; Christianity; Culture; Deviance; Essentialism; Female homosexuality; Feminism; Gays & lesbians; Gender identity; Gender performativity; Identity politics; LGBT; LGBTQ studies; Marriage; Queer culture; Queer studies; Queer theory; Raids; Religion; Sexual orientation; Sexuality; Social movements; Space; Theory; Transgender persons; Women
• ISSN: 1092-6690; 1541-8480
• DOI: 10.1525/nr.2008.11.4.3

In addition to articles focusing on sexual and gender nonconformity in new religious movements, our contributors explore what queer theoryin its broadest sense of addressing the social and cultural construction and representation of non-normative sexual and gendered acts, propensities, desires, bodies, activities, and cultural productsmight add to understanding new religious movements. Because of their location on the margins of the normative institutional order, new religious movements frequently provide social space for alternative gender and sexual performancesin some cases, more open or even positively queer and in others, more strict than prevail in the surrounding culture and societyand for critiquing prevailing gender and sexual norms. Specifically, a movement heavily influenced by feminism and the positive affirmation of male femininity at its origin now struggles with how to include women. Because of the movements ritualized gender bending, it also questions how to include mengay and straightwhose gender and sexual performances are not sufficiently atypical. In the evangelical ex-gay movement, we find what might best be described as a quasi-religious movement, in that it owes as much to twentieth-century psychiatry as to the evangelical subculture within which it locates itself. [...]these five articles invite inquiry into the relationships between types of new religious movements and the spiritual experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons who participate in them. In this regard, White demonstrates in a helpful historical corrective, that discussions about the status and place of homosexuals in the mainline Protestant denominations long preceded the movement for gay and lesbian liberation, and laid a foundation for some of the arguments for liberation that the movement adopted after the 1969 Stonewall rebellion2specifically in demands for 6 Machacek and Wilcox: Introduction participatory inclusion in the institutional life of the United States, as opposed to mere tolerance.