Afterword

This afterword uses the Episcopalian Church’s Gody Play story “The Circle of Time” to survey the essays in the volume. It discusses the color scheme for time in Anglican theology, linking the synaesthesia of temporalized hues to queer eroticism and focusing especially on the red “heat” of Pentecost, incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Using the work of José Esteban Muñoz, the essay links the incarnational to the performative in queer theory, suggesting that the transmittal of affect may be divine in the theological sense, whether or not participants believe in God. It asks whether the incarnational, the performative, and the queer might be linked by transfers of being and becoming of the sort epitomized by the Pentecostal Holy Spirit and described in many of the essays.

More Than a Feeling: A Queer Notion of Survivance

This essay explores, in part, queer theory's queerness in relation to the religious (Christian) and ethnic (European) frame that largely produced it. Although affect and temporality theories offer important possibilities—finally—for queering Christian theology, I suggest that even these may not escape the ossifying tendencies of conceptual closure so dominant in the trajectories of European and Christian thought. Gerald Vizenor's (Anishinaabe) theory of survivance, developed out of a Native American "postindian" philosophical context, opposes settler colonial closures of "the Indian" and may help illuminate and break through queer theory's (and theology's) entrapping reliance on ethnic European concepts to work through persistent problems of identity, eschatology, and ontology.

Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time Is Now?

This essay asks what psychoanalysis and religion might have to say to each other in view of Freud’s secular aspirations and queer theory’s temporal turn. Both queer temporality and psychoanalysis offer 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. Nevertheless, the times of psychoanalysis are multiple. On the one hand, psychoanalysis quite frequently lays down a teleology in which the individual subject matures along a set pathway. On the other hand, this developmental imperative is at profound odds with psychoanalysis’s capacity to 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” (Foucault’s term), ways of living and experiencing and telling time out of sync with the linear logics of what José Muñoz has called “straight time.”

Excess and the Enactment of Queer Time: Futurity, Failure, and Formation in Feminist Theologies

This chapter explores how the aims of feminist theological projects are (or are not) sought/accomplished through their methodologies, turning to futurity as a rubric and Sarah Coakley’s théologie totale as a case study. This chapter argues that despite her laudable desire to reframe systematics under a formational frame that she sees as liberative, the teleological thrust and attendant onto-epistemological assumptions undergirding théologie totale (and the role of contemplation within it) betray and thwart precisely what her approach seeks to engender—the inculcation of un-mastery, attentiveness to otherness, and awareness of the complex interrelatedness of sexual and spiritual desires. In assuming and proffering a narratively-cohering and linear account of subjectivity that takes as given a clear telos of desire, Coakley’s methodology adheres to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight time’s choke hold.” The latter half of this chapter suggests that a feminist theological imagination (and method) that aligns with the aims of théologie totale approaches “the future” not by asking “how do we secure or obtain it?” but rather, “who are the ‘we’ that make up and enact it?” This chapter concludes by proposing potential hallmarks of a feminist theological method in a queer time and space.

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 chapter 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. If anything worries us more than death, it seems, it is a lack of resolution.

The Futures Outside: Apocalyptic Epilogue Unveiled as Africana Queer Prologue

This essay examines the epilogue of Revelation (22:8-21) as an intervention for new imaginations of, and actions toward, a new heaven and new earth that can be realized in the present. It names the ways that Revelation (indeed, the Bible) is used to make outsiders of queer people. More importantly it suggests that the author/narrator John is not the only one who can be filled with the spirit on the Lord(e)’s day with something to say to those “with ears to hear.” The particular “queer time and place” of this investigation occurs at the intersection of queers of color critique, theories of queer temporality, and Sankofa—the Akan concept that we take what is beneficial from the past in order to work toward a more pleasurable future. Composite sketches of the lives of queer folks in the African Diaspora are gathered to create a “deep archive” (following Judith Halberstam) from which Muñoz’s call for new visions of a utopian “then and there” can be articulated in resistance to their apocalyptic “here and now.” Consequently, a re-vision of the death-dealing epilogue can become a life-restoring prologue toward the enactment of Africana queer utopian futures outside of apocalyptic Christo-heteronormativity.

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, triumphal claims to have liberated both sex and the speech about it do no more than restage existing regimes for sexual regulation. They dress up biopower in bolder colors. Foucault’s effort at 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 exerted herself to write into this difficulty was Marcella Althaus-Reid. This chapter looks in her chief works for telling moments of compositional failure—which are, not coincidentally, the moments of greatest promise. These passages suggest how to write queer theology more intentionally, especially in the direction of the indefensible boundary between theology and what is now called “literature.”

Remember—When?

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 have not found it in our lifetimes; this indicates that we must remember it from somewhere or somewhen. This chapter 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

How Soon Is (This Apocalypse) Now? Queer Velocities after a Corinthian Already and a Pauline Not Yet

Joseph A. Marchal,’s chapter examines the unexpected value of two ancient apocalyptic perspectives for rearranging queer approaches to temporality, affect, history, and the bible. Carolyn Dinshaw’s imaginative conceptualization of a “touch across time” provides a frame for staging this anachronistic juxtaposition between the first and twentieth century. Thus, after surveying key insights from queer theorists of temporality like Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz, this chapter turns to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, an exchange stuffed with alternative futures of the past. While Paul insists upon one apocalyptic vision of “not yet,” his letter indicates that the Corinthian women prophets lived and moved out of an alternative, if overlapping apocalyptic vision in their “already.” Both ancient parties engage in contingent varieties of temporal drag and of a critique of reproductive futurity, but the prophetic females are proceeding at a different velocity. Their prayer, prophecy, and withdrawal from social expectations around sex, marriage, and children register significant changes in a relatively short period of time. Greater attention to these changes provides a prophetic sort of apocalyptic praxis, long marginalized and dismissed, yet potentially resonating, if not exactly corresponding, to other more recent orientations to temporality, activism, and urgency in a time like now.

Response: Queer Enfleshment

This brief response catches glimpses within Karmen MacKendrick’s work, glimpses of what one might call a queer-incarnational apophasis. In her attention to mourning, melancholia, and haunting, MacKendrick attunes us to the queer temporality of a past that never quite was, for the sake of a future that might be genuinely new: such would be the structure of “the possible.” Reading MacKendrick through Laurel Schneider and José Muñoz, this essay attends to flashes of enfleshment—of livability and even justice—in the midst of an unbearable present. Here incarnation becomes promiscuous, ordinary, and spatio-temporally queer: not-quite, but not-quite-not; almost and all over the place.