This paper employs netnography and critical discourse analysis to examine the ways gay men on Twitter foster Satanic communities and orient themselves to gay Satanic practice. How do these men centralize the language of pleasure, the erotic, and phallic objects as a linguistic ploy that both bathes in the pornographic and reifies their identities as Satanists? How does the use of taboos (incest, methamphetamine use, rape play, bondage, sexual demonology) within imagery shape the ways queer Satanists orient themselves within this social media context? For this project, I examine common language, terminology, and themes surrounding queer pornographic discourses on self-identified Satanists twitter pages as touchstones that shape, twist, and deconstruct gay Satanic devotional practice, a practice that is fed predominantly by gay, cisgender, white men from Anglophone countries who consume pornography and enact sexual pleasure as an extension of their religiosity. Each of these Satanists contribute to a synthesized look at the employment of gay pornographic imagery and language and its potential benefits and complications for practitioners who exist in this social media-driven contemporary moment, intent on drafting community and connectedness online. While these Satanists rely on oppositional rhetoric to construct their personhood as antithetical to Protestant Christianity, this paper explores certain remnants of a Protestant, neoliberal subject which still emerge within gay phallocentric Satanism. This phallocentrism, or connection to religious practice as deriving from the phallus (whether symbolically, iconographically, and/or physically), also is prevalent in larger social and religious communities that are separate from Satanisms, like symbolic use of the shiva lingam, the online reemergence of the Cult of Priapus, and specific Tantric practices that focus on semen retention.

Interrogating Pope Francis employs institutional genealogies and a queer and trans studies lens to analyze the power dimensions binding the colonial project and the rise of the nation-state to the Catholic Church. In this dissertation, I contextualize the charismatic Pope Francis amongst his predecessors, the institutional Church’s direct adoption of colonial ideologies in the past, and its current support for exclusionary identity politics within national arenas. I conduct close readings of Church documents alongside Pope Francis’s public statements to reveal the evolution and stagnation of Catholic sexual ethics, and the ways in which the Church has intentionally separated sexual ethics from Catholic social teachings as a means to reject platforms for gender and sexual justice. This genealogy unearths the interrelated but paradoxically juxtaposed Catholic teachings on natural law, human dignity, sexual ethics, and social justice. My analysis further reveals the intentionally divisive and exclusionary direction Francis and the Catholic Church continue to assume in relation to peoples of nondominant sexes, genders, and sexualities: a direction that directly upholds the Church’s colonial legacy.

This thesis is a critical examination of muscular Christianity, “a movement emphasizing rigorous physical training for the good of men’s souls,” (Blazer, 2012, 289) and its quest for perfection near the end of the long nineteenth century. An exaggerated sense of social crises and a certain nostalgic utopianism led muscular Christians to try and realize a white Protestant utopia throughout the entire nation. Yet, as muscular Christianity continued, the movement faced significant obstacles that either narrowed its scope of achievable perfection or deepened contention within the movement. With obstacles accumulating, how was it that muscular Christians changed their perspective on the social situation of the U.S. as seemingly apocalyptic to something much less severe? I argue that in the muscular Christian’s continual efforts to achieve utopia, the nation’s social conditions dwindled in relevancy compared to his and God’s indispensable roles in achieving perfection. To inform my argument, I closely examine the writings and speeches of leading muscular Christians as well as published articles of unknown authors that refer to muscular Christianity. This thesis aims to foster explicit connections between muscular Christianity, William James’ theory of religious experience, American eugenics and progressivism.

The American Monomyth, first named and described by Lawrence and Jewett, has woven its way through American popular culture. This pervasive structure, with roots in Puritan captivity narratives, American westward expansion, and the creation and serialization of superhero comics and radio programs, has entertained generations of consumers and altered how they conceive of and interact with the world around them. But this structure has also had negative effects on audiences, and Jewett and Lawrence, after analyzing this monomythic framework and its effects in their 1977 and 2002 books, called for its replacement.

While they do not suggest a replacement, this dissertation proposes the Transitional Monomyth, a framework reflecting changes already taking place in American pop culture, and uses the long-running webcomic Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio, as a case study in the application of the Transitional Monomyth and its corollaries. This framework notes the shift away from abstemious heroes, two-dimensional villains, and largely unassisted successes and toward flawed protagonists, understandable antagonists, and well-rounded secondary characters, while still allowing for the persistence of certain elements from the American Monomyth, including an emphasis on salvific impulses and the liminality of protagonists. While this framework is not the only one in operation in works of pop culture, it does appear to have gained in popularity, as reflected in a greater number of movies and television series with flawed protagonists or outright antiheroes.

The prevalence of this narrative framework may point to a shifting conception of the larger culture. The idea of flawless heroes who always emerge victorious against the villain may no longer be as appealing because reality is far more nuanced. This shift in popular culture might also be pointing away from older conceptions of American culture and historical heroes toward a more nuanced understanding of American history and religiosity—rather than sanitized narratives that have isolated and marginalized, a greater push is and has been well underway to re-build a more thorough and representative history that acknowledges, includes, and recognizes.

This dissertation is the result of four years of ethnographic research with the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI). MLI is a network of North American Muslim leaders who engage with North American and Israeli Jews to learn about Judaism, Jewish peoplehood and the centrality of Israel to Jewish peoplehood. This engagement violates the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call to action to end the occupation of Palestine. MLI seeks to find an alternative pathway to advocate for Muslim minorities living in Western contexts as well as continue support and allyship of the Palestinian fight for self-determination. MLI and its participants have adopted and internalized certain aspects of their Jewish education that they hope to implement within their own local, national, and transnational Muslim communities. Additionally, MLIers and the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) that hosts this Jewish learning program, both engage racialized parallel logics that betray an oppressed oppressor mindset that reinforces white supremacist ideologies. MLIers, through their advocacy efforts to fight Islamophobia are problematizing racial structures by claiming a whiteness sought through intra-Muslim Arab supremacy. This white adjacency is a rejection of the racialization of religion imposed by Islamophobia. MLI’s racialized maneuverings take different gendered forms as women MLIers navigate intra-Muslim patriarchy and Western patriarchal structures. The ways women MLIers are pushing back against these dual patriarchies sheds light on how gendered, racialized religious minorities are trying to obtain full social citizenship within the North American contexts they have chosen to call home.

In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men centuries were popular among Christian audiences. Within these hagiographies, the subjects changed their gender presentation and lived as men, often in monasteries intended for those assigned male. However, current historiography explains away these acts of gender variance from the historical record. Historians often view their presentation as a means to negotiate patriarchy, such as safety while traveling or to attain authority reserved for men. There seems to be a compulsion among scholars to impose cisnormativity onto these figures through viewing their gender presentation as solely a pragmatic choice. This dissertation analyzes these examples of gender variance in late antique Christianity through a transgender studies lens. This approach views these saints’ genders as performative constructions within their cultural context. By using a transgender studies approach, this dissertation disrupts the cisnormative view that causes the erasure of gender variance from the historical record.