1st Edition
Jewish/Christian/Queer Crossroads and Identities
At a time when major branches of Judaism and most Christian denominations are addressing the relationship between religion and homosexuality, Jewish/Christian/Queer offers a unique examination of the similarities between the queer intersections of Judaism and Christianity, and the queer intersections of the homosexual and the religious. This volume investigates three forms of queerness; the rhetorical, theological and the discursive dissonance at the meeting points between Christianity and Judaism; the crossroads of the religious and the homosexual; and the intersections of these two forms of queerness, namely where the religiously queer of Jewish and Christian speech intersects with the sexually queer of religiously identified homosexual discourse. Including essays on literature and literary theory, Christian theology, Biblical, Rabbinic, and Jewish studies, queer theory, architecture, Freud, gay and lesbian studies and history, Jewish/Christian/Queer will have a truly interdisciplinary appeal.
Biography
Frederick Roden is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA
'...a fascinating, often compelling, occasionally downright surreal journey across time, space and genre. There are many moments of absolute brilliance... a fabulous book...deserves to be read and debated both within and well beyond the field of queer studies.' Modern Believing 'The volume takes advantage of - and pushes the boundaries - of that wide vastness of possibility for the signifier "queer."... Few scholars will be familiar with all of the material here: it ranges from a textual analysis of Pauline scripture to a psychoanalytic reading of Freud's relationship to Rome to an architectural and theological argument for the queerness of Queen Anne Churches, to name a few. A queer group indeed. The radical diversity of material, however, undeniably demonstrates the versatility of queer theories... [Roden's] insistence on considering Judaism and Christianity as interacting partners, while requiring authors to juggle multiple sets of cultural reference, sets the collection apart from other contemporary publications on queer theory and religion... Because of the quality of the individual work of the contributors, most scholars of Christianity or Judaism are likely to recognize the promise of queer theory in their own subfields, while those who work in gender studies will see exempla of the movement beyond an antagonist religion-versus-queerness.' Gender forum
