Browsing by Author "Robertson, Megan"

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    Called and Queer Exploring the lived experiences of queer clergy in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa
    (university of western cape, 2020) Robertson, Megan; Sarojini, Nadar
    In South Africa anti-queer attitudes are propped up by religious moral claims and by strong assertions that queer sexualities are un-African and a secular Western import. This study contributes to the growing body of literature which challenge these claims, and at the same time interrupts scholarly trends in the field of religion and sexuality which either characterises institutional religion as singularly oppressive or homogenises queer Christians as inherently subversive. In this thesis, I explored the lived experiences of six queer clergy (one of whom was discontinued) in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA), in order to understand the complex relationship between institutional power and the ordinary lived realities of clergy. The study focuses particularly on the MCSA as it is statistically the largest mainline Protestant denomination in South Africa and holds significant positions of power and influence on national, interdenominational and political platforms, not least of all because it has fostered an institutional identity as the �church of Mandela.� Further, situated within a continental and national context where anti-queer attitudes are politicised through cultural and religious discourses, I have argued that the MCSA also serves as a case study which represents the ways in which institutionalised religion continues to be co-constitutive of social systems and hierarchies.
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    Queer studies and religion in Southern Africa: The production of queer Christian subjects
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) Robertson, Megan
    The question of how to write about queer Africa has been a significant debate in scholarship over the last decade. One of the key emerging areas, in the development of �queer Africa scholarship� has been through the framing of queer African subjects at the intersections with religion and in particular, Christianity. As scholars begin to further imagine queer African subjects as Christian, it is important to explore how and in what ways these subjectivities are constructed. In this article, I apply a qualitative analysis to academic literature that explicitly focuses on, or includes a substantive analysis of queer Christians and/or queer Christianity in Southern Africa. While Southern Africa is not representative of the entire continent, this region is a productive site within which to understand how queer subjects are imagined to be situated, what they are imagined to be doing and how they are imagined to be doing what they do. The context produces queer and LGBTI + (this acronym is sometimes preferred to 'queer' to refer collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and in various other ways as gender and/or sex non-conforming.) subjects who find and make religious homes within legally permissive and restrictive countries and do so through a variety of normative, queer and normatively queer ways, thus revealing religious and sexual contradictions and boundary crossing.