About Marie Cartier
Marie Cartier is a scholar, author, educator, artist, and queer cultural historian whose work explores the intersections of sexuality, gender, religion, memory, and community.
Her book, Baby, You Are My Religion: The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space, grew from extensive oral-history and archival research into gay women’s bar communities before Stonewall. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Cartier examines these spaces not simply as social gathering places, but as sites of recognition, ritual, belonging, and sacred experience.
Her work develops the concept of theelogy as a way of understanding how women excluded from traditional religious structures created meaning and community for themselves.
Teaching and Scholarship
Marie teaches screenwriting at the University of California, Irvine, and Queer Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge.
She regularly uses Baby, You Are My Religion in the classroom to explore oral history, queer community, religion, cultural memory, and the social worlds created by marginalized people.
Her teaching also includes ethnographic and oral-history methods: how to conduct interviews, how to approach elders and community members with care, and how to develop research and creative projects from lived experience.
Academic Leadership
Marie has held longstanding leadership roles within the American Academy of Religion and its Western Region. She served as President of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, and has served as its Southern California representative.
She is the founder of the AAR Western Region’s Queer Caucus and has co-chaired its Queer Studies in Religion programming. At the national level, she has also served as co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Lesbian-Feminist Issues in Religion group.
Her academic service reflects a broader commitment to creating space within the study of religion for queer, lesbian, feminist, and historically marginalized voices.
Art, Writing, and Public Work
Alongside her scholarship, Marie has worked in visual and performance art, writing, activism, and public speaking. Across these forms, her work returns to questions of queer history, women’s lives, cultural memory, spirituality, and the ways communities create meaning outside dominant institutions.
Her writing and teaching continue to place personal testimony in conversation with larger historical and cultural questions.
Baby, You Are My Religion
First published more than a decade ago, Baby, You Are My Religion is now being substantially expanded with new writing, photographs, archival material, and additional perspectives.
The larger project now includes the book, documentary film, archival material, educational resources, and ongoing public conversations about lesbian space, community, memory, and sacred experience.
Speaking and Events
Marie is available for lectures, classroom visits, screenings, conversations, and events related to Baby, You Are My Religion, queer history and culture, oral history, religion and sacred space, gender and sexuality, and related topics.
“Cartier’s book merits attention from historians of LGBT America and theorists of religion, for the richness of its primary material and the probing questions it poses about the functions and forms of religion.”
The Journal of American Culture – Jennifer Rycenga