S E X U A L D I S O R I E N TAT I O N S

T R A N S D I S C I P L I N A RY T H E O L O G I C A L C O L L O Q U I A

Theology has hovered for two millennia between scriptural metaphor and
philosophical thinking; it takes flesh 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 fields of religion. A multivocal discourse of theology takes
place in the interstices, at once self-deconstructive in its pluralism and con-
structive in its affirmations.

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

SEXUAL
D I S O R I E N TAT I O N S
Queer Temporalities,
Affects, Theologies

KENT L. BRINTNALL,

JOSEPH A. MARCHAL,

AND STEPHEN D. MOORE

E D I TO R S

Fordham University Press  New York  2018

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CONTENTS

Introduction. Queer Disorientations: Four Turns

and a Twist | Stephen D. Moore, Kent L. Brintnall,
and Joseph A. Marchal 1
How Soon Is (This Apocalypse) Now? Queer
Velocities after a Corinthian Already and a Pauline
Not Yet | Joseph A. Marchal 45
Unbinding Imperial Time: Chrononormativity
and Paul’s Letter to the Romans | James N. Hoke 68
The Futures Outside: Apocalyptic Epilogue Unveiled
as Africana Queer Prologue | Eric A. Thomas 90
“Our Book of Revelation . . . Prescribes Our Fate
and Releases Us from It”: Scriptural Disorientations
in Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation |
Jacqueline M. Hidalgo 113
Queer Persistence: On Death, History, and Longing
for Endings | Maia Kotrosits 133
Who Weeps for the Sodomite? | Kent L. Brintnall 145
“They Had No Rest from This Torment”:
Encountering the Apocalypse of Peter | Brock Perry 161
Excess and the Enactment of Queer Time:
Futurity, Failure, and Formation in Feminist
Theologies | Brandy Daniels 178
viii | C o n t e n t s

The Madness of Holy Saturday: Bipolar Temporality

and the Queerdom of Heaven on Earth | Karen Bray 195
The Entrepreneur and the Big Drag: Risky
Affirmation in Capital’s Time | Linn Marie Tonstad 218
Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time
Is Now? | Ann Pellegrini 240
More Than a Feeling: A Queer Notion
of Survivance | Laurel C. Schneider 258
Remember—When? | Karmen MacKendrick 277
Response: Queer Enfleshment | Mary-Jane Rubenstein 292
In Search of Queer Theology Lost | Mark D. Jordan 296
Response: To Mark Jordan’s “In Search of Queer
Theology Lost” | Catherine Keller 309
Afterword | Elizabeth Freeman 314

Acknowledgments 319
List of Contributors 321
Index 329
S E X U A L D I S O R I E N TAT I O N S
  Introduction
Queer Disorientations:
Four Turns and a Twist
S T E P H E N D. M O O R E , K E N T L . B R I N T N A L L ,
AND JOSEPH A. MARCHAL

In order to be become orientated, you might suppose that we must first experience
disorientation.
—Sar a 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 affects.1 Like the colloquium out of which
it emerged, this volume seeks to engage with certain field-reorienting—and
field-disorienting—inflections 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 significantly or at all in that cor-
pus. Symptomatically, one searches in vain for mention of them in the field-
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
 2 | S t e p h e n D . M o o r e , K e n t L . B r i n t na l l , a n d J o s e p h A . M a r c h a l

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 reflexive desire to fill 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 fields have much to offer the cross-disciplinary enterprise of queer studies,
a conviction elaborated in the final 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.

E C S TAT I C O V E RV I E W

We know time through the field of the affective, and affect 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 significant, 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
 Q u e e r D i s o r i e n tat i o n s : F o u r T u r n s a n d a T w i s t | 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 disidentifications with
long dead but haunting figures 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–inflected concept that acknowledges histories of violence, con-
quest, and devastation but also offers 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, reflecting on the queer
affects 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
 4 | Stephen D. Mo ore, Kent L. Brin tnall, and J os eph A. Marc hal

Augustine and Judith Butler, MacKendrick evokes a God who haunts and ar-
gues that such a haunting ties an immemorial past to a future of possibility. If
the remembered God is the possible, the open, then all time is queer, always
open to being other than it is.
Some of the most significant, most discussed works in queer theory have
also analyzed feelings, emotions, inchoate sensations, and other bodily reac-
tions to sensory stimuli; in other words, or in a word, they have analyzed af-
fect. The emergence and development of affect theory has been intimately
bound up with queer theory. And that intimate interconnectivity has been
evident in explorations of queer temporality; Carolyn Dinshaw, Carla Frec-
cero, Elizabeth Freeman, and Heather Love all model affective modes of queer
historiography. But the fusion of temporality and affectivity has extended well
beyond their work. As Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Judith
Halberstam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have variously taught us, it is not
just how we think about time but also how we feel about time that matters: the
traumas of the past, the fragility of the present, the seductiveness of the fu-
ture. Temporality is a politically and ethically charged category because its af-
fective resonances are incalculably consequential. Past, present, and future are
the interflowing, ever-shifting sites where happiness, joy, shame, loss, mourn-
ing, disgust, despair, hope, pride, and victory are experienced and processed. It
is in the boundary-eroding current of time that longing and love, identification
and connection, pleasure and desire collect, coalesce, and circulate. Our affec-
tive orientation to the world, like our temporal one, is entangled with complex
social and cultural processes that clamor for careful analytical attention.
Several authors in the present volume try to take the reader into these new
ways of feeling and experiencing time. Both Karen Bray’s concept of bipolar
time and Linn Marie Tonstad’s concept of entrepreneurial subjectivity seek
to name, describe, and transcribe the set of feelings that characterizes life in
late capitalism. For both authors, experiences of fragmentation, dissolution,
and shattering are part of the dominant cultural order, which requires us to
rethink the queer or countercultural potential of such experiences of time.
Specifically, Bray asks how post-Fordist temporalities feel, and argues 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. Bray’s bipolar time
is a moment of protest and potentiality from within this shadow, a dialectic
between the soul-deadening effects of capitalism and the “mad” feeling that
things might be otherwise. Tonstad, meanwhile, asks how time can become
a site of nonreproduction of heterosexual and heterosocial sameness, and ar-
gues that the various temporalities of late and financialized capitalism have
introduced new forms of reproduction and new forms of discontinuity. Ton-
stad employs the temporality of entrepreneurial subjectivity to pose questions