he/they
Benny Cardullo (he/they) is an MA student in the department of Religious Studies. His research focuses on religious modernity within the United States, engaging queer theory and religious studies as methodologies to interrogate how affect and experience converge to form “reality.” Benny grounds his research in collective liberation efforts, placing qualitative and archival research in conversation with queer and de/postcolonial theory to develop theological frameworks that could operate universally while embracing bodily difference through the integration of scientific and humanistic knowledges.
Benny received an MSc of Gender (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2022. During this time, he engaged the material vs. the phenomenological body to interrogate how enactments vs. doctrines of gender, sexuality, and kinship shape social and spiritual worlds/identities. His dissertation mobilized questions of presence and absence to interrogate both material and psychological consequences of queerness generated in and generative of absence within Mormonism, producing the queer Mormon subject within an affective ecology of death and abjection that both precedes and constrains the queer body.