Queer and Trans Theologies in American Literature

MMLA

Minneapolis

November 17-20, 2022

The ARLS invites proposals for a panel that will focus on queer and trans theoretical approaches to the study of religion in American literature. In the U. S., religion and literature have historically been the principal sites of cultural work where dominant social norms are negotiated, reproduced, and resisted. Queer theory and trans studies are forms of critique that describe and disrupt this process, specifically, the production of normative categories of sexuality, gender, and embodiment. More broadly, these methods analyze the formation and function of all binary categories in society, and actively oppose such dualistic classifications. Recent scholarship has shown the value of applying the methods of queer theory and trans studies to the field of religious studies. This panel will examine works of literature that show how religion in America can destabalize heteronormativity and cisnormativity.

Papers may consider how norms concerning sexuality, gender, embodiment, desire, and affect are related to other foundational binary classifications in society such as sacred/profane, normal/deviant, virtue/vice, pure/dirty, material/immaterial. How are certain practices, rituals, and forms of embodiment rendered normal and sacred and others abject and profane? How are notions of sin, deviance, transgression, monstrosity, and perversion related to the maintenance of social norms? How are secularism, neoliberalism, and heteronormativity linked? We welcome papers that seek to queer the sacred/secular binary and question how this system of classification is related to forms of social inclusion and exclusion, to social recognition and social invisibility. How does American literature represent religious aspects of queer and trans embodiment? How does American literature challenge dominant ideas about the body, desire, and affect from a religious perspective? How does it bear witness to the religious regulation, disciplining, as well as liberation of the body? How do works of American literature express non-normative theologies of the body, sexuality, and the self? How do authors use religion to oppose dualistic norms and categories?

We welcome papers on American literature and print culture from any period. 

Please send abstracts to Andrew Ball (ball@math.harvard.edu) by July 16.

Please come join us for some great conversations at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago this weekend! We will be hosting the following panels:

Saturday, May 28, 8:30-9:50am: Mysticism, Magic, and the Occult in American Literature

Saturday, May 28, 10-11:20am: Professing Literature/Professing Faith

Saturday, May 28, 11:30-12:50pm: Business meeting (If you are interesting in joining or serving with the ARLS, please join us!)

https://americanliteratureassociation.org/…/ala-annual…/

The American Religion and Literature Society will sponsor a panel and a roundtable discussion at the 2022 national meeting. Please submit proposals to the contact person indicated at the conclusion of the relevant CFP. Be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any AV requests. Electronic submissions only, in .doc or .docx format. The deadline for submission to the ARLS is January 26, 2022.

Mysticism, Magic, and the Occult in American Literature

American authors have demonstrated a sustained interest in mysticism, esoterica, magic, the occult, and what Emma Mason and Mark Knight have recently dubbed “weird faith.” The American Religion and Literature Society invites proposals for presentations that focus on American authors’ engagement with non-dominant forms of religion. We welcome papers that offer new perspectives on more well-known cases—such as H. D.’s take on the occult, or the influence of Gurdjieff’s mysticism on Toomer—as well as those that examine lesser known examples. We encourage proposals on any form – prose, poetry, drama – or time period. 

Please send abstracts (under 1,000 words) to Andrew J. Ball (ball@math.harvard.edu) by January 26, 2022.

Professing Literature / Professing Faith: A Roundtable Discussion

In Professing Literature, Gerald Graff observes that, “as late as [1900], there remained only a faint line separating professors of English from the clergy” (29). By 1915, however, the English professor had transformed into a “secularized educational professional” after the German model: “a man who supposedly transcended morality and ideology in his disinterested search for truth” (59, 62). The German professor, commented James Morgan Hart in 1874, “shakes off spiritual bondage and becomes an independent thinker” (qtd. in Graff 63). 

Contrary to Graff’s secularization narrative, many institutions today retain strong religious affiliations, and many professors profess faith as well as literature. Nevertheless, the view represented by Hart is a commonplace for the profession as a whole, and the institutional transition between 1875 and 1915 and its legacy up to the present often go unexamined.

For this roundtable, the American Religion and Literature Society invites proposals that address the role of religion in the profession. We welcome approaches that are critical, historical, and/or pedagogical. What does it mean to profess literature and faith?  What role does a (secular) faith in the value of literature play in its teaching and study? How do religion and related assumptions inform our criticism, our teaching, and/or our division of labor and literature into periods, nationalities, subfields, and so on?

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Ryan Siemers (ryansiemers@suu.edu) by January 26, 2022.

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2022full name / name of organization: Post45 Contemporaries

Contact email: cdouglas@uvic.ca; Full CFP: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/09/20/whither-the-christian-right

“W(h)ither the Christian Right?” Papers are invited for a Post45 Contemporaries cluster on the U.S. Christian Right and literature. Recent evidence suggests the evangelical share of the population may be decreasing, but its political power so far has not waned and it is geared for apocalyptic combat. Momentarily defeated but unbowed like their champion President Trump, conservative white Christians have not received much attention in literary studies. This cluster asks questions such as: where are they going / what now / what did we miss? A series of Trump-era books by scholars such as Kristen du Mez, Anthea Butler, Robert P Jones, Sarah Posner, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry have focused on white evangelicals and their radicalization – all historians or social scientists. But the Christian Right and its authoritarian tendencies have been met with little interest among literary scholars. Why hasn’t literary studies been paying attention to the literature of this demographic that is shaking the country, driving its turn to authoritarianism? Essays might attend to fiction by Christian Right authors, or literature about the Christian Right. Essays are also invited to think about our discipline’s relation to the Christian Right. How does training in strategies of reading and a sense of the literary (complexity, richness, ambiguity, uncertainty, metaphor, etc) help students complicate fundamentalist culture and its reading practices of inerrantism and literalism? How is English, or literature and religion studies specifically, complicit in America’s descent into Christian authoritarianism? Could the Christian Right fiction we didn’t want to read or teach or research – the books that historians and social scientists were reading and teaching and researching – have given us an early warning about and increased understanding of the evangelical imagination? What current theoretical or methodological trends might enable or inhibit increased attention to the Christian Right in literary studies? Papers are invited for a June / July 2022 cluster of Contemporaries; deadline for first drafts is February 28th, 2022; contact cdouglas@uvic.ca and mmullins@sebts.edu for inquiries or submissions.

Due to the cancellation of ALA 2020, we have rescheduled this year’s panels for ALA 2021. We look forward to the great conversations ahead! For full panel abstracts, please see the posts below.

Keywords in the Study of American Religion and Literature 

Religion and Utopia in American Literature 

Religion and Utopia in American Literature

Recent scholarship excavates the politics of religions in American literature but has largely left untreated the utopian quality of religion. In many literary texts, religion provides bases for imagining new social relations. Reading religion as utopian invites us to look anew at the multivalent relations between religion and politics in American literature.

The American Religion and Literature Society seeks proposals for presentations on literary expressions of religious utopia or utopian religion broadly construed. We welcome presentations on any period, genre, or form of American literature, and those regarding any religious orientation. We are open to a variety of approaches and topics, including but not limited to:

• Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia
• Secularism and post-secularism
• Sex and Gender
• Queer Theory
• Disability
• Race
• Political Economy
• Ecocriticism, Environmental Writing, Climate Change
• Science Writing
• Geographies and Temporalities
• Religious Fundamentalism
• Reparative and Counter-hegemonic Religion

We also encourage interpretations of works of literature that do not overtly thematize religion.

Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words, questions, and /or concerns to Dave Morris (dcmorris@illinois.edu)

Abstracts are due by January 10th.

Keywords in the Study of Religion and American Literature

Nearly twenty-five years since Jenny Franchot described religion as American literary study’s “invisible domain,” methods and keywords for the study of religion and American literature have proliferated. Panels, special issues, and edited collections abound featuring conversations about the “postsecular,” “secularization theory,” “secular studies,” and “religion and literature studies,” among many other categories. These terms are often, though not always, used interchangeably, signaling shared thematic and topical interests among Americanists who study religion rather than identifying distinct methodological commitments and critical orientations.

For this roundtable discussion, the American Religion and Literature Society invites scholars working in all areas of these subfields to propose or revise a keyword that helps to clarify a significant movement within the study of religion and American literature today. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to: postsecularism, secularization, secular criticism, religious or devotional reading, the religious right / left, race and religion, gender and religion, religion and immigration / diaspora, ritual, lived religion, literature and theology, and transcendence.

The American Religion and Literature Society aims to assemble a diverse roundtable of 5-6 speakers from all academic career stages and from a wide range of institutions. Priority will be given to proposals that interrogate the keyword’s utility, that explore overlooked limitations or opportunities afforded by the keyword, or that offer a keyword to propose new paths for linking or distinguishing among the many different branches of religion and American literature studies active today.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Ryan Siemers (ryansiemers@suu.edu). Be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any AV requests.

Abstracts are due by January 10th.

Two Gileads in Contemporary Fiction: Margaret Atwood and Marilynne Robinson

In light of the 2019 publication of The Testaments (Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale), the widespread popularity of the television adaptation of Atwood’s fiction, and a forthcoming special issue of Christianity & Literature on the subject of literature and the Christian Right, the American Religion and Literature Society and the Marilynne Robinson Society will co-host a special session on the two Gileads of contemporary fiction: Margaret Atwood’s theocratic dystopia and Marilynne Robinson’s homage to religious life in the American Midwest.

Beyond sharing a name, Atwood and Robinson’s respective Gileads feature many fruitful similarities that warrant further consideration by scholars of religion and North American literature. Each features women in unconventional relationships with older men bearing considerable religious authority; each contains extensive meditations on the impact of religion on American ideas about family and childhood; each devotes considerable attention to the way reading and writing, particularly as these practices are facilitated or restricted by religious contexts, shape the subject’s perception of her everyday experience; and each invites its readers to consider the role that religious discourse, biblical hermeneutics, and the dynamics of faith play in contemporary public and political life.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to Ray Horton, rhorton3@murraystate.edu. Be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any AV requests.

Abstracts are due by January 10th