American Literature II: Literature After 1870
From the Spiritual to Religious: American Literature from 1870 to the Present
Session Coordinator: Karlyn Crowley
Dept. of English, St. Norbert College
Boyle Hall, 100 Grant St.,
De Pere, WI 54115
karlyn.crowley@snc.edu

Agnes in Drag: Gender and Religious Performance in Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

In The Last Report, Erdrich imagines a protagonist who shifts between gender and religious identities over her lifetime. Sister Cecilia (née Agnes), driven by her passion for music, abandons her convent, and following a bizarre series of events in which her common-law husband is killed and their farm decimated by a flood, appropriates the robes and mission of "Father Damien." Binding her breasts and mimicking the physical poses and gestures of men, she spends her life "passing" on the reservation of Little No Horse. Like the drag-queen's audience Butler evokes, readers "know better," (that Damien is biologically female) and may be entertained by her disguise, but also have the supposed naturalness of religious gender norms disturbed, especially given the narrator's continual vacillation between references to Damien and Agnes. Likewise, Agnes's investment in music and Ojibwe rituals produce a spirituality that exceeds the traditional structures of Catholicism, a problem she negotiates throughout her life. I suggest that the Ojibwe spiritual insights and rituals that merge with Agnes's Catholic traditions indicates, less a romanticization of native culture and demonization of Catholicism as representative of coercive white culture, but a more complicated conception of religious identity as shaped relationally, situated geographically, and sedimented through performance.

Elizabeth Toohey
Principia College
ejt@prin.edu

God in the Barrio: Latino Theology in the Puerto Rican Novel

Two Puerto Rican Latino novelists have recently written coming-of-age novels that reject traditional concepts and mores of Catholicism and the figure of Christ in favor of a new vision for the religious practices of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Meaning of Consuelo (2003) and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams (2000) reflect real concerns with the role of institutional religion in Latino communities. Ortiz Cofer’s young protagonist Consuelo finds the second-class citizenship of women in the Church oppressive whereas Quiñonez’s protagonist Julio harbors a cynical and critical view of the role of the Church in Spanish Harlem. By the end of the novel the main characters discard the traditional scripts assigned them by the Church and find a renewed faith molded by their experiences in their Puerto Rican communities.

Cofer and Quiñonez’s novels emphasize a new way to approach the Catholic Church, one that includes a more powerful role for women and social justice in the barrio. Ortiz Cofer is mainly concerned with the effects of institutional religion on the popular religion practiced daily by Puerto Rican woman. Quiñonez’s main criticism is directed toward the passivity of the Church in face of the social injustices that assault Puerto Ricans on a daily basis in the United States.

Bridget Kevane
Montana State University
umlbk@montana.edu

The Gender of Lowbrow : Women and Contemporary New Age Life Writing

Most academics and highbrow pundits find the New Age abhorrent. They scoff at crystals, chakras, angels, and aliens. However, many white middle-class women find a spiritual home in these “lowbrow” practices and beliefs. They use life writing as a liturgical text for a home-based spirituality that allows them gender agency not found in many mainline religions. These texts are gendered in their embrace of the “popular abject” and their use of feminist rhetoric without overt feminist claims. By examining a range of texts that are popular among a women’s New Age audience, but highly marginal in an aesthetic and political sense, we’ll discover what makes the New Age so appealing to some and so appalling to others.

Karlyn Crowley
St. Norbert College
karlyn.crowley@snc.edu

Post-Secular Queer: Conversion Narrative and Contemporary Queer Fiction

This paper contends that despite the assumption prevalent among critics that the contemporary queer “coming out” genre typically entails a disassociation and even alienation from religion, in fact the opposite is frequently true. Both formally and thematically, many landmark queer texts such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Mark Merlis’s An Arrow’s Flight (1998) construct coming-out narratives through the symbols and conventions of conversion narrative. These two texts exemplify a historically influential body of fiction that undertakes such a fusion of narrative forms to depict not a simple de-conversion from religion (or conversion to the secular) but rather a complex re-conversion to what I term the post-secular queer. As the U.S. finds itself well into a third “Great Awakening” of religious sentiment, and as current political debates over queer sexualities in the U.S. invoke powerfully contentious religious issues, this formal commingling of the sacred and the sexual in literary genres offers timely hints at the ways in which certain queer and religious positions, despite appearances to the contrary, may well be speaking the same language.

Norman W. Jones
University of California, Los Angeles
nwjones@ucla.edu