Queer Crises: Movements from Queerness and Feelings of White Religion in the United States

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how these affective economies materially orient bodies from queerness towards “a commitment to a national sexuality” (Jakobsen, 2020, p. 27). I argue that movements from queerness and white religion continue to exert significant power over queer bodies and U.S. sexual cultures through intersecting systems of whiteness, cisheterosexism, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism.