This panel foregrounds three distinct critical perspectives that deploy queer theory to study Catholic sacramentality. Drawing also from gender studies, theology, and ethnography theses paper work 1) to analyze the ways in which queer and sacramental performativity actualize the eschatological ends of the human body and the Catholic Church; 2) to interrogate how the Catholic priest is singled out as occupying a particularly ambiguous position whose “categorical shiftiness” has functioned in Catholic studies to normativize oddity through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority, and 3) to approach the queering of sacramentality as an issue of sacramental justice that enacts a counterpublic that demands unrestricted access to the Eucharist that is built upon nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism.
Niklas Rodewald, Loyola Chicago
Performing the Eschaton: Queer Performativity and Sacramental Action
Cella Masso-Rivetti, Columbia University
Catholic Priests, Queer Ambiguities, Category Anxieties
Elizabeth Ann Pritchard, Bowdoin College
Sacramental Justice as Queer Sacramentality
Responding
Anthony Petro, Boston University
Lily Stewart, Northwestern University, Presiding
lily.stewart@northwestern.edu
Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Hilton Bayfront-Indigo 202B (Second Level)