Countermythologies: Queering Lives in a Southern African Gay and Lesbian Pentecostal Church

Abstract

Black gay and lesbian Christians belonging to a grassroots Pentecostal charismatic church spanning small towns in Southern Africa make everyday claims to normativity with interpretive recourse to biblical myths and church rituals. Members of the church embody a range of gendered and sexual self‐expressions that also tend to reproduce prevailing masculine and feminine sexual roles and subject positions. By situating their identities, rituals, and exegeses in global perspective, I argue that church members queer more orthodox biblical interpretations to create what I describe as a life‐affirming countermythology to predominant discourses of religion, gender, and sexuality that otherwise structure their lives. In sum, this article shows how vernacular hermeneutic practices can be a queering force within presumedly restrictive religious settings and demonstrates how recovering conventional ethnographic topics like myth can move Black queer anthropology and African studies toward a critically imaginative becoming.