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Brandy Daniels

Brandy Daniels is Assistant Professor of Theology and Co-Director of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Portland. Standing at the intersection of constructive and political theologies, social ethics, and feminist and queer theories, her research explores the place of difference within communal identity and belonging, focusing on gender and sexual difference in Christian thought and practice. She serves on the executive committee of Political Theology Network, and as the co-chair of the Queer Studies in Religion unit of AAR.

Essays

(How to Do) Political Theology Without Men?

Has there been something fundamental to political theology that has made it a more convenient environment for men, and less so for women and non-binary people? What specific concepts, intellectual structures and paradigmatic convictions have made this specific field such a manly business?

Feminist (Theological) Fantasies

Berlant’s work points us to other possibilities that avoid, that resist, the fantasy of redeemed gender—calling for us instead to reside in the messiness of our attachments and providing space and ways for us to negotiate them, rather than seeking to transcend them. Whereas the efforts to transcend gender seem to, paradoxically, deepen our attachments to gender norms, it is also the case then that in negotiating the messiness of those attachments, one finds space for other ways of doing gender that perhaps subvert or move us beyond its constraining norms.

It’s Not for Everybody

To be a public theologian does not mean to do theology for everybody. It is not a matter of speaking from the particular to the universal, but of dwelling within multiple, overlapping particularities and finding theological meaning there.