Feminist theology today denotes a widening field of scholarship that shares historic, pragmatic concerns about gender justice in diverse cultural and racial contexts, but that increasingly differs in approach. In this essay, we discuss internal, creative challenges surfacing in (largely Christian) feminist theologies and review the historical social movements that have shaped them up to the present. Theologians who use race, queer, and postcolonial theory to assert the co‐constituting dynamics of gender with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion are muddying the waters of older feminisms that focused exclusively on gender, rendering the future of feminist theologies more ambiguous, broad‐reaching, and fluid.
This article traces the development of queer theology from its roots in liberation theology and poststructuralist gender theory. Starting with the challenges of terminology in the face of a rapidly changing social context, the authors outline the recent, interrelated histories of LGBT liberation theologies that focus on historically oppressed identity groups and of queer theologies that attempt to think theologically beyond essentialist categories of identity. Finally, they speculate on emergent challenges to queer and LGBT liberationist studies in religion.
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