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.
“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 47th 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.
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:
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,
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
Taves, Ann, (2009) Religious Experiences Reconsidered. Princeton University Press.
Proposals for Negotiating Religion, Race and Sexuality are due 10th March 2025.
Decisions will be communicated by 21st March 2025
Please contactFrancis Stewart, Director, The Edward Bailey Center
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