Queering God: Humour, Iconicity, and the Sacred

This chapter investigates the queer reimagining of God in contemporary anglophone media and popular culture, focusing on the ways in which humour, iconicity, and gender non-conformity destabilise hegemonic constructions of the sacred. Traditionally embedded within theology, institutional ritual, and patriarchal forms of representation, the divine is increasingly re-mediated through camp aesthetics, parodic embodiment, irreverent memes, non-binary avatars, and queer forms of cultural performance. Rather than treating these representations as merely provocative or desacralising, the paper argues that they constitute significant sites of discursive and ideological negotiation, where power, belief, gender, and identity are reconfigured within post-secular imaginaries. Grounded in English linguistics and informed by queer theory, cultural studies, and religious discourse analysis, the study approaches queer not as a stable identity category but as a disruptive critical practice that unsettles normative epistemologies and fixed symbolic orders. Drawing on Halperin’s conceptualisation of queer as that which resists the normal and the dominant, as well as on Kulick, Milani, Curti, Balirano, Althaus-Reid, West and Shore-Goss, and Murgia, the paper situates queer representations of divinity within a genealogy of theological, cultural, and semiotic dissent. Particular attention is paid to the role of humour as a discursive strategy that does not trivialise the sacred but exposes its performative and ideological construction. The paper contends that, when re-coded through parody, camp excess, and queer aesthetics, religious figures may become queer icons: affective and cultural condensations through which irreverence and devotion, transcendence and immanence, satire and affiliation intersect. In this framework, queering God emerges as both a semiotic and epistemological gesture, one that challenges heteronormative theology, disidentifies from patriarchal authority, and opens alternative ways of imagining the divine as fluid, embodied, resistant, and continually in flux.