Description
In December 2021, the Religion and Theology Program recommended a special grant of $30,000 in support of a project at UC-Riverside on “Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion.” The grant being recommended here follows that earlier small grant and will support the launch of a new journal and related website. QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion will be “the first journal dedicated to expanding both scholarly and public knowledge about the full range of rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality.” Its companion website is intended, in part, as a vehicle for publishing public scholarship accessible to diverse people and communities.
Luce’s grant will allow the journal to be fee-free and open-access. We anticipate that our grant of $100,000 will soon be supplemented by matching support from the Fetzer Institute, and that this joint support will also provide a basis for the journal’s editors and editorial board to begin to take next steps in seeking to realize the broader vision of which the journal is one key element. This vision includes the launch of a collaborative research center at the University of California, Riverside, intended to serve as a hub for visiting scholars, artists, activists, and community members, and “a place where generative conversations and work for change can take place across groups of people who all too often do their life-changing and world-changing work in isolation from each other.”
Queer and transgender studies in religion is a field formed at the intersection of queer studies, transgender studies, and religious studies. Though its roots stretch back much farther than some might suspect, it began developing in its current form just as queer theory and transgender studies were both taking shape, beginning in the early 1990s. Since that time, the field has grown from one whose proponents held their reception in an unmarked basement hotel room, whose graduate students were dourly warned away from it by their advisors, and one that saw the regular denial of tenure to scholars who refused to heed such warnings, to a field in which there is a sustained pattern of growth and interest, a field that is increasingly featuring in doctoral exams and job descriptions, and a field that saw the publication of its first comprehensive textbook in 2020.
Building on this growth, in 2019 a number of scholars began exploring whether the time was right for a journal to further establish and propel this field. Meetings at a special conference held in 2019, along with gatherings at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, generated significant enthusiasm, and a group of scholars began to envision a journal that would serve all scholars working at the intersections which define the field and its work. Extending from these efforts, our December 2021 grant supported a convening in spring 2022, laying plans for the journal’s launch. The journal will launch in fall 2023 with two issues seeded from the Spring 2022 gathering.
The Religion and Theology Program seeks to deepen understanding of religion’s complex place in public life. Working together with scholars of religion, faith leaders, and other knowledge makers, we cultivate more curious and civil public conversations, expand appreciation for religious diversity, and stimulate faith-inspired efforts to envision and build a more just and democratic world.
Through our grantmaking, we aim to grow and strengthen the creative efforts of diverse knowledge makers, to expand the reach of those whose voices are underrepresented, and to support initiatives working at the edges of existing knowledge territories and in the borderlands separating more established fields. The grant being recommended here extends from those efforts.
