Implicit Religion UK 2025

Dr Monique Moultrie - The 2025 Edward Bailey Keynote

Dr Monique Moultrie, Professor of Religious Studies, Africana Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., will deliver the 2025 Edward Bailey Keynote Lecture.
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Call For Papers - Implicit Religion - UK 2025

“Survival can be a feminist project, a queer project, a trans project, a crip project. For some of us to survive a world we need to transform it. But we still have to survive the world we are trying to transform.”

(Ahmed, 2023: 48)

The 47^th Implicit Religion conference will explore the variety of ways in which people and communities survive in a world they are trying to transform through negotiations with and between religion, race and sexuality.
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Religion, Race and Sexuality have a tangled, complicated relationship that is often undercut or downplayed in academic scholarship by being described as problematic or antagonistic. Such descriptors alone risk ignoring the rich, diverse and complex religious, sexual and racialised lives and experiences of transgender folks, queer people, Black people and people of colour. Religion, race, and sexuality matter in how they operate as governmental technologies of states, how they figure in people’s hopes and aspirations, and how they allow for certain ascriptions and assertions of identities, as well as for resisting these.

The conference takes its broad theme from Dr Monique Moultrie’s (2023) “Hidden Histories: Faith & Black Lesbian Leadership.” Within the book Moultrie persuasively argues that including, and fronting, sexual identity is essential to understanding the leadership styles and experiences of those who live at the intersections of race, class, and gender oppression and sexual invisibility. Within religious communities or communities who coalesce around something deemed special (Taves, 2009) people are not engaging in singular modalities but rather in the manifold interactions between these categories (Crenshaw, 1989) therefore this conference is seeking to learn from, listen to and engage with scholars and students who are working on the conceptual and empirical intersections between religion, race and sexuality. In particular we are interested in work that provides a critical assessment of the logics of their entanglement, separation, the concrete work these categories do, or their manifestations.

We invite abstract proposals on but not limited to:

Feminist and / or Queer perspectives anchored religious, syncretic, or experiences deemed special in communities, groups, subcultures, traditions, or institutions defined regionally, or globally
The intersection of sexuality and race within or without regard for either religious communities, or communities shaped by an experience deemed religious or special
The intersection of sexuality and race for those who create or curate scholarship, museum exhibits etc on or through the use of the bodies of relevant individuals.
The intersection of race and sexuality across leadership within or without regard for either religious communities, or communities shaped by an experience deemed religious
The use of erasure and invisibility as a tool of resistance and/ or community building
The weaponisation of erasure and invisibility.
Reproduction in the midst of crisis
Gender mobilisation and anti-gender mobilisation
Critical analysis and/or methodological reflection on sex and sexuality as categories of inquiry in empirical approaches to the study of religion
Reading or misreading sex and desire in representations of religion as a contested category, religious community / communities, communities centred around a thing deemed special
Race and Sexuality within mystical traditions and languages

Please note successful proposals will incorporate an Implicit Religion perspective in the design of the underlying study and address in part or in concert: Commitment, Integrating Foci, & Intensive Concerns with Extensive Effects,

References

Ahmed, Sara, (2023) The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Allen Lane

Kimberle Crenshaw, (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum

Monique Moultrie, (2023) Hidden Histories: Faith & Black Lesbian Leadership. Duke Press
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Taves, Ann, (2009) Religious Experiences Reconsidered. Princeton University Press.