ABSTRACT
Drawing from feminist and Foucaultian political philosophy, this chapter critiques theological and masculinist versions of sovereignty that underwrite the modern binary opposition of state and religion as equivalent to body and soul, public and private, power and spirituality, coercion and persuasion and male and female, respectively. It offers, instead, a queer reading of the state, focusing on the contemporary United States, in order to illuminate the ways in which sovereignty and sovereign power are neither singular nor a matter of possession, but are plural and performative. This reading analyses recent US Supreme Court cases involving religion and poses an illustrative analogy between religion and the “remnant nations” of American Indians and the “tradition” represented by the Confederate flag. The aim of this reading is to disrupt the tendency to de-politicise both religious and state power and to obscure the insidious collusion of state and religion in perpetuating a Christian, patriarchal, homophobic and racist United States.
