Presenters

Kent L. Brintnall, "Who Weeps for the Sodomite?"

Marcel Proust concludes the preface to the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time with the warning that should there ever be “a Sodomist movement,” it would have no interest in rebuilding Sodom.  “For, no sooner had they arrived there than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the appearance of belonging to it…. They would repair to Sodom only on days of extreme necessity…. In other words, everything would go on very much as it does today in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or Paris.”  n this paper, following Proust’s warning, I will reflect on Heather Love’s interrogation of reparative historical thinking, alongside Lee Edelman’s figuration of the sinthomosexual as well as his critique of compassion, to sketch the ethical vision that might follow from rebuilding Sodom—and staying there.  What would it mean to be willing to identify with and as the monstrous? What would it mean, by so doing, to unveil the structural antagonism, the implacable violence, that structures the social, and that seems to characterize the divine, in its most excessive moments? In our efforts to flee Sodom, to run away from the sodomite, and never look back, what destruction have we wrought?

Elizabeth Freeman, "Shakers, Not Movers: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance"

A New Yorker cartoon shows a father and son in a carpentry workshop, dressed in traditional Shaker garb. “No, lad,” the father says to his son, “We’re Shakers, not movers.” But thinking both about movement politics and feeling “moved,” what kind of movers were the Shakers? My paper will focus on Shaker theology and liturgy, honing in on the role of dance. I read Shaker dance as a case study for body politics—for how physical movement creates solidarities read as threateningly other or as promisingly porous. In terms of temporality, I focus on rhythm, a key aspect of Shakers’ otherness as they went from dancing in utterly arrhythmic ways to dancing in rhythms and formations so regular that their detractors equated Shaker dance with death. In terms of affect, I focus on how theology and the body meet one another, for Shaker theology was “danced” in particular, very detailed ways. In terms of queer politics, I focus on how dance made Shakers sexually andracially suspect. Dancing Shakers were cast first as Native American savages and then, after liturgical reform, as whites occupying the position of black slaves. Yet ultimately, Shaker dance hybridized nonwhite and Anglo cultural aesthetics, Catholic affective liturgy and the Protestant spirit of dissent, theology and practice, and thus has much to teach contemporary queer theory.

Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, “Our Book of Revelation…Prescribes Our Fate and Releases Us From It”: Scriptures as (Dis)Orientation Devices in 1990s Queer Chican@ Literature"

This paper examines the use and reconceptualization of the Book of Revelation in three queer Chican@ texts from the 1990s: Gil Cuadros’ City of God (1994), Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation (1993), and John Rechy’s Our Lady of Babylon (1996). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on orientations, homing devices, and happy objects (particularly in Queer Phenomenology and The Promise of Happiness), this paper shows how each author picks up the bible, especially the Book of Revelation, as a disorientation device for queer Chican@ subjects. The paper’s title comes from Moraga’s conclusion to The Last Generation, “Codex Xerí,” where the book of Revelation appears alongside many glyphs of Chican@ revelation, be they written on barrio walls or present in bodies gathering together. She presents these competing scriptures as objects of temporal refraction, as routes within and toward her own misalignment with dominantized orientations. Searching for that which is “prescribed,” that which exists before and beyond the written, each author offers a critique of Revelation’s particular scripturalization as an unreachable temporal compass, as an object that has shaped a “hybridity of home” that both binds and displaces queer Chican@s even while it can also be usable in a disorientation that opens up other worlds of being.

Mark D. Jordan, "In Search of Queer Theology Lost"

In History of Sexuality 1, Foucault tried to represent—as allusion, satire, dream—the difficulty of finding new speech for telling the lives of sexed bodies.  On his account, our triumphal claims to have liberated both sex and the speech about it do no more than restage existing regimes for sexual regulation. They dress biopower in bolder colors.  Both Foucault’s effort and his analysis should be recalled by anyone trying to write queer theology—much more, to write about it in the past tense.  Whatever queer theology has managed to do, it has not yet been able to sustain new forms for speech about bodily pleasures in lived time. One theological writer who saw the difficulty clearly and exerted herself to write into it was Marcella Althaus-Reid.  I return to passages in her chief works to search for telling moments of compositional failure—which are, of course, the most promising moments. From them, I suggest, we can pursue the task of writing queer theology more deliberately, especially in the direction of the contested and indefensible boundary between theology and what is now called “literature.”

Maia Kotrosits, "Queer Persistence: On Death, History, and Longing for Endings"

“What does it mean to live with HIV indefinitely, without knowing whether or not it will kill you?” Tim Dean writes, marking the changing timeline for HIV in the wake of new medical treatments. Exploring the anxiety experienced by some gay men as a result of the new uncertainties around HIV positivity, Dean proposes that this anxiety might tell all of us something about our relationships to time, the future, and mortality. Indeed death has haunted queer theory from its inception as its implicit telos, either to be embraced or refused. But if death is the telos of queer theory, then it is one that repeatedly and frustratingly refuses to be final. This paper explores the longing for endings and what might be called a "queer persistence" through Dean’s essay, Eve Sedgwick’s almost incidental description of queer as a “continuing moment,” and the Gospel of Mark, a text that bends or thwarts conventions of beginning, middle, and end. What might we make, for instance, of the fact that Mark’s pointed and violent vision of the end of the world occurs in the middle of the text; that the "beginning of the good news" is the apparent middle of Jesus’ life; that its original ending was so strangely indeterminate that it was later straightened out with a more proper conclusion? If anything worries us more than death, it seems, it is a lack of resolution.

Joseph A. Marchal, "How Soon Is (This Apocalypse) Now?: Queer Velocities After a Corinthian Already and a Pauline Not Yet"

Temporality and relationality are lively issues in early assembly communities, like the one in first century Corinth, where dynamics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment operate in overlapping and mutually conditioning and delimiting relations with (at least two) apocalypticisms.  More recently, before there was No Future, there were Dinshaw’s queer touches across time and Freeman’s temporal drags. I confess to feeling an affiliated pull between the past and the present, seduced by the potential of shared marginalities through anachronistic juxtapositions. From this vantage point Edelman is almost redundant for a treatment of those ancient assembled communities, who felt a different pull of an alternative temporality; and Muñoz’s not-yet-here follows distantly upon Paul’s sarcastic, re-doubled “already” (then and there) in response to those other apocalyptic temporalities. The differences within and ultimately between these scenes, the first century and the twenty-first century assemblages and debates, are matters of velocity. The prophetic females in Corinth embodied and argued out of a non-terminal velocity, in a different mode of response than Paul to their apocalyptic age. Their overlapping and outrunning rates help to scramble and rearrange some of the oppositions within queer debates about temporality, while this exchange dissonantly feeds back into queering disidentifications with figures that persist partially, haunting disavowed losses, but posing prophetic possibilities for still other citations, combinations, or connections.

Karmen MacKendrick, "Haunted by the Future"

In the Confessions, Augustine argues that God is found in memory. One indication of this is that we all desire true happiness, even though we certainly haven’t found it in our lifetimes. This paper asks what it means to find a God only in memory, and what kind of memory that could be. After reviewing the mnemonic options of forgetting, mourning, and melancholy, it turns to the possibility of haunting. In conjunction with Judith Butler’s theory of a forbidden melancholic queer identification, it asks about a haunting by God, and then how such a God is to be conceived. The result ties an immemorial past to a future of possibility, and a mutual entanglement of hope with loss.

Ann Pellegrini, "Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time is Now?"

This paper draws from my new book project, Excess & Enchantment: Queer Performance Between the Religious and the Secular, to ask what psychoanalysis and religion might have to say to each other in the wake of queer theory’s temporal turn. Both queer temporality and psychoanalysis offer us resources for understanding the multiple ways time coats, codes, and disciplines the body in secular modernity.  This is so even though psychoanalysis is one of these disciplines, and not just because of the tick tick ticking of the clock during the analytic hour. The secular aspirations of psychoanalysis—Freud’s desire to distinguish it from other occult and spiritual practices and, especially, from the Jewish question—sometimes result in a tension in the ways psychoanalysis tells time. On the one hand, psychoanalysis quite frequently hews to a developmentalist imperative, in which not just the human organism, but the individual subject is supposed to mature along a set pathway: from A to B to C. An individual may go off the rails, and often does; but, detours and disruptions actually prove the rule of time and telos.  On the other hand, this “chrononormativity” (a term borrowed from Elizabeth Freeman) is at profound odds with the capacity of psychoanalysis to make room for, and help us make room for, the co-existence of past and present in ways that confound secular time’s forward march. This latter recognition—co-temporality—may even lay down routes for the cultivation of counter-codes, ways of living and experiencing and telling time out of sync with the linear logics of what José Muñoz has called “straight time.” Arguably, it is in those places where psychoanalysis has retained the imprint of the religious that it is most queer and most capable of proposing alternatives to neoliberal subjectivities and “Christian secular” moralizing over sex and bodily life. 

Laurel C. Schneider, "More Than a Feeling: A Queer Notion of Survivance"

In the opening essay to an anthology he edited entitled Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) declares that “Survivance is greater than the right of a survivable name.”  Contemporary residents of North America (in the eastern U.S. especially) live in the truly deafening silence of linguistic extinguishment where native names persist like grave markers—as states, towns, streets, or even car companies—constituting an afterlife of so many disappeared languages (and so according to the Czech proverb, of so many disappeared souls.) But native survivance defies narratives of disappearance and resists the static, contradictory requirements of nostalgia and of names. Vizenor’s development of the franco-creole notion of survivance, which he applies particularly to the working of Native American narrative, is also something more: I suggest it is a philosophical vessel for imagining other uncolonizable presences that resist/exceed/survive colonial temporalities and affects.  In this paper I will draw this concept of survivance into a kind of cross cultural conversation with queer theology, to help think about the queer affects and temporalities that make it possible, even beyond the survivable name “queer.”

Linn Marie Tonstad, "Debt Time, Straight Time, Prophetic Time"

How can time become a site of non-reproduction of heterosexual and heterosocial sameness? The various temporalities of late and financialized capitalism introduce new forms of reproduction and new forms of discontinuity. In this paper, I consider the relationship between debt-time (as one mode of the time of capital) and sameness and stasis (as heterosexuality is the logic of the self-same). I argue that queer critiques – for instance, performance art – can serve as prophetic redirections of time that avoid the binary of identity vs. self-loss that structure some contemporary queer-theoretical engagements with temporality.  While some queer theorists prescribe self-shattering as the only answer to the discontinuous autonomous subject of late modernity, they miss the way the self is already shattered by the infinite demands placed on it by late capitalism. Self-identity is already made impossible by debt-time; it is social sameness (social reproduction) that needs to be reconsidered. Releasing social sameness from its subjugation to identity requires the creation and visioning of communities that have non-oppositional relationships to the dominant social order (that is, they are alternatives rather than negations). One way of producing such communities is through the materiality of queer performance art, which communalizes social and physical bodies beyond identity’s shattering.

 

Student Presenters

Karen Bray, "The Madness of Holy Saturday: Bipolar Temporality and the Queerdom of Heaven on Earth"

In Theology of Money, Phillip Goodchild warns of the eschatological judgment of money. The sovereignty of money nurtures an eschatological hope akin to what Berlant has diagnosed as “cruel optimism.” Under neo-liberalism, “To achieve time that is of value, saving time should be subordinated to spending time” (Goodchild, 188). Even as we are held in suspense of the moneyed eschaton, we must be ever more efficient (re)producers of promised wealth. To this eschatology political theologians have sought counters. The Radical Orthodoxy proposes a return to the Christian Kingdom. Others propose the eventiveness of the multitude—an in-breaking of democratic potentiality. Yet none have adequately addressed how Post-Fordist temporalities feel. For this we need queer theory. I argue that the Post-Fordist moment is a Holy Saturday moment--a day lived in the wake of crucifixion and the shadow of an uncertain resurrection. It is a moment reflective of what Shelly Rambo has described as life penetrated by death, and a sensibility resonate with Heather Love’s concept of “feeling backwards.” Using Rambo’s theology of trauma alongside theories of queer temporality I argue that we feel Holy Saturday. We feel ourselves to be in the wake of failed revolutions, even as we are beckoned forward, held cruelly captive to the promise that Sunday is coming. And so we wait in the shadow of the moneyed eschaton. Engaging Freeman’s exploration of S/M; Cvetkovich’s theory of depression; and McRuer’s work on disability this paper constructs “bipolar-time” as a site of protest and potentiality from within this shadow. I suggest that the indictment to save time represents a heteronormative insistence on both able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Like that of S/M, which can serve as “a dialectic between the will to speed up and annihilate and the will to slow down and dilate” (Freeman, 2010), bipolar-time is a dialectic between the soul-deadening effects of capitalism and the “mad” feeling that things might be otherwise. Bipolar-time does not seek a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire, nor to become efficiently and sufficiently ordered, but rather questions the very nature of order. It is a dream of a temporally reordered world, one where worth is divorced from work, value from efficiency. Further to live into a space of bipolar resistance we will need to spend timein the concrete-utopias described by José Muñoz, in which queer futurity, the feeling that things might be otherwise, is performed in the present. Embodying the Queerdom of Heaven on Earth, this life of faith refuses the eschatological judgment of money.

Christy Cobb, "Reading Female Homoeroticism Across Time: Queer Performance in the Acts of Xanthippe and Nightwood"

There is no lack of homoerotic relationships in the literature of antiquity.  Without looking far, the astute reader finds philosophical conversations, erotic novels and poetry, theatrical subplots, and sexually explicit images on pottery all focused on homoerotic love.  Predictably, most of these examples are of men who love other men. Examples of female homoerotic stories and poetry exist, of course, but they are much fewer in number.  One such ancient novel where female homoerotic relationships can be found is the early Christian novel the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca.  Utilizing similar literary motifs as Acts, the Apocryphal Acts, and other Greco-Roman novels, this 4th/5th century text tells of the dramatic conversion of Xanthippe, an elite wife of a Spanish leader; Polyxena, Xanthippe’s “sister” who is converted and then abducted; and Rebecca, a Jewish-woman-converted-Christian, who is also involved with Polyxena.  The relationships between the women are clearly erotic, yet remain ascetic, a characteristic of Christian novels enabling love relationships to be more pure than other earthly relationships.  Reaching from the past to the present, I read this early Christian novel alongside a contemporary homoerotic novel, Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (1936). The protagonist of Nightwood, Robin, is a tortured woman who travels between Europe and America, first married to man and then involved with two women, Nora and Jenny.  These two novels, I argue, highlight a triangular relationship between three women in addition to their relationships with a number of men, yet the female/female relationships drive the plot in both texts.  In order to explore these female/female relationships, I turn to the theoretical work of Garber, Butler, and Sedgwick.  Using Garber’s definition, I will show that both novels unmistakably have bisexual plots.  Yet, pulling in the work of Butler and Sedgwick, one can see how the characters perform queerness through the development of the novel.  This is explicitly seen in Nightwood, and reading the contemporary novel with the ancient one reveals the queer performance subtly found in the Acts of Xanthippe.  These queer female relationships are intimate and spiritual – sacred spaces the characters connect with God and with each other.  Reading these novels together enables a crossing of temporal boundaries that creates a queer space for the female relationships – ancient and modern – to flourish.  Finally, the endings of both novels are complex, unfinalized, as the novels leave readers wondering about the fate of their heroines.  Theologically, the endings are vital to the queer representations of the female protagonists in the stories – both Xanthippe and Robin are consumed at the conclusion of their stories.  These are endings that appear to be tragic, yet I argue are queerly transformative.

Richard Coble, "Memory, Futurity, and Biopolitics in Pastoral Care"

Lee Edelman and José Muñoz cast two trajectories of futurism: the Child of violent heteronormative politics on the one hand, and the concrete utopias of minoritarian politics critiquing the stultifying present on the other. Though ostensibly opposing, these authors also echo each other, as they contrast temporalities – or lack thereof – of queer political critique with those employed by normative regimes. My project, however, examines a coalescence between the opposing directions of futurity outlined by these authors. Can a temporality, or more specifically a figure around whom memories and futures collect, advance futurism towards both normative and subversive trajectories? My argument is that such temporal tension is precisely centered in the contemporary work of pastoral care, especially in its institutional iterations. When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I attended and evoked memory, often of death. Weeks, even months, after an on-call shift, I would be stopped in hallways, once by a father with whom I sat vigil while his teenage son underwent emergency surgery, another time by the trauma surgeon I stood beside as she told a family their child had died. The person of the chaplain is a gravitating center around which concrete memories of death and care circulate. As such, chaplains signify moments of what Jean-Luc Nancy in his Inoperative Community has termed “being-in-common,” our mutual exposure to finitude in the death of another. For Nancy, such exposure dissolves the foundations of biopolitics, the governance of a transcendental national or racial life on which norms, economy, and technologies are based. In contrast to a normative, biopolitical trajectory, the memory of concrete deaths encircle the person of the chaplain, which, though not obviously utopian, echo the critical trajectory of Muñoz’s futurity, in that they bespeak fragments of a past that challenge our biopolitical present and push toward another future vision.  But the chaplain is also at work for the biopolitical sphere. The hospital is premised on the normative governance of populations towards the cure of disease. Though not malicious, such care is a part of the biopolitical trajectory of modern politics. The narrative itself that memory attaches to the person of the chaplain also furthers the narrative of national (and commercial) care and progress, trends that in reality can forsake or downplay the concrete memories of death and finitude. In this way, I argue that the chaplain is an ambiguous figure, a center of memory employed both in the advance and subversion of the normative, biopolitical sphere she in habits.

Brandy R. Daniels, "Who’s the We? Excess and the Enactment of Queer Time"

This paper will critically examine the way futurity functions in particular strands of feminist theologies— of how the (defense or critique of the) past functions to secure the future—suggesting that a teleology of success problematically assumes/creates boundaries of and to community in such a way that undermines its supposed aims. In particular, I will turn to Sarah Coakley’s recent work on God, Sexuality, and the Self, arguing that despite her desire to reframe systematics under a formational frame that she sees as potentially liberative, Coakley’s project fails to be liberative because it adheres to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight time’s choke hold.” After outlining how Coakley’s text relies upon a narrative of straight time that reproduces the “mastery” she vigilantly seeks to avoid, this paper turns to queer theoretical reflections on both temporality and failure as resources for feminist theological reflections on futurity. I will begin with a turn to Halberstam’s account of queer failure as a resource that questions and reframes a telos of “success,” and from there I will turn to Muñoz, exploring how his constructive account of “the future in the present” and his ethical turn towards a queer horizon offers an open account of futurity that 1) refuses to envision the good life as something to be either rescued from the past nor deferred to the future but rather as something to be performed and enacted in the present, and 2) identifies the enactment of “the future present” in and through excesses (affective and otherwise) as opposed to a formation through a linear process—and argue that these features are imperative to a theological imagination, and corresponding methodology, that is truly liberative. A truly liberative theological account of the future, I argue, asks “Who is the we that make up and enact it?” rather than “How do we secure or obtain it?” I will conclude with brief reflections on rethinking futurity under Munoz’s paradigm in theological studies, turning to Catherine Keller’s notion of anti-apocalypse and Wendy Farley’s account of formation and belonging as useful resources in this endeavor.

James N. Hoke, "The Empire Binds Time: Erotohistoriography and Romans 13"

Can queer approaches to Paul’s letters extend beyond sexual “clobber” passages to reveal deeper connections between sex, theology, and politics? Scholars writing on (queer) sexuality and Paul’s letter to the Romans typically focus on Romans 1:18-32, but, in this paper, I will instead consider Romans 13:1-7, Paul’s exhortation that everyone submit to ruling authorities, in order to demonstrate that Paul’s reliance on the imperial sex-gender system in Romans 1 anticipates his exhortation to submission in Romans 13. Beginning from a feminist and queer de-centering approach to Paul, I understand the letters as “sites of debate, contestation, and resistance” (Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Laura S. Nasrallah) and their audiences as “oddly assembled and critically reflective collectivities” (Joseph A. Marchal). Centering then on the various orientations (gendered, sexual, political) of these communities, I use Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queer temporalities and affective histories to expand upon Marchal’s “queer orientation to historical time,” which refuses the divide between continuity and alterity in the history of sexuality by forging a partial connection (or “queer coalition”) between these first century ekklēsiai and modern queer historiographers to envision further historical possibilities for conversation between the Roman wo/men and Paul. Drawing upon Freeman’s conceptions of “chrononormativity” (using time to organize persons to be most beneficial to a particular agenda), I will show how the Roman Empire binds time by setting itself as the eternal “end of history” (as Neil Elliott argues) and thus arranges life through a sex/gender system that fits these political goals. According to this imperial logic, one’s options exist as binary options: either submission (Romans 13:1) to all aspects of imperial hierarchies is the only reasonable response or active (armed) rebellion (Romans 13:2,4) is the only alternative. Drawing on a disruptive use of time that seeks bodily pleasure and a hybrid past/present, I will use Freeman’s work on erotohistoriography to unhinge interpretation of Romans 13 from this binary logic of submission or overt resistance, and I will open the possibility that the wo/men of the ekklēsia might share (with us) in pleasurably “queer” sensations at a tempo that is “out of joint” with the sexed/gendered/political logics of Rome.

Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo, "The Non-Origins of Queer Blackness: Queering African(a) Temporalities"

Genesis 2-3 has predominantly been read as a story about human origins. The man and woman—who are often interpreted as a heterosexual couple— that are placed inside the Garden of Eden have been perceived as living inside a divinely ordered community, which represents YHWH’s intention for human existence. They are exiled from the garden as a result of the transgression of the commandment given to the man in Gen 2:16-17. Implying that heterosexuality is the original and absolute configuration of human relation and that which goes against the construction of the heterosexual community of Eden is a transgression of divine commandment. Africa, like Eden, has been largely perceived as an originary space. The continent has been portrayed as the “birthplace” of all black people and the representation of that which is natural. African Biblical Scholars such as David Tuesday Adamo have suggested that parts of Gen 2-3 originated from Africa and the construction of the “first people” seen in the text resembles Ancient African traditions concerning human origins that have been passed down and spread orally. Thus, the heterosexual construction of the “first people” in Gen 2-3 is portrayed as indigenous to Africa and is a tradition that ought to be passed down from generation to generation.  Readings such as Adamo’s have been used to justify hostility and violence towards queer people which have been incorporated into the construction of the notion of the original African identity. Accordingly, heterosexuality becomes biologically determined not only by sexual organs but also by race; where black bodies are seen as possessing an African identity and therefore ought to conform to “Ancient African” constructions of heterosexuality. Anything outside of this notion of the “original Africa” is seen as a transgression of nature, (ironically) placing any black queer people in a category similar to that which is occupied by (neo-)colonizers—the violators of “Mother Africa”—who do not belong in Africa. I intend on re-reading Gen 2-3 as a trope for Africa, rejecting the notion of Eden and Africa as original. Following Gale Yee, I suggest that Eden and Africa are socio-economic, political and cultural constructions that have been created to justify dominant ideologies.  This re-reading of Africa through Gen 2-3 is an attempt to show that the construction of Eden and Africa as origins function as devices of chrono-normativity. Subsequently, this re-reading moves towards an understanding of queer black identities, their histories in which Africa is envisioned not as a origin that determines their futures but like Elizabeth Freeman’s understanding of Frankenstein’s monster, is an embodiment of  “temporal nonsynchronicity”, where the relation between black bodies of the past and present creates a future that has a “corporeal kinship” with the past but need not resemble nor be recognizable to the past and deviations from the past is not a transgression that belongs outside.

Brock Perry, “'They had no rest from this torment': Negativity and Temporality in Queer Biblical Criticism and Christian History”

This essay will consider the functions of critique and historiography at the interface of biblical criticism, Christian history, and queer theory. In order to consider the ways in which biblical criticism might move away from not only its obsession with historical-critical methodology but also theory-driven identitarian readings—i.e. the endless “queering” of texts that often serve to incorporate queers into the normative Christian fold at the expense of more unruly others—I will follow Ken Stone in his argument that biblical criticism can be considered a Foucaultian “technology of the self” in which the subject of biblical criticism does not precede but is constituted, transformed, and engendered by its encounter the bible such that “our very existence as ethical subjects can be effected and modified through our variable interaction with texts which have, for better and for worse, assumed a powerful position in our culture.” Insofar as this is the case, I will further argue that the encounter with Christian historical texts is one structured by negativity, in which the queer ethical subject of biblical criticism and Christian history is constituted through the repetition of self-displacement and loss that comes with reading texts that have been used against it. In this way, doing biblical criticism and Christian history can be thought of like sex: something we are often drawn to despite the “for better and for worse” such that there is a blurring between the distinction between its pleasures and traumas. As such, I propose an “erotic hermeneutic” that posits that we read because we desire, and that that desire draws us into an encounter with the past that forms and deforms the queer reader. An erotic hermeneutic, unlike a paranoid one, cannot predict its politics or political subjects in advance, but instead assumes that the political emerges from the encounter with history, and that the shape of the political my be contrary to its dominant conceptions. I will apply this erotic hermeneutic to the gender deviants of the Apocalypse of Peter, who are forced by their tormenters to repeatedly climb a mountain and throw themselves from a cliff in perpetuity. No doubt, an approach to religious history that locates queers in hell hardly provides an obvious platform from which to argue for inclusive ecclesial policy or LGBT rights.  By leaving them behind, however, and by leaving ourselves open in the present to their presence in the historical archive, there is a chance we allow for a different kind of queer (religious) historiography, one that Carla Freccero has described as “queer spectrality.” This approach to queer time and history, which neither forgets the dead nor properly mourns them, “involves an openness to the possibility of being haunted, even inhabited, by ghosts.” In opening ourselves to be haunted by the queer figures inhabiting the Apocalypse of Peter’s hell, we may also be able to share in their jouissance, to experience the self-loss of their fall.  In doing so, we hold open the future for those whose lives continue to be made hell by those who would leave them behind as the price of admission into paradise.

Sara Rosenau, "Amateur Christians, Queer Church"

In this essay I propose a queer ecclesiology, arguing that church is queerly enacted through everyday practices transformed in light of Christian scriptures, traditions, and embodied life. I draw on Kathryn Tanner’s ecclesiology, which frames church as a collection of partial and undefined practices always in the making. Further, through Carolyn Dinshaw’s figure of the amateur, I position the queer Christian as a paradigmatic example of a ‘church-maker’, one who illuminates the “queer temporal possibilities” in the enactment of church (Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? 5).  Tanner’s ecclesiology of every-day life turns away from ahistorical universals towards the participatory and communal nature of Christianity. Tanner argues that Christian community is not a given, but is produced by borrowing materials, meanings, and practices from the wider culture and using them differently. A Christian way of life is not a matter of what cultural material one uses as much as how it is used; “Christian practices are always the practices of others made odd” (Tanner, Theories of Culture, 112-13).  More explicitly then Tanner, I interpret the church’s ‘odd’ use of the practices of the world as queer. To make church is to borrow and queer cultural practices according to a particular Christian community’s embodiment of core beliefs. In order to further the queer potentiality of Tanner’s thought, I rely on Carolyn Dinshaw’s figure of the amateur. Dinshaw describes amateur readers of medieval history as motivated not by payment or fame but, as the etymology of amateur implies, by love.  These readers “take their own sweet time” navigating between heterogeneous temporal modes of the past and present.  Amateurs queer time as they pursue their passions from “positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build another kind of world” (How Soon Is Now? 6). Against a cultural backdrop of Christian homophobia, the queer Christian is also an amateur, an outsider to ‘professional’ Christian (hetero)normativity.  Yet, the queer Christian still labors, in their own sweet time, to enact a Christian life out of love.  One example of amateur church-making is Sara Miles, a queer writer and activist, who started a food pantry in her neighborhood church in response to her love of the Eucharist (Miles, Take This Bread). Miles’ story underscores what Dinshaw calls the “temporal multiplicity” of Christian life, a creative navigation of the plane of everyday life and the plane of universal historical events such as the last supper (Dinshaw, “All Kinds of Time”).  This essay argues that the amateur practices of queer Christians create what Dinshaw calls a “temporal clash” which opens the potential for making church anew (ibid., 34). For church is not a static ‘thing,’ but is enacted through the everyday practices of people who labor to craft a Christian life, for love.

Eric A. Thomas, "The Futures Outside: Apocalyptic Epilogue as Queer Africana Prologue"

According to the Apocalypse of John, entrance into the New Jerusalem is the great reward for those with ears to hear its message, those who conquer and endure.  Yet “outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood (Rev 22:15).” The threats of not being listed in the lamb’s book of life, not being one of the 144,000 who have not defiled themselves with women, or the “hell” of the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, are empty for queer people of color throughout the African Diaspora who experience Armageddon as the everyday. Following the argument of José Esteban Muñoz that “queerness as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity,” I propose that a re-vision of apocalyptic epilogue can become a prologue towards the articulation of Africana queer utopian futures outside of apocalyptic Christo-heteronormativity.  The particular “queer time and place” of my investigation occurs at the intersection of queers of color critique, queer and postcolonial biblical interpretations of the Apocalypse of John, theories of queer temporality, and Sankofa – the Akan concept that we learn from the past in order to build a successful future. Composite sketches of the lives of queer folks in the African Diaspora are gathered to create a “deep archive” (following Judith Halbestam) by which Muñoz’s call for new visions of a utopian “then and there” can be articulated in resistance to their apocalyptic “here and now.”  Queer time ticks through a lens of postcolonial approaches: the “strangeness of home,” African American significations of the Apocalypse called “scripturalization” as articulated by Lynne St. Clair Darden, and my expansion of Shanell T. Smith’s hermeneutics of ambiveilence – a blending of W.E.B. Dubois’ notion of the “veil” with Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial ambivalence. As a result, the hope is that Africana queer subjects can become free of the “bind” to the Apocalypse of John (as text and ideology) and free to articulate our own visions of a new heaven and a new earth where erotic justice reigns forever and ever.  

Max Thornton, "TransCription: Gender, Disability, and Temporality"

“[A] newly transgendered person … moves just a bit slower than most people; he or she is unlearning old ways of moving, and picking up new ways of moving. So one of the first things you try to do is to move at a normal pace.” (Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us [New York: Vintage, 1995], 87.) Crip theorist Alison Kafer cites the above quote from “gender outlaw” Kate Bornstein in order to suggest potential affinities between trans people and disabled people with respect to their temporal needs. The relationship between trans theory and crip theory remains undertheorized, and temporality is a useful nexus for examining this connection. Both crip and trans time disrupt the rhythms of bodies that are driven by capitalist concerns of maximalized productivity, which Elizabeth Freeman refers to as “chrononormativity.” The spatial and temporal materiality of the crip body destabilizes the boundaries between flesh and prosthesis, between able and disabled, and ultimately between self and not-self. Moreover, the truism that “if we live long enough we all become disabled” is the potential source of social reimaginings: facing up to our own inevitable debility, not relegating it to an ignorable future, but understanding it as an inescapable aspect of humanity, could lead us to embrace ways of being that are less exclusionary and ableist. In trans time, futures and pasts are reconfigured in the historiography of the trans-identified self. The social and medical processes of gender transition inhabit an intermediary yet definitive time in the narrativizing of the trans self. Like crip time, trans time disturbs the complacent chrononormativity of late capitalism, denaturalizing the bodies and behaviors that are taken for granted under the heading of gender. Together, trans time and crip time open a space for the disruption of unexamined norms and the reshaping of past and future temporalities for all bodies – those that are trans, crip, both, neither, or in the interstices of categorization.