Queer Women and Religious Individualism

6 Building a Mosaic: The Sacred (and the) Self

Self-identity has become central to the partnership of individualism and consumerism that drives much of contemporary U.S. popular culture. Not only clothes and means of transportation, but cell phone covers and even candy can be personalized to display “who” the consumer “really is.” Claiming and proclaiming less visible identities has become a political rallying cry, exemplified by ACT UP’s slogan, “Silence = Death.” At the same time, “identity politics,” described by detractors as exclusive, noncoalitional, single-issue organizing around a socially significant (and usually nondominant) identity such as race, sexuality, or disability, has become the source of much controversy across the political spectrum. As the term “identity” has come into widespread usage, it has also come to hold a wide range of meanings, from group membership to demographic characteristics to sense of self.    As U.S. cultures have shifted across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it is not only religious practices that have moved away from “dwelling ” and toward “seeking”; it is identity itself. While sociologists have long distinguished between ascribed (given) and achieved (earned) identities, the nature of these and the balance between them have undergone significant change. Fewer identities are ascribed in the early twenty-first century than in the early twentieth; some of those that are still ascribed have narrower consequences and less permanence. Achieved identities have broadened in scope, quantity, and variety, and the lessening importance of many (though certainly not all) as6 Building a Mosaic the sacred (and the) self It’s all very spiritual, it’s all God. It’s the divine Goddess, the divine Mother, it’s all of this universe working together to help one be who they really are. And I’m a fucking lesbian! —Cassandra Christenson • 166 | Queer Women and Religious Individualism cribed identities leaves greater room for individual negotiations—a situation simultaneously influenced, capitalized upon, and constrained by the plethora of products bidding the buyer to “be yourself” through consumption. David Lyon, in exploring the convergence of religion and postmodernity, goes so far as to suggest that ascription and achievement have been replaced as modes of identity development by production and discovery.1    While popular culture and marketing agencies encourage us to “seek,” “find,” “express,” “create,” and “be” ourselves, this process is not as easy in reality as it seems in the dys/utopia of advertising, because some aspects of identity remain not only ascribed but also seriously constrained. Socioeconomic status often reproduces itself across generations, for reasons having little to do with individual choice and much to do with social structures. Race continues to be such a significant and essentialized marker of identity that the 2006 season of the reality TV show Survivor divided contestants into racial “tribes” (a turn of events with extremely troubling implications), and race continues to be associated with significant differences in average income, life expectancy, rates of incarceration, and other measures of collective well-being or lack thereof. Furthermore, different aspects of identity interact in ways that make it impossible to describe a single, fixed set of constraints upon and choices available to any particular group (a phenomenon often referred to as intersectionality).2 Thus, even self-identity reflects a complicated combination of constraint and freedom, decisions made and options foreclosed.    Existing studies of LGBT religious identities, themselves implicitly intersectional , seem to support Lyon’s argument that ascription and achievement are insufficient for conceptualizing postmodern identities. Yet rather than stressing the production and discovery of identity, these studies have portrayed something more like negotiation, bringing two apparently discordant and preexisting identities—religion and sexual orientation—into harmony or at least into a truce. However, such studies have focused entirely on specific religious traditions. The clear agreement among them is that there is no single pattern of identity negotiation, though several typical patterns seem to hold at least for Christians and Jews, and possibly for Muslims as well. In most studies these include suppressing one identity or the other, compartmentalizing the two identities and bringing only one out at a time (for instance, being Jewish in the synagogue and gay at the bar), integrating the two identities, and living with the two in tension.3 Some studies also include strategies for addressing the sacred texts or theologies that call into question the validity of LGBT identities within traditional religions; interestingly, these strategies appear to be similar in many ways across the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The primary strategies generally include downplaying the importance of the...