Queer Women and Religious Individualism

Notes

1. Beyond the Congregation 1. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 2. On gender and individualism, see especially Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Cf. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3. 4. A quick glance at the various groups hosted by the larger LGBT community centers, or the organizations represented at summer pride festivals, gives some sense of this proliferation of identities. 5. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994). 6. R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (March 1993): 1044–1093; Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 7. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 8. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993) and Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). I am indebted to the latter work for a number of conceptual insights. 9. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–22. “Bricolage” means drawing upon available resources to create a coherent whole; it describes the sort of “found-art” approach to religious identity discussed earlier. See also Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Bricolage Vaut-Il Dissémination? Quelques Réflexions sur l’Operationnalité Sociologique d’une Metaphore Problématique,” Social Compass 52, no. 3 (2005): 295–308. 10. See Christian Smith, Melinda Lundquist Denton, Robert Faris, and Mark Regnerus, “Mapping American Adolescent Religious Participation,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 4 (2002): 597–612; John M. Wallace, Jr., Tyrone A. Forman, Cleopatra H. Caldwell, and Deborah S. Willis, “Religion and U.S. Secondary School Students: Current Patterns, Recent Trends, and Sociodemographic Correlates,” Youth & Society 35, no. 1 (2003): 98–125. 11. Michael Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 5. 12. An exception to this lack of knowledge, and significantly also a book that uses a case study approach, is Ruth Frankenberg’s Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Notes 234 | Notes to pages 234 | Notes to pages 6–7 Politics, Epistemology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). In a much broader study of literary and cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American women, Laura Hyun Yi Kang notes in passing the existence of resistance and self-construction within the boundaries of religious tradition. See Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 223. 13. Ronald M. Enroth and Gerald E. Jamison, The Gay Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1974); see also Ronald M. Enroth, “The Homosexual Church: An Ecclesiastical Extension of a Subculture,” Social Compass 21, no. 3 (1974): 355–360. 14. Paul F. Bauer, “The Homosexual Subculture at Worship: A Participant Observation Study,” Pastoral Psychology 25, no. 2 (1976): 115–127. 15. E. Michael Gorman, “A New Light on Zion: A Study of Three Homosexual Religious Congregations in Urban America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980). 16. This has been true for noncongregational groups, as well. Most recently, a small study of Mormons concluded that lesbian Mormons’ experiences were so different from gay men’s that the two should be studied separately. The author chose to study the men only. See Rick Phillips, Conservative Christian Identity and Same-Sex Orientation: The Case of Gay Mormons (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). 17. See Enroth and Jamison, Gay Church; Bauer, “The Homosexual Subculture,” and Gorman, “A New Light on Zion.” The quotation from Gorman’s work in the epigraph is almost the only mention of gender tensions in his entire dissertation. 18. Leonard Norman Primiano, “‘I Would Rather Be Fixated on the Lord’: Women’s Religion, Men’s Power, and the ‘Dignity’ Problem,” New York Folklore 19, no. 1–2 (1993): 89–103. Primiano’s research was conducted in the early 1980s. 19. Moshe Shokeid, A Gay Synagogue in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 20. Moshe Shokeid, “‘The Women Are Coming...