Queer Callings: LGBTQ Literature and Vocation

This chapter argues for “queering vocation’ through the reading of literary texts that offer significant alternative spaces for restoring and expanding queer subjectivity. The study of queer literature, such as Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, can re-envision the notion of vocation to be inclusive of sexual experience and resistant to those that ascribe vocational identity to heteronormative concepts. The chapter draws from Audre Lorde’s poetic theorising in Sister Outsider that highlights the vocational significance of erotic embodiment as grounded in the queer, racialised body and its desire. Such readings imagine an expanding and restructuring of communities to become more hospitable and nourishing to queer personhood, and by extension, to create a more just and humane world. The queering of vocation expands the scope of vocation’s humanizing impulses for everyone.