'Sexuality' and 'gender' in Santeria: Towards a queer of color critique in the study of religion

This dissertation theorizes the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality by connecting decades of feminist and feminist of color writings with lesbian and gay studies, Queer Theory, and a recent Queer of Color Critique. It does so by empirically studying the participation and reception of Lesbian-, Gay-, Bisexual-, and Transgender- or Transsexual- (LGBT) identified practitioners of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religious-cultural practice, in New York's metropolitan area. Using traditional ethnographic and interview methods, selected media coverage, experimental qualitative methods, and Santeria literatures, this dissertation challenges the relationship between "gender" and "sexuality" as either interrelated categories in the social sciences, or as ontologically distinctive. Understanding gender and sexuality in US Santeria also requires understanding the effect of racialization upon its practitioners, and significant discussion engages the relationship between racial formations and sexuality.;I examined various aspects of LGBT participation/reception in Santeria. These findings constitute a comprehensive look at the impact of various categories: by looking at "gay" as an all encompassing LGBT term and several "sexual minority" variations emergent from Santeria; the place of "gender" and "sexuality" as analytic markers where they were both seen as ontologically distinct at times but interrelated at others; and by demonstrating how perhaps "sex" was much more rigid than "gender" in this religious setting, as in the case of transsexuality, and how "gender" was more rigid that "sexuality," especially in terms of the figure of the woman in the kitchen.;The research closely examines the participants' understandings of the relationship between gendered behaviors read as based on sexual minority identities, and sexual and erotic behaviors interpreted through a gender lens. In this sense, even heterosexually identified men with gender-atypical behavior are often understood as "sexual minorities"; likewise, understandings between women and "gays" as penetrable lumped these two groups into a newer understanding of what "sexual minorities" may be. The possession of the Santeria deities (the "mounting") offered gendered as well as sexualized ways of understanding the relationship between gender and sexuality in this religious-cultural practice. These empirical findings loop back into the theoretical discussions on the productive relationship between a Queer of Color Critique and Queer Theory.