Perhaps an unlikely subject
for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of
Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust,
and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often
riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and
faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in
radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of
affect in radical, coalition politics.
A
House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of
the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years,
David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special
attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily
queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary
struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership,
activism around police-minority relations, outreach to LGBT
Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging
in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique,
psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All
People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship
and religion.
Building
on queer theory's rich history of "subjectless" critique,
Seitz calls for an "improper" queer citizenship--one that
refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the
ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or
intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only
on "good politics" but also on people's capacity for
empathy, integration, and repair.