Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz (review)

Daniel Shank Cruz's Queering Mennonite Literature does many helpful things for those interested in religion and literature, but one major contribution that it makes is that it expands contemporary Mennonite identity beyond its existing borders. Challenging the kind of policing that would reject expressions of Mennonite identity apart from confessional Christian theology, Cruz articulates a generous and open Mennonite identity in his work on queer Mennonite literature in several important and entangled ways, not least of which is his self-reflexive and personal participation as a reader of the works he explores in the book.

The "Introduction" of Queering Mennonite Literature takes up a relational approach to Mennonite Studies (following the work of Felipe Hinojosa) and argues that although Mennonite identity and queer identity may seem like opposites, Mennonites and their Anabaptist forbears are really quite queer. Wearing his Mennonite values on his sleeve—peace, justice, community, and the critique of violence—Cruz advances what elsewhere I have called a "Secular Mennonite Social Critique" by affirming Mennonite identity by attending to values and ethics that are not reducible to theological capture. Queerness, for Cruz, goes beyond dismantling rigid boundaries that have violently defined discourses on sex and gender. Throughout the book, the act of queering plays out in the troubling of simplistic binary disjunctions wherever they are found, and this leads Cruz to many interesting places.

Through readings of Christina Penner's haunting novel Widows of Hamilton House and Wes Funk's strange autobiography Wes Side Story, chapter one ("Building a Queer Mennonite Archive") presents queer Mennonite literature as a practice of archiving queer life. Cruz explores the continuities and discontinuities between the archival desire for preservation and the exilic place of queerness in Mennonite communities, often entering the reading process by describing his own visceral responses to the works under consideration (dreams, somatic reactions, traumatic memories). Chapter two ("Searching for Selfhood in Jan Guenther Braun's Somewhere Else") further demonstrates the deep connection between the personal experience of identity formation and the work of queer Mennonite literature. Suggesting that literature serves queer Mennonites in their search for healthier communities than those they are often forced out of, Cruz's attention to the personal-political connection leads him to a queer Mennonite hope that stands against the homophobia of the tradition, but situates itself in the tradition, nonetheless.

Chapter three ("Queering Tradition in Jessica Penner's Shaken in the Water") furthers this engagement with tradition by developing a queer Mennonite history through a reading of the liberating queer community depicted by the simultaneous affirmations and critiques that are storied in Shaken in the Water. Moving further into the Anabaptist background of the Mennonite tradition, chapter four ("Stephen Beachy's boneyard, the Martyrs Mirror, and Anabaptist Activism") reads a foundational text of Mennonite identity in North America with an eye for its queer and erotic character. The chapter follows the main character in Beachy's boneyard, an Amish adolescent who is learning to process his trauma through writing, and in the process discovers hidden erotic elements in Jan Luyken's engravings of the torture of Anabaptists. Through a close reading of desire, fantasy, and form in boneyard, Cruz argues that the Martyrs Mirror presents a queer vision for pacifist activism.

Moving toward speculative fiction, in chapter five ("The Queer Ethical Body in Corey Redekop's Husk") Cruz examines the place of pacifist values in the protagonist of Redekop's novel: a gay Mennonite zombie named Sheldon Funk who experiences resurrection and desires a cannibal eucharist, but is reined in by his Mennonite values of nonviolence and empathy for others. Finding an implicit queer ethics in the strange character of Funk, Cruz makes a case for a complex but nonetheless normative nonviolent activism that attends to marginalized and disabled bodies with care. Chapter six ("Trans Mennonite Literature") furthers the work by reading Casey Plett's short story collection A Safe...