Disidentification and/as Queer Theological Method

Disidentification and/as Queer Theological Method

Can God be an accomplice in queer worldmaking?

Contemporary Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are wrestling with whether or how to build queer-affirming lifeworlds within religious traditions that are ostensibly antiqueer typically do so in one of two main ways. Some pursue a reparative interpretive strategy,[1] reimagining the significance of religious texts and practices that have historically been read as antiqueer, so that a queer life not only becomes conceptually possible but more importantly valuable within the religious tradition that these texts and practices come from. For the most part, such reparative re-readings are apologetic in form, arguing for the full inclusion of gender, sexual, and romantic minorities within these religions on the grounds that antiqueer interpretations of their texts and practices are misinterpretations. Exemplars of this reparative-apologetic strategy include Joy Ladin (who argues that a trans-affirming sense of Jewish law is “already planted in the Torah, waiting for us to discover” it),[2] Eugene Rogers (who uses Ephesians 5 to show that gay marriages can symbolize Jesus’s commitment to the church just as well as straight ones),[3] and Scott Kugle (who argues in *Homosexuality and Islam* that hadith reports and fiqh decisions that stigmatize or criminalize queerness are in conflict with the Quran).

Others rightly worry about the limits of this reparative-apologetic approach. Instead of looking for the ways that traditional doctrines, texts, and practices are inherently queer, these thinkers pursue a paranoid interpretive strategy. In other words, these critics of the reparative approach employ a hermeneutics of suspicion, exposing and problematizing the complicity of queer apologetics in the very kinds of structural harm it is seeking to redress. Exemplars of this paranoid strategy include Linn Tonstad, Kent Brintnall, and Marcella Althaus-Reid. These thinkers point out that arguments for the full inclusion of gender, sexual, and romantic minorities in religious institutions are, at bottom, arguments about rights: queer people should have the same rights as their cis and straight co-religionists (to marriage, ordination, etc.) because they also measure up to their religious institution’s normative vision of humanity. The problem with such rights-arguments, though, is that they produce an other to whom rights are denied, namely, anyone who does not measure up to the institution’s normative vision of humanity. The reparative-apologetic strategy ultimately maintains this othering logic. It does not dismantle the destructive regime of insiders and outsiders. It merely redraws its borders so that some queers—the ones who will conform to a certain straight, white, capitalist fantasy about what humans ought to be like—can come inside.

In short, where the reparative-apologetic approach seeks to normalize queer people, the paranoid approach seeks to upend systems of determining and validating what is normal.

So far, so good—the paranoid reading of apologetics is not wrong. But queer theologies often get stuck here, in the paranoid mode, as if it were (to quote Eve Sedgwick) “a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities,” a methodological imperative and not “one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”[4] Put another way, once they demystify queer apologetics, theologians tend not to construct new, more lifegiving queer theological forms, nor to envision radically transformative queer lifeworlds. Rather, they tend to embrace Lee Edelman’s antisocial ascetic ideal. All social life depends on insider-outsider logic, says Edelman, such that in any social order, the structural position of queerness will always remain, even if the particular members of the set of queerness change over time. The ethical value of queerness is, then, to be the outsider that every social order requires. For in accepting the position of scapegoat, queer people allow themselves to be the symptom that reveals the pathology of the social itself, viz., that sociality is formed and maintained through violence. Apologetics abandons the ethical value of queerness in favor of inclusion, thereby “shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else.”[5]

The antisocial ascetic ideal frames the ethical value of queerness in terms of the destructive systems of recognition that determine and validate what is normal. It effectively places an obligation on queer theologians to continue to think with and for those systems, as gadfly—or (minimally) to be legible to them as such. I am interested in what happens when queer religious thinkers resist this legibility while also refusing the cruel optimism of apologetics. The paranoid framing of the value of queerness eclipses the pleasures of queer worldmaking. How could a theology of queer joy theorize social transformation without sanctifying the notion of a decent and therefore deserving rights-bearer? What other reparative methodologies are available to queer theologians besides apologetics? Where is God in all this?

In this paper, I describe an alternative possibility for queer worldmaking in the face of queerphobic religious institutions, a theological method that is neither paranoid nor apologetic, which I call (with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz) reparative-disidentification. Two recent texts exemplify this third approach: Lamya H’s *Hijab Butch Blues* (2023) and Ashon Crawley’s *The Lonely Letters* (2020). I argue that each of these texts offers what neither the paranoid nor the apologetic mode can achieve: a queer economy of representation that circumvents straight, white, capitalist systems of recognition altogether, clearing ground for *otherwise worlds* in which queers receive the *wahi* of their queerness as an invitation to experiment with new relational forms of joy, nourishment, play, and care.

[1] On the reparative vs. the paranoid as modes of reading, see Eve Sedgwick, *Touching Feeling* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123-152. For alternative readings of the reparative vs. the paranoid in queer theology, see Linn Tonstad, "Ambivalent Loves: Christian Theologies, Queer Theologies," *Literature and Theology* 34.1 (2017) 472-489; and Susannah Cornwall, "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" *Theology & Sexuality 21.1 (2015): 20-35.

[2] Ladin, *Soul of the Stranger* (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2019), 11.

[3] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-04/same-sex-complementarity 

[4] Sedgwick, *Touching Feeling*, 125, 126.

[5] Edelman, *No Future* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 27.