"A House of Prayer for All People": Promises of Citizenship in Queer Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer theory’s tradition of subjectless critique, which refuses to limit an understanding of sexuality to LGBTQ identity, dreams not only of more dexterous scholarly analysis, but of nourishing coalitional solidarities among differently marginalized subjects. My dissertation argues that subjectless critique’s capacious ethico-political aspirations make it possible to imagine citizenship differently. Although queer studies often regards citizenship as a hazardous object, exclusively bound up with nation-state violence and Eurocentric universalism, I follow geographers in mapping citizenship as multiscalar and teeming with radical potential, particularly at the urban scale. Advocating a reparative – but not optimistic – approach to the concept, I propose what I call “subjectless queer citizenship” to imagine bundles of solidarity, sympathy, rights and redistribution that take neither the nation-state nor LGBTQ identity as an exclusive referent. I ground this theoretical exploration in analysis of three years of ethnographic study at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, a large, predominantly LGBTQ Toronto congregation that promises “a house of prayer for all people.” While the church has played a key role in a range of citizenship struggles, I focus on four: refugee rights, debates on race and gender in religious leadership, global outreach to LGBTQ Christians, and activism around urban police-minority relations. On the one hand, I point to the church as a space that realizes subjectless queer citizenship. I highlight the church’s refugee program, which has resisted pressure from the Canadian nation-state to weed out “fake” refugee claimants who are not “really” LGBTQ, and insisted on providing support and resources to all refugees on the basis of vulnerability alone. On the other hand, I trace the church’s considerable limits – moments of racialized and gendered exclusion; failure to criticize forms of police and geopolitical violence; and unreflexive, dangerous aspirations to save the world. I take inspiration, however, from the affective, spiritual and political praxis of church leaders, particularly women of color, who integrate the church’s good and bad fragments in order to pursue capacious, “minor” visions of citizenship. The promise of a subjectless queer citizenship, I contend, ultimately depends not on good political analysis alone, but on people’s capacity for affective reparation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".