Burrow-Branine, “Blogging while gay and Christian”

Burrow-Branine, Jonathan. 2015. “Blogging while gay and Christian: Andrew Sullivan and the production of the religious, secular, and sexual.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal. DOI:10.1080/14755610.2015.1019897 

Abstract: This article examines blogger and political pundit Andrew Sullivan’s performance of gay Christian identity through his weblog, The Dish. Through a reading of the repetitive and collaborative nature of The Dish as a medium of cultural production, I argue that Sullivan’s gay Christian performance is made legible by how the religious and secular are articulated and negotiated through the site of the body in American culture. Sullivan’s performance both reproduces and resists religious and secular normativities while at the same time produces a singular identity with distinct political and social advantages. Among other advantages, examining how the religious and secular are articulated through everyday discourse and embodied performance exposes some of the political investments in this articulation and provides a space to consider the stakes of scholars’ own investments in ‘secular’ knowledge.