“You Were Gonna Leave Them Out?”
Locating Black Women in a Transfeminist Anthropology of Religion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18925848 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Pérez (0000-0003-3069-7462, University of California, Santa Barbara, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 94-111 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2643-7961 • E-ISSN: 2643-7961 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/fea2.12033 |
| OpenAlex | W3116427648 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 30 |
This article summons a transfeminist anthropology of religion and asserts that such an orientation (with a subfield to match) would be impossible to conceptualize without the scholarship of Black women—feminist, Womanist, and otherwise critically situated. Through the ethnographic analysis of interviews, documentary footage, newspaper reportage, social media, and videos, the article pays tribute to the late Reverend BobbieJean Baker (1964‐2014). The article argues that Black transgender Christian women's religious subjectivity encompasses the innovative inhabitation of Black ecclesiastical linguistic codes and gestural idioms; the elaboration of transfeminist biblical hermeneutics and discursive mechanisms of legitimation; and the simultaneous performance of culinary and relational virtuosity. The article further contends that Baker's account of her subjectivity cannot be understood without the insights of Christina Sharpe, Hortense J. Spillers, Monica A. Coleman, Yvette A. Flunder, Savannah Shange, Geneva Smitherman, Psyche A. Williams‐Forson, and Karen Baker‐Fletcher. Together, they assist in revealing that Baker's efforts to increase the livability of trans women's worlds were inseparable from her religious convictions, as communicated through (and constituted by) the discourses of the Black church. Equally so, her ministerial vocation and vision of beloved community proceeded from her experience as a seasoned—and expertly seasoning—southern‐born‐and‐raised Black trans woman
Epistemology · Ethnography · Hermeneutics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subjectivity · Theology · Transgender · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Theological Perspectives and Practices
In the Wake
Religion Is Already Transed; Religious Studies Is Not (Yet) Listening
Religion in the Kitchen
Black on Both Sides
Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Methodology in Religious Studies
Black Feminist Thought
The Shape of Angels' Teeth
All Power to All People
Tranifest
"Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother
Critical narrative analysis
Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches
How we get free
The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness
For "the Children" Dancing the Beloved Community
Transformance
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Toward a Fugitive Anthropology
Black Girl Ordinary
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |