Faces of Faith, Kindred Spirits: Black & Latinx Transgender Religious Lives

FAIN: FT-278675-21

Elizabeth Perez
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)

Complete revisions of five chapters of a book on the religious practices of transgender African-Americans and Latinx people.

NEH’s Summer Stipend would support the completion of my second book, Faces of Faith, Kindred Spirits: Black & Latinx Transgender Religious Lives. The fruit of a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the book reveals that the history of trans liberation is American religious history. Faces of Faith shows that trans people have re-envisioned established religious forms so as to be seen and heard within their chosen traditions. In the U.S., these forms include singing in Gospel choirs; cooking “church food”; quoting Bible verses and preaching; building altars for saints and the Virgin Mary; and paying homage to Afro-Diasporic gods and ancestors. Faces of Faith documents the reclamation of these religious forms through innovative “de-Othering” strategies. The first book to provide a richly textured analysis of Black and Latinx trans religious practitioners, Faces of Faith promises to be a pathbreaking contribution to religious studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies.