Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies

339 Pages·2017·3.72 MB·English

by  Kent L. Brintnall

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SEXUAL DISORIENTATIONS
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TRANSDISCIPLINARY THEOLOGICAL COLLOQUIA
Theology has hovered for two millennia between scriptural metaphor and
philosophical thinking; it takes fl esh in its symbolic, communal, and ethical
practices. With the gift of this history and in the spirit of its unrealized poten-
tial, the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia intensify movement between
and beyond the fi elds of religion. A multivocal discourse of theology takes
place in the interstices, at once self-deconstructive in its pluralism and con-
structive in its affi rmations.
Hosted annually by Drew University’s Theological School, the colloquia pro-
vide a matrix for such conversations, while Fordham University Press serves as
the midwife for their publication. Committed to the slow transformation of
religio-cultural symbolism, the colloquia continue Drew’s long history of en-
gaging historical, biblical, and philosophical hermeneutics, practices of social
justice, and experiments in theopoetics.
Catherine Keller, Director
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S E X UA L
D I S O R I E N TAT I O N S
Queer Temporalities,
Aff ects, Theologies
K E N T L . B R I N T N A L L ,
J O S E P H A . M A R C H A L ,
A N D S T E P H E N D. M O O R E
E D I TO R S
Fordham University Press ! New York ! 2018
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Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
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! Introduction
Queer Disorientations:
Four Turns and a Twist
STEPHEN D. MOORE, KENT L. BRINTNALL,
AND JOSEPH A. MARCHAL
In order to be become orientated, you might suppose that we must fi rst experience
disorientation.
—Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
If one wants to . . . consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem
arises. . . . We already have more than one time at work in this time. . . . The way in
which debates within sexual politics are framed is already imbued with the problem
of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold
a future of freedom in time.
—Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time”
It’s about time. This book is principally about time—queer time, to be pre-
cise. But it’s also about time that a book on queer theologies tackled queer
temporalities, together with queer aff ects.1 Like the colloquium out of which
it emerged, this volume seeks to engage with certain fi eld-reorienting—and
fi eld-disorienting—infl ections of queer theory whose origins lie in the mid-
to late 1990s but which have been oddly underremarked even by those in the
theological disciplines most invested in all matters queer. The literature by
biblical scholars, theologians, and church historians that has been assembled
incrementally under the patchwork queer banner is by now a sprawling,
endnote-defying corpus.2 Yet the prominent developments in queer theory
surveyed in this introduction do not feature signifi cantly or at all in that cor-
pus. Symptomatically, one searches in vain for mention of them in the fi eld-
consolidating works of queer biblical criticism and queer theology that have
appeared even since 2005, whether multiauthored works such as The Queer Bi-
ble Commentary (2006), Bible Trouble (2011), and Queer Theology (2007),3 or singly
authored works such as Patrick Cheng’s cartographically ambitious Radical
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2 | Stephen D. Moore, Kent L. Brintnall, and Joseph A. Marchal
Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (2011) and Susannah Cornwall’s theoreti-
cally nuanced Controversies in Queer Theology (2011). The present volume pre-
supposes these previous, altogether indispensable volumes, along with other
similar studies too numerous to name. What motivates, indeed necessitates,
this volume, however, is not a mere refl exive desire to fi ll a gap or occupy a
supplemental space. The volume instead emerges from the conviction, shared
by the editors and, we suspect, by many of the contributors, that the theologi-
cal fi elds have much to off er the cross-disciplinary enterprise of queer studies,
a conviction elaborated in the fi nal section of this introduction.
This collection seeks to blaze a new trail, then, to strike out from a heavily
trodden path. The trajectories of queer theory with which it aims to intersect
will be sketched summarily and then mapped more thoroughly in the pages
that follow. Our introduction attempts to orient the reader to certain disorien-
tations that have occurred in queer theory since the mid-1990s: sexual disorien-
tations, needless to say, but also temporal disorientations and disorienting feel-
ings. We begin with the summative sketch, our (no doubt delusional) attempt
to transcend the disorienting scene and describe what we see from on high.
ECSTATIC OVERVIEW
We know time through the fi eld of the aff ective, and aff ect is tightly
bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together, as the Magnetic
Fields request.
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
Some of the most signifi cant, most discussed works in queer theory have inter-
rogated time. They have questioned, reframed, and reimagined how we enact
our relations to the past and the future. This timely body of work on time
seeks to replace reliance on logics of repetition, linearity, periodicity, and teleol-
ogy with counterlogics of hauntological historiography, erotohistoriography,
and queer temporal drag; anachronisms and proximities; contaminations and
caresses across temporal gulfs. Such work includes Carolyn Dinshaw’s time-
folding reconception of historiography as a practice enabling queer touches
across time; Carla Freccero’s reconception of it as a practice of becoming
ghostly in relation to a past by which one is perpetually haunted; Madhavi
Menon’s counterheterotemporal historiography without historical chronol-
ogy, historical periods, or historical method; Judith Halberstam’s and Elizabeth
Freeman’s counterchrononormative imaginings of alternative temporalities
unregulated by the paradigmatic markers of heteronormative life experience,
most of all marriage and reproduction; Lee Edelman’s antisocial insistence that
certain forms of commitment to certain forms of futurity serve to eradicate
queers and queerness; José Esteban Muñoz’s utopian insistence that queerness
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Queer Disorientations: Four Turns and a Twist | 3
is of value only when viewed on the glimmering horizon of the future; and
Heather Love’s unsettling redirection of the queer gaze backward to a dark,
disavowed past. Just as the foundational works of queer theory revealed that
gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity are not natural or inevitable but social
and conventional—and hence ethical and political—these time-(dis)oriented
works of queer theory demonstrate that even seemingly commonsensical cat-
egories such as past, present, and future are no less culturally constructed and
no less intimately bound up with the (il)logics of desire and power.
This body of work infl uences and is extended by several essays in this
collection. For example, Joseph Marchal’s engagement with the Corinthian
women, the apostle Paul, and their respective interpreters helps us think about
our complex relation to history and our competing understandings of time.
The alternative temporality of the Corinthian women impels us to interrogate
certain of the oppositions within contemporary queer debates about time,
while these debates dissonantly feed back into queering disidentifi cations with
long dead but haunting fi gures who persist partially while posing prophetic
possibilities. Examining another Pauline text, James Hoke asks how time and
empire are bound together—and how they might become unbound—in the
Letter to the Romans. Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s concepts of chrono-
normativity and erotohistoriography (more on which below), Hoke shows
how the Roman Empire bound time by setting itself up as the eternal “end of
history” and argues that the wo/men of the early Christian assemblies invite
us to share with them pleasurably queer sensations at a tempo that is out of
step with the sex/gender logics of Rome.
Laurel Schneider tries to move us away from biblical texts and Western
theoretical frames by turning to Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance, a Na-
tive American–infl ected concept that acknowledges histories of violence, con-
quest, and devastation but also off ers a much more complex future than a
mere overcoming of a tragic past. Schneider draws the concept of survivance
into a cross-cultural conversation with queer theology, refl ecting on the queer
aff ects and temporalities that make such theology possible, even beyond the
survivable name “queer.” In Jacqueline Hidalgo’s contribution to the volume,
there is a bridging of biblical and indigenous worlds through an engagement
with Cherríe Moraga’s “Codex Xerí,” the conclusion to The Last Generation
and a text that tries to recall a past that has been lost under the weight of con-
quest. “Codex Xerí” sets the biblical book of Revelation alongside the many
glyphs of Latinx revelation, be they written on barrio walls or are present
in bodily assemblies, thereby becoming competing scriptures as objects of
temporal refraction. In her essay Karmen MacKendrick poetically and pro-
vocatively explores what it means to remember at all, what it feels like to have
the past occupy the present in a manner that might transform the future. Via
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