Queer and Trans Religious Belonging: Conversion, Memory, Place

This paper theorizes a connection between the Singaporean Chinese religious practice of burning paper offerings and the experience and political project of queerness. This connection is the politics of truth as determined by the logic of debt. By reading the tradition of burning offerings as a mode of servicing debt to ancestors and society, this paper argues that paper offerings reveal a logic of debt that structures social relationships and, necessarily, compulsory heterosexuality. By paying attention to the workings of debt (and credit), guilt, and memory, the paper investigates how subjects incur debts that are repaid via heterosexual performances. A debt-centric analysis reveals new textures for queer praxis within and against the governing structures of filial piety. Queer interventions include a faithful refusal of guilt, active forgetting/creative remembering, and an exploration of methods of accounting under which queer life can flourish.

The Quad Cities Pride in Memory’s mission is to document, protect, and preserve local queer history in the Illinois-Iowa region and its broader significance. Historically, religious groups in this region have organized to make legislative interventions aimed at a more just and equitable society for queer people. More recently, however, queer communities are increasingly distancing from religious ones. With rollbacks on queer rights at record-breaking levels, the stakes are high. Geographer Callum Sutherland uses the term “theography” (religious geographies) to explore religious reflection as it relates to spatial imaginations of transcendence and praxis. Coupled with womanist ethicist Emilie Townes’ concept of redemptive self-love as best expressed through justice-oriented public policy, I argue that religious groups contribute a unique vision for relationships across space and time that equips queer communities to reinvigorate civil rights movements today.

What happens to trans folks’ religious commitments after being pushed out of religious communities? What are we to make of trans populations’ move away from the faith networks into which they were born? To what extent does gender transition affect religious conversion, and what does that relationship have to offer conversion studies? (And vice versa?) In this paper, I aim to bring theorizations of conversion studies—and of queering conversion studies—together to offer an understanding of transgender religious movement in the contemporary United States that adequately accounts for trans and queer people’s often ambiguous and shifting relationships with organized religious traditions. I argue that this contemporary lived-religious dynamic is helpfully characterized both by studies and theories in religious conversion, and in religious studies writ large, in ways that help contextualize current trends of American transgender religious re-identification.

In the proposed paper, I aim to look at the Third Gender (Aravani/Thirunangai/Ali) Christians in North Chennai. The third gender community in India is generally not Christian. Their self-mythologizing is usually Hindu, and they are known to follow syncretic faith practices, borrowing from all religions. To adopt Christianity and have a church to themselves are unique cultural formations that demand study. How has a section of this community come to embrace Christianity? What does it mean to them? How are third-gender Christians seen by the communities in which they live? How do the third gender Christians understand the image of God, and how do they theologically understand their gender? How does their belief help them with their daily sufferings and the systemic marginalization and abuse they face? Studying and writing about the community will offer new perceptions of gender and Christianity in India.

Keywords: Christianity, Conversion, and Syncretism