Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies ed. by Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (review)

This is one of the richest and most energizing new collections in queer studies that I have seen for some years, all the more exciting for emanating from scholars of biblical studies and Christian theology, disciplines whose potential vigor and rigor are frequently grossly underestimated. The book emerged from a 2014 meeting of the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium at Drew University themed around affect and time; fortunately, it shows none of the patchiness or arbitrary categorization of disparate work from which so many conference volumes suffer. The book contains a mix of longer essays and shorter responsive pieces; the quality of argument, from emerging scholars and well-established luminaries alike, is consistently excellent.

The editors' thesis is that, despite a blossoming of queer theological work over the last two decades, far too little of it has engaged with the discussions of temporality, futurity, and history that have been such generative themes in queer critical discourse. They note the contingent, socially inflected nature of pasts, presents, and futures and time's intersections with power and desire. The volume is situated in the light of, if not "after," work such as Jack Halberstam's invocation of alternative queer temporalities not organized around the logics of birth, marriage, and reproduction; Heather Love's disruption of the sometime project of seeking queer "ancestors"; the tension in queer studies between the future-negating antisociality of Lee Edelman and the anticipatory ecstasy of José Esteban Muñoz; and Elizabeth Freeman's critique of "chrononormativity" and appeal to temporal drag (with implications of retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past on the present).¹ Freeman was the invited respondent and discussant at the original colloquium and also provides the afterword to this volume, a delightful queer interpretation of the Montessori-influenced Sunday school curriculum called Godly Play, where she highlights the "strange temporalities" (316) with which Christianity is replete.

It is clear that theologians have learned (and have much to learn still) from queer theorists; this volume claims that, reciprocally, "theological fields have much to offer … queer studies," not least because, when the discipline is operating as it should, theologians are "always adept at locating the ineffable in the quotidian" (26–27). Following four notable "turns" in queer theory—toward antinormativity, toward antisociality, toward temporality, toward affect—there might, they suggest, yet be time (!) for a theological "twist" that would highlight the surprising omission (given the frequent queer consideration of notions such as trauma, death, redemption, and hope) of reflection on religion in much queer critical discourse. Indeed, as the authors suggest, it is hard to see how the history of sexuality and the history of theological and religious claims about sexuality may ever be read discretely.

Without exception, the essays here are lively, authoritative, and closely rooted in both queer-critical and theological/religious-studies/biblical-critical literatures. That said, some particular highlights include editor Joseph A. Marchal's rollicking account of queer apocalypticism via the under-examined practices of first-century Corinthian women prophets; James N. Hoke's postcolonial analysis of the Roman imperial time in whose context the letters attributed to the apostle Paul were produced, in which Hoke shows that queering time is both anti-imperial and anticapitalist, disrupts hierarchies of "topping" and "bottoming," and concludes that queer time is better understood as enabling collective pleasure rather than the triumph of the individual fucker; Maia Kotrosits's rereading of the eschatological tension of Mark's gospel in light of barebacking (exploring the implications of survival and possibility when meaning and justice collapse and showing that the sure knowledge of imminent death may yet be more livable than uncertainty); Brandy Daniels's incisive critique of the teleological bent of much systematic theology, and invitation to imagine otherwise, in the nonlinear direction of "future presents"; Karen Bray's crip theory–inflected appeal to "bipolar time...