Queer Crises: Movements from Queerness and Feelings of White Religion in the United States

Author

Austin Williams Miller, University of New Mexico - Main CampusFollow

Publication Date

Summer 8-1-2023

Abstract

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how these affective economies materially orient bodies from queerness towards “a commitment to a national sexuality” (Jakobsen, 2020, p. 27). I argue that movements from queerness and white religion continue to exert significant power over queer bodies and U.S. sexual cultures through intersecting systems of whiteness, cisheterosexism, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism.

Language

English

Keywords

affect theory, queer theory, religion, whiteness, phenomenology, rhetoric

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Communication

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Department of Communication and Journalism

First Committee Member (Chair)

Shinsuke Eguchi

Second Committee Member

Michael Lechuga

Third Committee Member

Susana Martínez Guillem

Fourth Committee Member

Anjali Vats

Recommended Citation

Miller, Austin Williams. "Queer Crises: Movements from Queerness and Feelings of White Religion in the United States." (2023). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/161