“You Were Gonna Leave Them Out?”: Locating Black Women in a Transfeminist Anthropology of Religion

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 . 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