Book launch talk with author S. Jonathon O' Donnell and responses by Heike Schotten and Tristan Sturm, chaired by Jamie J Hagen.

The event is co-hosted by the Queen's University Belfast Centre for Gender in Politics and Queen's University Religious Studies Research Forum.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America. Situating spiritual warfare as part of broader frameworks of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire management, author S. Jonathon O’Donnell exposes the theological foundations of the systems of queer- and transphobia, anti-blackness, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current U.S. political order.

O’Donnell argues that demonologies are not only tools of dehumanization but also ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies—models of the “right ordering” of space, time, and bodies that stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Alternative orders are demonized as passing, framed as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. Yet these orders refuse to simply pass on, instead giving strength to deviant desires that challenge the legitimacy of sovereign violence. Critically examining this challenge in the demonologies of three figures—Jezebel, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders re-imagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION:

S. Jonathon O’Donnell (they/them) is a postdoctoral fellow in American Studies at University College Dublin.S. Jonathon O’Donnell is a postdoctoral fellow in American Studies at University College Dublin.

C. Heike Schotten (she/her) is Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests lie at the various intersections of queer theory, Nietzsche Studies, biopolitics, the War on Terror, and liberatory critical theory.

Tristan Sturm (he/him) is Lecturer in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast. His interests include critical geopolitics of religious movements, especially Christian Zionists, apocalyptic thought related to religious fundamentalism and climate change, nationalism and archaeology.

​Jamie J. Hagen (she/her) is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen's University Belfast. She is also the founding co-director of the Centre for Gender in Politics.