Queer Memories: Religion and the Politics of the Past

This presentation explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in Flanders concerning the Catholic Church based on oral history research conducted with 17 interviewees. The current welcoming initiatives of the Flemish bishops, along with the strong Catholic heritage of the region and its history of support for LGBTQ+ individuals, render this context exceptionally intriguing. This presentation highlights two key findings. Firstly, individuals interviewed can be categorized into three groups based on their current stance towards the church: those rejecting it entirely, those who have gradually secularized, and those who firmly identify as Catholic. Secondly, the interviews reveal that people’s sense of inclusion or exclusion from the church is significantly influenced by their image of ‘the church’, shaped by memories of upbringing and past life experiences. Consequently, the presentation concludes that achieving an inclusive church necessitates a profound shift in personal perceptions, extending beyond changes in teaching, practice, and leadership.

As a “memorial” literary text that queers the religious past (and present), this paper explores a Japanese (juvenile) novel series, Maria Watches Over Us (1998–2012), by Oyuki Konno. This work can be interpreted as a literary resource for creatively remembering the ambiguous desires of adolescence, erotic and otherwise, especially within the context of religious education. In this work, female students maintain diverse forms of intimacy with one another—from very close “friendships,” a somewhat polyamorous yet hierarchical “sisterhood,” to lesbian romantic relationships—at a fictional girls’ Catholic school. Through a close reading of the text, this paper argues that Maria Watches Over Us “queers'' the past and present of a religious educational milieu in the Japanese context (and beyond). This study concludes by utilizing Foucault’s theory to emphasize the importance of (re)visiting both the comfort and discomfort that arise from the ambiguities of sexuality, relationality, and religious imagery. 

This paper looks to queer feminist authors and activists for insights about coalition-building amidst ongoing traumas stemming from structures of coloniality. M. Jacqui Alexander’s theory of palimpsestic time, Aurora Levins Morales’ focus on narrating histories of interconnection, and artist/activist JeeYeun Lee’s organizing will frame an example of coalitional activism in 2021 that re-enacted memories of disputed Indigenous land rights in the same location as the 1983 Parliament of World Religions. Attending to the entanglement of racism, sexism, religious supremacy, and settler colonialism shows how identities, histories, and even city structures hold the legacies of violence that continue to persist today. I argue that re-narrating histories that focus on the intersection of religion, race, gender, and nation can move decolonization from a metaphor to a practice. Both trauma and spirituality, in different but interconnected ways, show how the past must be acknowledged as embodied in the present.

This paper constructively synthesizes Paul Tillich’s theology, Christian Danz’s pneumatology, and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. The synthesis demonstrates how both Christianity and gender/sexual identities can be regarded as embodied forms of communication in which memory plays a constitutive role, recasting tradition and memory as synonymic within an ecclesiastical context. Moving beyond Tillich and Danz, this paper makes clear the dynamic and interconnected relationship between memory, gender/sexual identity, and God through the role of ontology. By re-framing identity through a queer-memory model of ecclesiology, this paper proffers that through memory both gender/sexual identity and Christian identity are constructed in communities that orient us through tradition (received meaning). Therefore, it contends that memory takes on an ontological function – tradition shapes our understanding of being – one that can free Christian communities from heteronormativity's gender essentialism, which problematically concretizes not only the gender binary but also conceptions of God.