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Christianity and Queerness: Affinities and Their Political Implications

November 7, 2023 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

♦♦ VENUE CHANGED TO KK LG1.06 ♦♦

Christianity and Queerness: Affinities and Their Political Implications

♦ Abstract ♦

Despite the protracted opposition between Christianity and queerness, there exists a fundamental affinity between being queer and being Christian. Vital to both are intimate associations that transcend accidents of biology, and an interest in the way those intimate relations foster new forms of personal and social transformation. Christian negative theology counsels modesty, skepticism, and linguistic discipline in all claims on divinity, thus placing limits on confident knowingness about human desire. This too finds affinity in queer theory’s commitment to putting established orders into question. I will use these affinities to think about the Janus-faced future of Christianity in East Asia. It can become complicit in compulsory heterosexuality, reproductive futurism, heteropatriarchal suppression of gender variation, and homosocial authoritarianism. Or it can become a challenge to them through Christian truth-telling.

♦ Speaker ♦

Peng Yin is Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University, where he serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Among his current projects is Queer Unlearning, exploring how queer experiments in living might help us rethink fundamental moral categories such as kinship, vulnerability, play, fidelity, bodily change, and sexual knowledge.

♦ Details ♦

Organized by: Gender Studies Programme, The University of Hong Kong
Supported by: Faith and Global Engagement, The University of Hong Kong

♦♦ Register HERE ♦♦

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