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'The Church as an Open Closet'
Organised by the Queer and Trans Geographies Thematic research Group, we are pleased to invite you to a talk on Dr Josep Almudéver Chanzà's new book Women Leaders, Queer Faithfuls.
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Organised by the Queer and Trans Geographies Thematic research Group, we are pleased to invite you to a talk on Dr Josep Almudéver Chanzà's new book Women Leaders, Queer Faithfuls. The book examines how women and queer people navigate leadership, belonging, and visibility within Christian institutions, focusing on the Catholic Church in Spain. Complicating the idea that queerness and religion are incompatible by taking faith seriously as a site of everyday queer life, shaped through attachment, care, and institutional commitment rather than formal recognition.
The talk will begin with an overview of the book, followed by a more focused discussion of the chapter 'The Church as an Open Closet.' This chapter explores how churches often operate as spaces of partial inclusion, where queer lives are neither fully acknowledged nor entirely excluded. By foregrounding ambivalence and conditional belonging, the book challenges celebratory narratives of inclusion and offers a framework for thinking about how power operates through managed visibility and silence, within and beyond religious settings.
The session will include two discussants, Dr Amy Robson and Jay Sinclair, who will be in conversation with Josep to place the text in conversation with wider queer and trans literatures and demonstrate the value of these approaches for understanding questions of belonging, visibility, and subjectification in an increasingly ambivalent world. In doing so, the event aims to support and promote queer and trans research at Durham by creating shared points of reference, without assuming prior knowledge of these fields.
Pricing
Free