Description
Book Synopsis2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
At the funeral of Matthew Shepardthe young Wyoming man brutally murdered for being gaythe Reverend Fred Phelps led his parishioners in protest, displaying signs with slogans like Matt Shepard rots in Hell, Fags Die God Laughs, and God Hates Fags. In counter-protest, activists launched an angel action, dressing in angel costumes, with seven-foot high wings, and creating a visible barrier so one would not have to see the hateful signs.
Though long thought of as one of the most virulently anti-gay genres of contemporary American politics and culture, in God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb maintains that religious discourses have curiously figured as the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression and activism throughout the twentieth century. Cobb focuses on how queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to the violence done against them, alternating close readings of writings by James Baldwin, Tenness
Trade Review
God Hates Fags is an excellent way to become immersed in the issues and rhetorical arguments of a sub-cultural world of American religious and political disourse. -- Richard Hughes Seager * American Studies Journal *
God Hates Fags is an exciting, even exceptional, book, and it will contribute to an important and necessary conversation between queer studies and African American literary and cultural studies. -- Christopher Nealon,author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall
Looks specifically at texts and spectacles about religious violence and hatred. -- Julie Novkov,University at Albany, SUNY
Michael Cobb raises questions of both ethics and effectiveness that are deeply urgent. If you, too, want to know how the rhetorics of violence that swirl around queer people work, then read this book. -- Janet R. Jakobsen,co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
I am moved by it, as by his practiced rhetorical sensibility. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *
[Cobb] begins not only in the middle of still fresh news (Matthew Shepard, Fred Phelps, Colorados Amendment 2, and the marriage debates), but in the middle of ordinary assumptions about rhetoric and our east elision of sexuality with race. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: The Last Safe Group to Hate 1 The Language of National Security: A Queer Theory of Religious Language 2 James Baldwin and His Queer, Religious Words 3 Like a Prayer 4 Rights as Wrongs Conclusion: Our Aberrant Future NotesIndex About the Author
