It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact ar ... More

It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, this book resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of erotic fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the long and complex historical entanglement of concepts of faith, race, and secular love is urgent to contemporary debates about normativity, agency, and subjectivity. Queer Faith puts Christian theology and Renaissance lyric poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer theory and scholarship.