Sexual Disorientations
Reviewed by Casey Aldridge
Content Warnings: hell, sadomasochism, HIV/AIDS
From reorientation to disorientation
According to the editors and most of the contributors of this phenomenal and provocative volume, queer theory and queer theology are presently in two different places. Or, to reframe the problem according to the language of this book, queer theory and queer theology are presently at work in (or at) different times. The introduction—penned by editors Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore—tracks four recent developments, “turns,” or “swerves” within the diverse constellation of texts that have come to be known as queer theory (p. 6). The editors maintain that these four turns (against the normative and the social, toward the temporal and the affective) are not to be understood as disparate moments, but that each turn is deeply entangled with and contested by the others (6).
These turns, they suggest, are less reorientations of queer theory than they are unsettling disorientations of the very field from which they emerged.
That is to say that the aforementioned turns in queer theory do not merely reiterate or reinforce the assumptions that have so far prevailed within queer scholarship; the antinormative turn, for instance, aims to resist “normativity as such,” whether heteronormativity or “homonormativity” (7). The antinormative turn, according to Laurel Schneider, has defined queer theory since before it existed, ever since Foucault set religion and sexuality against one another in a way that this book seeks at last to reconcile (260). Brintnall, Marchal, and Moore trace the antisocial turn—which they call “a radical inflection of the antinormative turn”—back to Leo Bersani’s question in 1987 (“Is the Rectum a Grave?”) and moreover to Lee Edelman’s 2004 work, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (8). Edelman’s writing especially attacks the “unofficial state religion” of the status quo, in society itself: “reproductive futurism” (10).
Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017. 368 pages. $35.00. ISBN: 9780823277520.
By way of “reproductive futurism,” or desire to use politics to create a better world in the future, Edelman contends that society itself is structured by the violent demands of the future, specifically the demand to sacrifice on behalf of the figure of “the Child” (9). The task of queers and of queerness, he argues, is to resolutely say “fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (Edelman 2004, 29). In Edelman’s antisocial rejection of the social order and the “reproductive futurism” upon which it is founded, we also begin to detect something of a worldly turn in queer theory. Edelman is not the first queer theorist to take seriously questions of time and the future, but he is certainly the forefront spokesperson for the wholesale rejection of the future as the value of queer theory.
Against Edelman stands José Esteban Muñoz, or so the usual narrative goes. Muñoz saw his 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity as “a critical response to ‘the anti-relational turn’” within queer theory (11). For Muñoz, queerness sits ahead of us in the future, as a utopian horizon “we may never touch… yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (Muñoz 2009, 1). The editors of this volume suggest less distance, however, between Edelman and Muñoz than has traditionally been understood. They suggest that queerness “is equally evasive of present pinning down” for both Edelman and Muñoz (11). According to each, queerness is insufficient as a term of identity, but is nevertheless a potent site of identity-disruption. The conceptual similarities between Muñoz and Edelman point towards the significance of temporality in contemporary queer theory; as the introduction observes, “some of the most significant, most discussed works in queer theory have interrogated time” (2). The turn towards time has also been accompanied by a turn towards affect theory, towards queer historical work less interested in whether or not there were gay people in the past than in the more affect-inflected questions: “Why do we care so much if there were gay people in the past?” and “What relation with these figures do we hope to cultivate?” (19).
For Brintnall, Marchal, and Moore, these four swerves have come to define queer theory today. Nevertheless, these swerves remain conspicuously absent from queer theology and queer biblical studies: “the prominent developments in queer theory surveyed in this introduction do not feature significantly or at all in that corpus” (1). Perhaps the disconnect was inevitable. If queer theory after the antisocial turn is exclusively qualified to unsettle identities and narratives, then there is something fundamentally incompatible between queer theory and cataphatic (or positive) theology, the latter of which seeks—very probably in vain—to construct neat historical schemas and to say meaningful things about the nature of God. To the extent that queer theology and queer biblical studies take the Western characteristics of cataphatic theology as their starting points, they likely find very little of value in queer theory as it currently stands.
This tension is noticeable in Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s response to Karmen MacKendrick’s contribution to this volume, where Rubenstein assesses “the West’s long-lived enchantment with abstract singularity and immutable oneness,” which has as its (intended or unintended) result the limiting of divine incarnation to one body, one subject—that of Jesus of Nazareth (293). While queer theory might necessarily be at odds with cataphatic pronouncements about the singularity of incarnation, Rubenstein locates in MacKendrick’s article something of “a queer-incarnational apophasis” (292) or, in MacKendrick’s words, the claim that “divine otherwiseness might unfold in the flesh” (287). And in her evaluation of Gerald Vizenor’s indigenous notion of “survivance” and its usefulness for queer theory, Laurel Schneider observes another fundamental incongruity between theology and queer theory: “the demand for completion is strong in theology, which is why binaries so often thrive and multiply there” (270). “The name ‘queer,’” Schneider argues, “is less important than the vitality of life toward which it theoretically points” (272).
Sexual Disorientations does not seek the completion of queer theory, theology, or biblical studies. In fact, it is a book which is altogether skeptical that any such completion could possibly exist. Instead, this book is a book about “pointing” in particular directions. To where—or more precisely to when—does queerness point? Does it align us with the alternative (46) and anti-imperial (82) temporalities of the women and queer folk addressed by Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the Romans, which Joseph Marchal and James Hoke respectively take up? Does queer theology “long for an ending” (134), as do the Gospel of Mark, barebacking practices, and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative readings according to Maia Kotrosits (140)? Does it invite us into the “bipolar time” of Holy Saturday (207), as Karen Bray suggests, which resists an overemphasis on the certainty of progress or resurrection (212)? Does queerness compel us to “look back” at the destruction of Sodom with Lot’s wife, who in Brintnall’s Edelmanian reading “reveals” and “bears witness to… the catastrophic violence that forges communities” (154)? To when does queerness point?
This book draws from a number of disciplinary approaches to address this question and does so quite remarkably. MacKendrick addresses the question through something resembling high theory or systematic theology, asking where we might turn to “find God” as she applies Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” to Augustine’s musings on mourning and Judith Butler’s ruminations on melancholy (279-284). Across the rest of the volume, disability studies sit next to essays concerning queer historiography and Africana and Chicanx queer readings of the Book of Revelation by Eric Thomas and Jacqueline Hidalgo, respectively. Brock Perry turns our attention to the queer figures of yet another piece of apocryphal apocalyptic literature in his exegesis of The Apocalypse of Peter, and Brandy Daniels’ critique of Sarah Coakley’s théologie totale in a similar way suggests that “a clearly bounded, narrative linear account of history and formational processes is not only problematic because of where it leads… but because of who it leaves out in its account of the past and thus in its vision of the future” (188). Moreover, the contributions to this volume often come to different conclusions. Authors debate, for instance, whether or not BDSM practices are out of step with what Bray calls the “moneyed eschaton” (196), or if they are perfectly “in keeping with neoliberalism” (318). But as Schneider reminds us through her queering of Vizenor’s theory of “survivance… the point is not who or what is correct, but what other stories emerge out of the telling” (271).
It is likely quite clear by this point that this volume was not compiled with a general or lay audience in mind. This book is not for those uninitiated in terms of queer theory. It is really only decipherable for an academic audience already well-versed in the field. Over the first three paragraphs of this review, I tried to capture the lay of the land within queer theory as the editors of this book see it, with particular emphasis on the temporal turn and the prevailing approaches to “the future” found in Edelman’s No Future and Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia.
Edelman’s denial of the future and Muñoz’s enthusiastic embrace of it, along with Elizabeth Freeman’s concepts of erotohistoriography (70) and chrononormativity (68), are in many ways the conceptual frames of each of the diverse approaches to queer theology, temporality, and affect found throughout this book. But these frames are themselves indebted to longer genealogies of critical thought that predate queer theory—Edelman’s project is formed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Muñoz’s “concrete utopias” are a term he borrows from Marxist philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch.
For many readers, then, this book will be perplexing, even incomprehensible. And yet I think that under the particular circumstances, it can be forgiven its inaccessibility. This volume came together as the result of an academic conference at Drew University in 2014, out of a panel on queer theory, affect, and time at the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. What we have here in Sexual Disorientations is therefore a dialogue among experts. While the book is not well suited to introduce new readers to queer theory, queer theology, or queer biblical studies, it is a set of rigorously argued and powerfully stated pieces well positioned to catch queer theology and biblical studies up to speed with the temporal and affective turns in queer theory. Accessibility is neither this book’s aim nor its achievement. But what it does remarkably well is to make queer theology and exegesis intelligible and relevant to a more generalized queer theory, just as it also applies the most recent and significant turns in queer theory for biblical and theological research. For readers who have spent time within queer theory or queer theology, and especially for those who sense the profound gulf between the two, this collection of papers will be an extraordinarily precious resource. It aims at more than the incorporation of the body and sexuality into biblical and theological scholarship; it advances a recognition that identity—and thus queerness—is bound up not only in place, context, and social location, but also by a certain position in time.
Mark Jordan asks in his reflections on camp and the manifesto-form: “Once we’ve found queer theology… what do we expect it to do for us? Do we expect it to ease our lives (if only by explaining them), to excuse God’s silence, to reform the world, to hasten the eschaton?” (305). Sexual Disorientations is queer above all in that it aims towards that “queer-incarnational apophasis” that does not seek to make any grand claims about God, history, time, or queerness (292). This volume is content to merely disturb such claims. It is composed of many (conflicting) voices, and yet these diverse voices are uniformly wary of writing into queer theory or queer theology some kind of eschatological “victory march,” in the words of Catherine Keller (310).
Perhaps the most interesting and challenging article in this compilation has so far gone unmentioned. In Linn Marie Tonstad’s analysis of drag, entrepreneurialism, and capitalist time, the author provocatively implies that “some of the strategies we use to counter the depredations of the present intensify rather than ameliorate its strategies for self-perpetuation, and distract us from other possible resources for futural redirection and transformation” (220). That is to say that quite often, Tonstad worries, the very practices we refer to as “resistance” or “transgressive” play right into the hands of neoliberal capitalism. Like Jordan, Tonstad turns to the manifesto, which she says “answers the individuating potential of the threatening, unknowable future with the collectivizing ‘we’ of a determinate future.” (232) From the Black Women’s Manifesto to the Communist Manifesto (232), these queer little texts “attempt to produce that which they seem to presume” (Weeks 2011, 215). The manifesto is a genre that Tonstad sees as having the capacity to “make demands that can constitute a ‘we’” (233). If for Muñoz queerness is not yet here, if for Edelman queerness cannot describe any present identity, and if for this book queerness remains elusive and apophatic, perhaps the collectivizing, actualizing power of the manifesto is one way forward. To when does queerness, queer theory, and queer theology point? To whenever queer folks, queer writers, and queer theologians decide to take it.
Additional Works Cited:
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.