Description

The Luce Foundation’s Religion and Theology Program seeks to advance more inclusive and nuanced public knowledge of religion. Aiming to promote innovative thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts, and to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religious ideas and spiritual practices in the United States and beyond, we support knowledge makers who challenge received understandings, reconsider accepted histories, deepen appreciation for transnational influences and global interconnections, weave new religious and cultural narratives, and endeavor to imagine alternative futures.
We seek 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 recommendation of a special grant in support of a project on “Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion” extends directly from these aims and commitments.
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, the project proposed here would primarily involve further planning activity and a convening in spring 2022, leading to the launch of the new journal. 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. The journal has advanced to the approval process with the Editorial Advisory Board at Duke University Press after receiving favorable reports from the external reviewers. Published twice a year, it will feature cutting edge scholarship in multiple formats, starting with formal academic articles, book reviews, and occasional roundtables, but also including dynamic web materials and original creative works. Content will draw on a range of approaches, disciplines, and subjects, and will demonstrate the relevance of various modes of gender, sexuality, and embodiment wherever one might find religious people, practices, or ideas. The journal will launch in 2023 with two issues seeded from the Spring 2022 gathering.