Queer Faith

Melissa E. Sanchez is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Erotic Subjects (2011) and Shakespeare and Queer Theory (2019), and the co-editor of Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, Sexuality (2016).

"A smart, vital synthesis of religious studies and queer theory that reinforces the deep affinity between both realms over time. Sanchez refuses the easy celebration of queer as a counterpoint to normal, promiscuity to commitment. Through sublime readings of major early modern thinkers, Queer Faith offers us a capacious genealogy of promiscuity that accounts for its failures, fragments, philologies, and Christian theology, and all the ways our attachments undo us." - Michael Cobb, author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence "By placing Christian theologians in conversation with queer theorists, Sanchez illuminates what is lost when the two are put in opposition: Sanchez shows that theology provides crucial terms for registering the inherent promiscuity of human attachments, whether we understand those attachments as devotional, interpersonal, or communal. Queer Faith takes up race, religion, eroticism, and ethics in ways that bridge the gap between early modernists and scholars focused on our own contemporary moment, forging a vibrantly original argument at the intersection of diverse and influential voices." - Kathryn Schwarz, author of What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space "From erotic accountability to procreation and orgasms, Queer Faith is an incisive exploration of human sexuality's many manifestations. . . . Sanchez engages her subject with humor. Queer Faith is an enjoyable and outstanding piece of scholarship." (Foreword Reviews) "Clearly written and extensively researched, this book is far more engaging than most academic texts, supported by detailed notes and an extensive index that simplify search." (Choice) "...its achievements are difficult, challenging, and utterly exhilarating. Sanchez builds rich analytic frames and then compellingly reads texts toward them." - Joseph Loewenstein (Recent Studies in the English Renaissance) "Promiscuously traversing between theology, queer theory, and early modern poetry, Melissa Sanchez compellingly questions the academic opposition between a secularized queerness and religious normativity." (Sixteenth Century Journal)