"You Were Gonna Leave Them Out?": Locating Black Women in a Transfeminist Anthropology of Religion. Issue 1 (23rd December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pérez, Elizabeth
• Is Part Of: Feminist anthropology. Volume 2:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 94
• Page End: 111
• Publication Date: 2020-12-23
• Subjects: Transfeminism -- Blackness -- Anthropology of Religion -- Gender/Sexuality; Feminist anthropology -- Periodicals; Feminist anthropology; Periodicals; 305.42
• DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12033
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2643-7961

Abstract

Abstract: This article summons a transfeminist anthropology of religion and asserts that such an orientation (with a subfield to match) would be impossible to conceptualize without the scholarship of Black women—feminist, Womanist, and otherwise critically situated. Through the ethnographic analysis of interviews, documentary footage, newspaper reportage, social media, and videos, the article pays tribute to the late Reverend BobbieJean Baker (1964‐2014). The article argues that Black transgender Christian women's religious subjectivity encompasses the innovative inhabitation of Black ecclesiastical linguistic codes and gestural idioms; the elaboration of transfeminist biblical hermeneutics and discursive mechanisms of legitimation; and the simultaneous performance of culinary and relational virtuosity. The article further contends that Baker's account of her subjectivity cannot be understood without the insights of Christina Sharpe, Hortense J. Spillers, Monica A. Coleman, Yvette A. Flunder, Savannah Shange, Geneva Smitherman, Psyche A. Williams‐Forson, and Karen Baker‐Fletcher. Together, they assist in revealing that Baker's efforts to increase the livability of trans women's worlds were inseparable from her religious convictions, as communicated through (and constituted by) the discourses of the Black church. Equally so, her ministerial vocation and vision of beloved community proceeded from her experience as a seasoned—and expertly seasoning—southern‐born‐and‐raised Black trans woman.